Okay, the reason: a report about Instagram influencers and the reactions of many that they had just bought their followers. My question: ‘Is that really that simple?’ And fake followers actually help you to get real followers.

Imagine the following situation: you’re on a street in a city you don’t know. You are hungry. In front of you, you see two fairly similar restaurants. One is full, the other is not. Although you don’t know anything about the quality of the restaurants, you probably step into the full restaurant. The fact that there are people (or numbers) gives you a false sense of trust. Once you are inside, you expect quality. So numbers alone won’t get you there.

Cure your Instagram

First things first. At the start of my experiment I had about 2.000 pictures on Instagram. Random things that I hadn’t thought about at all. My first step was to buy automatic instagram likes monthly and remove the vast majority of those photos and to only have travel related photos left. This way people who visit me will see what they can expect from me. And again you create a false sense of trust “Wow, that guy already has 5,000 followers with only 150 photos”. To get rid of the photos easily, I installed an app that lets you remove photos every 200 hours. The maximum for Instagram.

Take care of your bio

If you look at the bio of an influencer, you will often see the same style return. A line or 3 or 4 with clear info and contact details. To be able to put text on different lines in your bio you have to leave the app for a while. Write your text in Notes or somewhere else, copy it and paste it into your bio. Looks nice and pro.

Remove following

I want to make it look like a lot of people are following me without me having to follow them. So I removed all the people I was following at the time. From 2,000 to 0. Totally 0. In the meantime, I’ve rebuilt that number a bit, especially with friends’ accounts.

Start Instagress

Instagress is actually an automation tool. You can set which hashtags you will automatically like and what kind of accounts you will automatically follow. If you set it up specifically, the tool will do a great job for you. I’m guessing my photos received 100 to 200 likes via Instagress. Instagress also has a follow-unfollow tool that automates that process. A lot of people hate that feature where you just want to attract people’s attention. But unfortunately it does work. People also thank you when you comment on the pictures you’ve never actually seen.

Postal photos

Once everything is cleaned up and started up, you can start posting photos. Actually, you should be able to create volume. Ideally, post twice a day and plan everything. There are also a lot of free tools for that, so you can already put a lot of posts in place and don’t have to think about it anymore.

Choose hashtags

Hasthags are really useful when you make them more specific. So don’t go for hashtags with already two million photos but choose a niche. This makes it more likely that your photo will be noticed.

Fix likes your photos

Okay. This is kind of weird, but there are appendages where you lick photos for coins. These virtual coins can be exchanged for likes or followers on your account. So if you have enough coins, you can arrange a lot of likes on them immediately after placing your picture. What happens then is that you end up in the ‘Top Posts’ section at the top of a hashtag. People who search on that hashtag will see your picture and give you extra likes. Nice thing about the app is that it is completely free.

Fix comments on your photos

More and more companies are looking not only at your number of likes but also at your comments. There, too, you can actually cheat. The easiest way is to start a comment pod. Comment pods are groups of users that comment on each other’s photos. If you have enough large accounts together, you can help each other up. Especially if you are all in the same niche.

Such comments pods can be found on Facebook. A second way is with a similar app as for the likes. There is a ‘Get comments’ app where you post comments to Instagrams in exchange for coins that you can exchange for comments that you choose on photos that you choose. So you can have a Romanian random account comment on your photo in English. Pretty creepy right.

Buy followers

If you want to look really big, you can of course just buy followers. There are plenty of sites that offer followers. In the beginning of my experiment I bought 4.000 followers for 35 euro somewhere. Luckily Instagram does a check for ghost followers every now and then and then to remove them. At one point I had 11,000 followers. In the meantime, that number has been reduced to 7,000.