Whether you’re working with a marketing department or as an entrepreneur, Instagram is essential to contemporary brand development and audience growth. However, keeping up with regular, daily posts and engagements can be overwhelming and exhausting.
If you’re ready to outsource some of the mundane tasks that go hand-in-hand with social networking, it’s time to look closely at our list of the 20 best Instagram bots to try right now.
What are Instagram bots?
Instagram bots are a type of software that automates your interactions across Instagram. Depending on the type of bot you use, they can like posts, make comments, answer polls, send direct messages, and follow new profiles all on your behalf.
Bots take the drudgery out of maintaining your own social accounts. They also act quickly to generate audience growth, and they can use algorithms and information about your targets to expose you to new followers you might not have discovered on your own.
While some bots work in tandem with a human-powered team to grow your engagements, others are powered completely by artificial intelligence.
When used wisely, bots can be vital to helping kickstart your social media presence and build your brand. However, used irresponsibly, bots can be a source of annoying spam that will get your account banned.
In 2017 and 2019, Instagram cracked down on bot-based spam. The Instagram bots in our list are designed for responsible use that will allow you to succeed on the platform in 2021.
Which type of Instagram bots is best in 2021?
Thanks to Instagram’s crackdown on spam, growth bots that take a more organic approach to automation lead today’s market.
Meanwhile, there’s a wide variety of tasks these bots can complete. You can also custom-fit multiple bots to meet your personal needs.
Let’s take a quick look at some of the most common tasks performed by Instagram bots and how these can help build your brand:
Automatically follow other accounts on your behalf. When you follow new people, it increases your visibility. Often, the individuals and brands you follow will follow you back in return, as will their friends.
Automatically like other people’s posts and comment on them on your behalf. When your profile gives the impression that you’re active online, it opens opportunities up for collaboration.
Can comment on and like your own posts. When other users are interacting, or at least appear to be interacting, with your content, that also boosts confidence in your brand and builds both interest and loyalty.
Basically, Instagram bots stimulate activity within your account and build your following by helping you find and create relationships with well-matched accounts, or by generating mini-bots that stand-in for authentic user accounts and can be used to increase likes and followers.
Finally, there are bots that do not focus on engagement and growth but that help you plan and post content regularly, a known engagement and growth-building strategy.
Without further adieu, let’s get right into the 20 best Instagram bots to try right now.
#1. SocialMeep – The Best Overall
SocialMeep excels at generating organic, authentic growth. Once you choose a plan, you will be able to set up your audience settings to target your specific niche (i.e: fitness, business, e-commerce, fashion, etc). The tool then performs micro-interactions such as story viewing, comment liking, IGTV Viewing, and posting liking on potential followers that fit your criteria. They don’t follow/unfollow, post, or comment for you.
This method helps protect you from violating Instagram policies and having your account disabled. It is also the most effective pathway to long-term success.
With SocialMeep, none of your new followers come from ghost accounts. Rather, they are all real, actively engaged people with a genuine interest in the product or service you provide.
Additionally, SocialMeep is a highly affordable program, and the process of using it is intuitive and rewarding. First, you select the plan that best meets your business goals. Next, you can define the audience that you want to target on the dashboard. If you prefer to have them setup your account, you can opt-in to their AutoPilot feature. Finally, you sit back and enjoy your account’s new growth.
Together, these qualities have earned SocialMeep the top spot on our list. Whether you’re breaking through your follower count ceiling, reaching more potential followers, increasing engagement, or even monetizing your Instagram account, SocialMeep can help.
#2. PlanMyPost
The key to achieving long-term growth is making quality posts, consistently, over an extended period of time. As a result, content strategy and growth strategy go hand-in-hand.
Another bot that does exactly what its name suggests, PlanMyPost acts like an automated, personal assistant for managing your Instagram posts with ease.
This time-saving tool offers image editing support and a simple dashboard with customizable settings.
#3. Media Mister
This program automates your Instagram engagements, as well as your engagements across other social media platforms. These include Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Spotify, Pinterest, and more.
If you’re concerned about synchronizing your cross-platform engagement, Media Mister is for you.
#4. Followersup
If you’re a fan of Media Mister, Followersup is also worth a look. This is another service focused on automating engagement and growth across multiple platforms, including TikTok. If you have multiple social channels, finding the best fit for a one-stop account manager is beyond worth it.
#5. Combin
Combin shines by integrating content planning and marketing tools. This is because they understand the power of combining consistent post scheduling with targeted growth.
Through Combin, you can communicate with your audience directly, as well as automate future interactions. Finally, you can easily track your progress in detail and make informed adjustments to your growth strategy.
#6. Jarvee
An automation download, Jarvee is a superior solution if you’re running Windows on a laptop or desktop. It’s designed to mimic your daily social activities across Instagram and other platforms up to ten times faster than you could complete them on your own.
#7. FollowingLike
FollowingLike is also a good choice for people who hold multiple social accounts. It’s a great organizational tool, and you can also use it to make sure your social content aligns well across platforms.
However, users should beware that the type of engagement varies across platforms and that it’s a comparatively expensive service with no trial period.
Large businesses will likely benefit. However, for individuals and small businesses, more cost-effective options may work best.
#8. Social Buddy
Social Buddy strikes a welcome balance between the feel of an automated service and a manual one. The program does automatically recommend your posts to its network of followers. However, only those who genuinely resonate with your brand will contribute to the growth of your site.
Additionally, Social Buddies offers audience growth programs that target your industry’s influencers, your closest competitors, and key hashtags for your brand.
#9. Social Captain
Social Captain automates your Instagram engagements with heart and a human touch. Each client relationship begins with a demo, which helps ensure success using the program to increase your Instagram growth.
Social Captain strictly avoids using spam accounts to generate followers and likes. It also specifies services according to your unique audience growth needs.
#10. Social Follow
If you’re new to Instagram growth services and working with a limited budget, check out Social Follow. Anyone can sign up for a fully free version of the service. It will give you a glimpse of how automation works and whether it will help your brand.
If you decide to take a deeper dive into automated growth, Social Follow offers paid plans as well.
#11. Insta Promoter
This service claims that it’s the fastest in the business of delivering your choice of new Instagram followers and likes. It offers simple reports and can provide a short-term boost to your Instagram engagements.
#12. Kenji
Kenji has developed a strong reputation for automating engagements that lead to authentic growth. They offer a 14-day, money-back guarantee, and optimized features to meet each client’s specific needs. Kenji also assists with targeting and can be used on virtually any device.
#13. Buzzoid
Buzzoid is another budget-friendly automation service. It limits and distributes all your purchased likes, views, and follows in a way that feels balanced and will help you avoid your account being flagged. Getting set up is easy, and there’s top-notch customer service support.
#14. SimplyGram
One of the best at automating engagements that lead to organic growth, SimplyGram claims it can provide 5000 new followers each month. They also offer advanced filters that will help you identify competitors and additional account targets. A free trial is available so you can discover firsthand whether SimplyGram is a good fit for you.
#15. Treefrog Social
Treefrog Social focuses on simple, organic growth. They are the trusted choice of major organizations, including MTV, the Food Network, Sony Music, and the National Football League. However, they also welcome the chance to help individual artists and influencers.
Whether you’re seeking new followers, thousands of likes, or long-term fans, Treefrog’s human-powered system exists to help you succeed.
#16. Upleap
Upleap blends the best of bots and human-powered support in its multi-tiered approach to helping you achieve optimal growth.
Organic audience building. Members of a human-powered team follow you, react to your stories, and interact with your live broadcasts.
Custom support. Second, your dedicated account manager offers feedback unique to helping your specific brand grow.
Indexing. Upleap shares your profile externally so that it can be indexed by search engines that will generate greater growth.
Finally, Upleap offers first-time clients a free three-day trial and collects no up-front payment information.
#17. Stellation Media
Stellation Media is another service that uses artificial intelligence to stimulate organic growth.
The Mass Story Engager, their signature piece of technology, allows users to easily select target accounts and to identify the types of responses they would normally provide in polls and comments.
Using a series of pre-selected auto-responses, Stellation Media’s Mass Story Engager also completes direct messages, likes, follows, and unfollows on your behalf.
At any point in time, you can adjust your rate of engagement, as well as review and update the types of responses that Stellation’s system has been making for you.
#18. Ingramer
An automated bot that focuses on speed, Ingramer is the perfect resource if your goal is to generate a large audience quickly.
Post scheduling, automated messages, likes, comments, and follows are all services this one-stop bot provides.
#19. StormLikes
StormLikes also focuses on speed. Its signature achievement is generating a ton of views for your work quickly. The idea is that views lead to likes and follows. However, if you want to focus exclusively on one of those areas, don’t fret.
StormLikes offers separate plans focused on generating your choice of only likes or follows.
All new engagements come from authentic accounts held by real people within StormLikes network.
#20. Social Viral
If you’re on a budget and are looking for a solid provider of the basics, Social Viral is the bot for you.
This bot will increase your followers, likes, and views, all while using genuine user profiles. The speed, efficiency, and price of Social Viral make it a great choice for safe, effective audience growth.
Best Practices for Using Instagram Bots
While it may be tempting to push bots to maximum capacity, this is often a red flag that can get your account flagged. A smarter move is to use the bots with discretion and aim for steady, rather than explosive, growth. You can do this by limiting the number of new daily followers and engagements, as well as programming these numbers to vary over time.
It’s also important to remember that some tasks seem more obviously automated than others. For example, bizarre, inappropriate, or repetitive comments are often clearly the work of bots. The same is true for many types of direct messages.
Meanwhile, it’s much more difficult to tell if likes and follows are due to bot-based activity. So, if you are consistently posting quality content, and if you have set realistic limits on bot activity, it’s unlikely that using bots to gain likes and followers will get you banned.
As a result, we recommend you use bots mostly for likes, follows, and views. When it comes to using them for comments, polls, and direct messages, we advise you to proceed with caution. These can easily shift into the territory of spam.
When getting acquainted with a bot, check the dashboard for customization options and start slowly rather than immediately going all the way.
Why do people invest in bots for Instagram audience growth?
Just like with hiring a marketing team, the pay-off in using bots is often worth the cost. Over 200 million people use Instagram daily. Bots give seasoned professionals and creative individuals alike an opportunity to self-promote and to reach a massive audience that exceeds anything an individual could accomplish on their own.
The thing is there is rarely enough time in a day for humans to match the work capacity of artificial intelligence. However, artificial intelligence is still no substitute for authentic human communication. While replacing people entirely with bots is unwise, bots make a great addition to your marketing and communications strategy.
Investing in bots as an integrative element of a dynamic marketing plan is just good business.
If you’re not quite sure that a bot will work for you, check out our recommendations for the bots that come with trial periods and money-back guarantees.
The Key to Long-term Engagement is Content
Bots can certainly help build and sustain your base of followers, but the content is really the key to keeping them actively engaged.
The first step in creating excellent content for your audience is developing a very clear understanding of who your audience is. You may think that you’re attracting a certain type of follower. However, many bots offer data that shows other types of people are more naturally attracted to your work.
You can use this information to make content that’s better-tailored to meet the needs of your actual audience. Alternatively, you can change the type of content you make to more clearly attract the intended audience for your work.
Either way, bots can help you make the content better, and better content will ultimately help the bots do a more effective job of generating audience growth and brand awareness.
Generally speaking, content that is relatable, helpful, actionable, and entertaining is best for gaining organic likes, follows, views, and shares. Images that show action and relationships will also attract more attention than those that show stationary objects or overly familiar, obviously staged scenes.
Ideally, content should appeal to multiple emotions at once and spark a feeling in your followers that makes it memorable. Reframing similar content and then sharing it in multiple ways is also helpful.
For example, Instagram allows you to share content via posts, stories, or live recordings. You can also re-share posts within your stories, save live recordings as posts, and select archived stories to live on in various highlight reels that run across the top of your profile page.
Instagram users engage with all these types of content differently. Likewise, some users respond more powerfully to one type of content than another. Generally speaking, people also find information easier to remember when they see it presented in multiple forms.
There is a way to do this that feels repetitive and spammy. However, there’s also a way to this that feels professional and welcome. Imagine seeing an eye-catching post that advertises an upcoming Instagram livestream. Now, imagine seeing a story update that reminds you the livestream is tonight. Finally, imagine that the livestream actually happens.
If you happen to be online, you can engage actively with the stream. If you miss it, you can check stories the next day for a recorder. A savvy influencer will have one available and will likely share it in their highlight reel for a set time.
You can likely see how effective it is for each of these types of content to work together, but you can also probably see how keeping it all organized can get confusing quickly, especially when posting additional, supportive-yet-unique, content a few times a day is also ideal.
It’s normal for people to struggle to their content in order, but this is where bots can excel. Rather than growing engagement directly, some of the best bots help Instagrammers grow engagement indirectly via posts that are well-planned, well-timed, consistent, and tagged appropriately.
Selecting the proper hashtag for your content is an important feature of many bots. While people are often left to guess which hashtags work best, bots use data to quickly identify the hashtags with the most traction for your niche, as well as for the moment.
Steps to Take if Your Instagram Account is Disabled or Suspended
In the rare event that using bots leads to trouble, the most important step you can take is to remain calm. Usually, being banned from the network is temporary, lasting between one and 7 days.
While permanent bans do happen, it’s almost never without warning, particularly when bots are to blame. Instead, it would be far more realistic to receive a notice of changes to make in order to prevent, or lift, any account restrictions.
So, if a violation notice comes your way, pay attention but don’t panic.
Meanwhile, the following tips can help you use bots with lower risk:
- Focus mostly on using bots that help you schedule and post content.
- If using bots to gain followers, likes, and views, choose a service that values organic audience growth.
- Avoid using bots to send direct messages, make comments, and answer polls.
- Adjust your settings to reduce the number of likes, follows, and views being generated by bots.
- Vary the number and the timing of likes, follows, and views to reflect natural fluctuations throughout the week.
- Avoid bots that generate their own profiles for the purpose of boosting engagement only.
- Combine your use of bots with the use of other social media tools that can help you enhance the quality of your hashtags, posts, and stories.
If you feel like reducing the number of daily engagements is slowing down your growth, just remember that the recommended limitations still exceed what many individuals can accomplish on their own. This is especially true when you consider that individuals not only have to set aside enough time to fulfill the work but also must keep their minds clear and free of stress and exhaustion.
Recommended limits for social engagements on Instagram are here:
- Limit follows to between seven and 13 per hour. Do not exceed 100 to 150 new follows per day.
- Like no more than 300 to 400 of your followers’ posts daily.
- Leave no more than two to four comments per hour, and keep daily comments below 20.
- Send no more than 10 direct messages per hour.
Courtesy of a 2020 study of Instagram users, these suggested limits still apply in 2021. When experimenting with your personal limits, consider starting just under the low end of the range and working upward from there. Generally speaking, larger limits are associated with bigger, better-established accounts.
Final Thoughts
Just like Spider Man teaches us, great power brings great responsibility. Instagram bots have the power to take your brand to a new level, so it’s important to use them responsibly.
While using Instagram bots carelessly may cost your followers and get you banned from the platform, using them with care is well worth the effort. By trying some of the best Instagram bots, you can expect some of the following key benefits:
Saving time.
Within the business world, sometimes this is even more valuable than money. Instagram bots work for you when you’re busy building your business and experiencing life.
Sharing consistently.
This is second only to producing high-quality content when it comes to long-term Instagram success.
Gaining exposure.
Regardless of which, or how many, bots you use, the simple act of putting yourself “out there” leads to attention.
Attention equals time spent with your accounts, and you know the value of time.
Meanwhile, another form of exposure is what bots teach you about the sea of potential followers, collaborators, and competitors that you may have never discovered in any other way.
Freeing your focus.
Going hand-in-hand with time, your focus is valuable and powerful. In fact, spending too much time focused on your brand can be its downfall. It’s healthy for you and your business to step away from your work sometimes and observe changes to the people and culture around you.
Instagram bots grant you this level of freedom, and your brand will be stronger for it.
