So you have your own brand/business and are creating nice content, regular stories, engaging with your audience and your Instagram feed looks great. Awesome, you are doing everything right!
Unfortunately only a couple of hundred people even know you exist and you don’t have $$$ to spend on marketing in other channels or SEO to get your brand recognized in an oversaturated market. If this sounds familiar then you have found the right post, read on…
This is a basic guide for those looking to get started using automation to increase the awareness of their business and find some customers. I am assuming that you have a brand account that is already established and active daily. If you have a new account then please search elsewhere on the forum for advice.
Before you use your brand account for any automation, test on a personal account to get some experience and make mistakes in a safe environment.
Why do it yourself?
- Nobody knows your brand and target customer like you.
- Employing a quality agency to manage your IG account is an expense you can’t afford (yet).
- You like a technical challenge and love learning new skills.
What Automation tool?
Jarvee - if you read the forum you will find it is the only one people recommend. It costs $30 per month for the basic package. I found it after researching and testing many tools. Get the free trial and you won’t look back.
Jarvee is windows based and needs to be running 24/7. If that is something you want to do at home then go for it.
If you only have Apple stuff or you don’t want to run a PC at home 24/7 then you can run the software on a Virtual Private Server (VPS). This is a nice ‘clean’ way of having the software running on a reliable datacentre windows server environment. Jarvee have a great tutorial for getting this set up on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and it’s free for the first year.
OK, so you are all set up with Jarvee software, well done and thanks for coming back.
Do I need a proxy?
It’s time to consider IP addresses: If you are running Jarvee at home then that’s good, you have a residential IP address that will be well trusted by IG. If you only have one account on Jarvee then you don’t really need to set up a proxy. This is the basic setup and perfectly good to start automating your account. Don’t automate more than one account using this method as bad behavior or a mistake on one account could affect your brand account. If you get things wrong Jarvee can do a lot of damage to your account much quicker than you could using the IG app.
If you are running a VPS or want to automate more than one account (you will do I guarantee it) then you are going to need proxies. There are loads of proxy providers out there, you will need one suitable for IG. If you have a search around you can find various recommendations on this forum but it seems that everyone’s experience is different and there are many conflicting experiences. Good ones do a free trial so you can test things before spending actual cash. A datacenter proxy should work well for our strategy here as we are not going to be pushing things too hard or posting from Jarvee.
Proxy setup
In your proxy configuration set the authorized IP to that of your VPS.
Make a note of your proxies, should be something like 123.123.123.123:5432
Jarvee setup
We are only going to use Follow, Unfollow & Like tools as these are fairly safe. I don’t recommend using other tools without serious testing on non-critical accounts.
Settings - Enable global nightmode & randomise nightmode. Switch them on and set to reasonable hours that a real person might actually do.
Social profiles - add profile. Show proxy settings, add your proxy for the account (eg. 123.123.123.123:5432). Add your IG username & password and click ‘validate account’.
Tools - Follow - these are starting guidelines, change all the numbers slightly to make your automation more anonymous. Keep follow + unfollow actions less than 60 per hour (combined).
Wait between 4-8 min per operation
follow between 2-8 people per operation, with a delay 70-120 seconds between each follow.
Add random sleep time on.
Follow limits (SUPER IMPORTANT) - this is where you can easily go wrong as if this is not set correctly your account will just keep going and be stopped by IG.
Follow a maximum of 10 - 20 per day, increase each day with 10 until it becomes 400 max. You may want to be more aggressive with this but test and research before you do.
User filters - this is up to you, more filtering = better accuracy. We are looking to grow and find real customers, not only follower numbers.
Use the filters that segment your target customer, i.e. english speaking, skip business accounts, follow only male/female and language selection.
The following filters should be used to improve your follow back effectiveness and avoid fake accounts:
User has profile image
User bio must not contain invalid words (find an undesirable word list)
User has a number of followers / followings, 20-1500, 20-1500 - tweak this for your target customer (do research) but keep the max number low or they might not notice you exist and are unlikely to follow back.
User is not following this account
Do not follow private users
Do not follow accounts with more than 3 digits in their username (filters a lot of spam accounts)
After follow actions
Like users latest post
Like between 1 and 2 posts
Like random posts
Like before follow 50% - modify this anywhere from 20-80 for increased randomness
Like percentage 50% - this is a bit safe but IG hates automated likes so we will only like 50% of the time.
Tools - Unfollow - these are starting guidelines, change all the numbers slightly to make your automation more anonymous. Keep follow + unfollow actions less than 60 per hour (combined).
Unflollow items after a minimum of 1-1 days. this depends on how agressive you want to be unfollowing.
Wait between 4-8 min per operation
unfollow between 2-8 people per operation, with a delay 70-120 seconds between each follow.
Add random sleep time on.
Unfollow limits
Unfollow a maximum of 15 - 25 per day, increase each day with 15 until it becomes 400 max. You may want to be more aggressive with this but test and research before you do.
User Filters
Unfollow all users targeted by Jarvee - optional but recommended to keep your own follower / following ratio looking healthy
Also target users followed outside of Jarvee - good if you have already manually followed loads of people and need to tidy up.
Use whitelist is handy, add your favorite customers/friends so you don’t accidentally unfollow them.
Tools Like - Settings - We are going to keep the use of this feature minimal as we are mostly liking from follows however, we need to switch it on so we can control the number of likes given in a day. As mentioned before IG is crazy suspicious of likes and easily blocks you for a day.
Wait between 120-240 minutes between each new operation
Like limits - 10-20 per day increase each day with 10 until it reaches a maximum of 300 (or less)
Tools - Like - Sources
Like latest feed posts
Like posts of users that interacted with target posts - enter your own account here.
Tools - Follow - Sources.
You may have noticed that I did this in the wrong order! that’s because this is the big one and the bit where you need to do the work. I can’t tell you what accounts to use as it depends on your niche and target customer. So let’s start with the settings and then you can do your research.
Follow followers of target accounts
Follow the most recent 1000 followers
enter accounts of competitors or people your target customers follow and click ‘add account followers’ to add to the tool.
Follow usersd that interacted with posts on target accounts
enter accounts that your target customers like or comment on and refine the settings to suit.
There are lots of other great tools but i’ve just covered the basic (and most popular ones).
Once you get started, you can monitor and refine these sources. Jarvee gives you a follow-back ratio on each source so you can refine your sources. You will find that some sources give you numbers and some sources give quality, so don’t jsut focus on the follow back. As a brand you need social proof (i.e. followers & engagement) and you need real customers, I personally find that in my niche real customers don’t comment very much but view every story and like the posts they really love. This all depends on your customer and niche.
GO!
OK, it’s time to get started, go back to the tools page and enable Like, Follow & Unfollow for your account.
Congrats, you got started using my guide! Now the real work begins monitoring and refining your setup to perfection.
If this looks like too much of a challenge for you then I suggest searching the forum for a professional who can give you customized service and grow your social media presence. I have spent so much time on Instagram and would not recommend doing it yourself unless you really enjoy it.
Disclaimer time:
- The above guide is based on my personal experience and may not work for you, depending on a thousand variables your experience could be completely different so use with caution.
- Jarvee is addictive, you will spend much more time on it than you expect and you have a business to run so you should go and do that instead (voice of my wife).
- If anyone more experienced on the forum (there are many here) see any technical inaccuracies then please let me know so I can update. If any data here is too sensitive for lvl1 then please let me know as I still can’t work out what is and is not OK.
If you like the guide then please hit the like button thing, thanks.
Edited by @wortime. DM for reason if needed.
Edit: removed proxy recommendation for safety reasons.
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