Instagram gives influencers, marketing professionals, and entrepreneurs an unprecedented opportunity to make an impression.
Used by more than 2 million individuals daily, there is no shortage of people on the platform to support your brand, but finding your ideal followers can be tough. Fortunately, the 30 best Instagram automation tools to grow your followers can help.
What are Instagram automation tools?
In short, Instagram automation tools make using the platform somewhat automatic. Some highlights covering exactly what Instagram automation tools can do for you are here:
- Target accounts to follow.
- Follow and unfollow accounts.
- Like other people’s posts.
- Like your own posts.
- Make comments, answer polls, and send direct messages on your behalf.
- Schedule your posts.
- Suggest hashtags.
- Attract followers to your account.
Some Instagram automation services are powered by people. Meanwhile, others are powered by artificial intelligence software.
In either case, the most important thing to look for in an automation service is a focus on organic growth. This means the new profiles that follow your account belong to real people who are genuinely active Instagram users.
Each type of automation service promotes authentic growth when it generates likes for your content by:
- Suggesting your page to targeted profiles.
- Following targeted profiles, with the idea they will follow you back.
- Sharing your page, posts, and stories with a dedicated network of followers who are participating in an audience growth program.
- Including your brand in influencer giveaway programs and celebrity partnerships.
The alternative is to gain likes, views, and follows for your content via the use of fake profiles that have been established solely for this purpose. Doing this is a violation of Instagram’s policies and can get your account banned.
Taking an organic approach to Instagram audience growth is not only safer but also more effective long-term. It ensures that the people following your account are genuinely interested in the content you’re sharing, and this makes all the difference.
People who sincerely enjoy your posts will be more likely to share them with others, save them to collections, like, and comment. Even more importantly, they are more likely to continue doing this over time while also supporting the products and services you offer.
The Instagram automation tools on our list all use organic growth strategies to grow your followers.
#1. SocialMeep – The Best Overall
When it comes to generating organic growth, SocialMeep exceeds expectations. It offers an experience that blends expert guidance with personal autonomy.
After signing up for your account, you can configure your settings to target your specific niche. If you’re looking for 1 on 1 help and expertise, you can opt into their Experts service.
SocialMeep works by performing micro-interactions, things like story views, comment likes, post likes, and IGTV Views. They don’t follow/unfollow, comment, or post for you. This keeps your Instagram account safe while also being the most effective strategy for long-term sustainable growth.
Engaging at a rate that makes an obvious difference in audience growth is a full-time job. Attempting it on your own, while running your company and building your brand, is a recipe for burn-out.
It also takes your focus and energy away from generating meaningful original content and improving the product or service that you offer. If any of those areas are lacking, even the most impressive Instagram growth strategies will fail.
Collaborating with SocialMeep brings trackable results and instant relief to marketing professionals and independent influencers alike.
Whether you’re a seasoned pro or just getting started, SocialMeep is a reasonably priced automation tool that gets solid, lasting results and tops our list as the best Instagram automation tool to grow your followers.
#2. Social Follow
If you’re new to Instagram automation tools and working with a limited budget, you should definitely sign up for the free version of Social Follow.
While this lacks some of the customization offered by the paid version, it will still provide a powerful experience with automated social networking. We suggest trying it out for a month or so and then paying for premium services once you’ve seen what it can do for your brand.
#3. Nitreo
Nitreo’s signature two-minute setup process makes it an appealing choice for beginners who just want to get down to business.
You can expect it to use software-driven automation to help you grow your followers. It also offers tools for brand development, and it comes with a two-week money-back guarantee.
#4. Buzzoid
Another budget-friendly automation service, Buzzoid guarantees you a certain amount of likes, views, and follows based on the amount you pay. However, the program limits the distribution of these engagements 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.
#5. SimplyGram
SimplyGram claims it can provide 5000 new followers each month, and it has a reputation for being one of the best automation tools for organic growth.
In addition to attracting new followers to your profile, SimplyGram offers advanced filters that will help you identify competitors and additional account targets.
A perfect tool for a growing brand, SimplyGram offers a free trial to help you discover firsthand whether this automation tool is a good fit for you.
#6. Upleap
The free, three-day trial makes Upleap a good choice for small businesses that are serious about growth.
Upleap takes a multi-faceted approach to help you grow your audience. First, members of a human-powered team follow you, react to your stories, and interact with your live broadcasts. Second, you’re assigned a dedicated account manager who provides you with highly personalized feedback. Third, Upleap shares your profile externally.
This way, it can be indexed by search engines for the purpose of generating even greater growth.
#7. Kenji
With a 14-day money-back guarantee, Kenji definitely gives you time to experience how the service can help you. This automation tool works by carrying out engagements that lead to authentic, organic growth.
Kenji has a strong reputation for success and works on virtually any device. Expect expert assistance deciding which accounts to target, plus optimization features to meet your unique needs.
#8. Ampfluence
A human-powered automation tool designed to amplify your Instagram growth, Ampfluence is trusted across multiple industries.
Each new account holder begins the process with a personal consultation. You then receive professional assistance when setting targets for your brand and when expanding your reach over time.
As an added bonus, all site visitors are invited to download a free Instagram marketing guide.
#9. Social Viral
Social Viral excels at efficiency and simplicity. It provides basic automated Instagram growth services. This automation tool also safely boosts account growth by offering increased followers, likes, and views from genuine profiles.
By providing fast, quality service at low, affordable rates, Social Viral has become one of the very best budget-friendly audience growth solutions.
#10. Media Mister
This advanced automation tool works across Instagram, but it doesn’t stop there. You can also use it to boost 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 the automation tool for you.
#11. Followersup
It’s important to vibe with your automation tool, and Followersup is a good alternative to Media Mister. Another advanced tool for generating authentic engagement and growth, it also works beyond the world of Instagram.
Give Followersup a try if you’re growing your brand across multiple platforms, including TikTok. If you have multiple social channels, it’s beyond worthwhile to find the one-stop automation tool that works for you.
#12. FollowingLike
Another excellent choice for managing multiple social accounts, FollowingLike delivers reliable, organic growth. It’s a great organizational tool, and you can also use it to make sure your social content aligns well across platforms.
However, if you’re just getting the feel for automation tools, FollowingLike isn’t the best place to start. It’s for experienced users who are willing to forego trials and pay a premium for intense growth.
#13. Jarvee
If your technology set-up favors software you can download, Jarvee is the perfect match for you. An automation download, Jarvee is a superior automation tool 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.
#14. Follow Adder
This top-rated Instagram automation tool is specially designed for business users. It offers an intuitive set-up through which you can easily monitor and manage daily automated activities. These include scheduling posts, uploading images, and engaging across Instagram. Many users trust this program for safely growing both their follower bases and daily engagements.
#15. Treefrog Social
The trusted choice of major organizations that include MTV, the Food Network, Sony Music, and the National Football League, Treefrog Social focuses on easy, organic growth. In addition to enterprise clients, Treefrog welcomes small businesses and individual artists and influencers to try their superior automation tools.
The human-powered system helps subscribers obtain hundreds of new followers, thousands of new likes, and long-term, loyal fans.
#16. Trusy
In addition to basic Instagram automation tools, Trusy offers unique audience growth programs, which include strategic giveaways, celebrity partnerships, and cross-platform posts.
Choosing Trusy means your brand can be included in weekly influencer giveaways, where it will receive extra attention that brings additional traffic to your Instagram page. Dynamic and ongoing partnerships with major celebrities like Cardi B. also help spread your brand to the masses and can lead to explosive Instagram growth.
If your products and services are ready to enter the mainstream market with a bang, trusting Trusy is an excellent step to put your account over the edge.
#17. Kicksta
An automation tool focused on long-term, organic growth, Kicksta offers precise targeting and avoids using spam or fake followers.
If you need help identifying target accounts and want to develop long-term follower relationships, Kicksta is a great way to get started.
#18. Combin
Combin is an Instagram automation tool that excels at integrating content planning and marketing. This is a sure sign that the minds behind Combin understand the power of combining consistent post scheduling with targeted growth.
Through Combin, you can both automate future actions and communicate with your audience directly. Finally, you can easily track your progress in detail and make informed adjustments as you grow toward achieving your audience growth milestones.
#19. Social Buddy
Social Buddy is an automation tool that balances the precision of artificial intelligence with the warmth of human understanding. A dedicated network of followers will see your posts as recommendations. However, they will only like, view, and share them if they feel genuinely inspired to do so.
Do you want an automation tool that expertly targets your industry’s influencers, your closest competitors, and key hashtags for your brand? Social Buddy is for you.
#20. Social Captain
Similar to Social Buddy, Social Captain brings a human touch to software-driven automation. Each client relationship begins with a demo to help ensure your success using the program to increase your Instagram followers.
Social Captain offers a variety of service options to fit your specific needs. However, this automation tool always avoids using spam accounts to generate followers and likes.
#21. Insta Promoter
Claiming to be the fastest automation tool available today, Insta Promoter specializes in delivering your choice of new Instagram followers and likes. It offers simple reports to inform long-term growth while acting as a superior solution for providing a short-term boost to your Instagram engagements.
#22. Growthoid
When it comes to growing in a good way, Growthoid is an automation tool that blends security with freedom. First, Growthoid supplies you with a team to handle every aspect of account management for you. Second, Growthoid delivers detailed reports and top-notch customer service.
With Growthoid on your side, you can focus on more critical tasks than gaining followers, like increasing the quality of your content and improving your service and product offerings.
We also love Growthoid because it makes it simple for you to keep a close watch on how your account is growing and to step in and make adjustments when needed.
#23. IG Clerk
You can rest easy by automating growth via this manual service. IG Clerk prides itself on following all of Instagram’s official policies and procedures. If you want to be 100 percent sure your account is safe from being blocked as it grows, then IG Clerk is the automation tool for you.
#24. Stellation Media
Stellation Media is an automation tool that uses artificial intelligence to stimulate organic growth.
Their signature piece of technology, Mass Story Engager, will help you easily select target accounts and set up automated responses if you want to give automatic commenting and messaging a try. Likewise, you can select your most likely answers to polls.
Stellation Media’s Mass Story Engager also works by automating direct messages, likes, follows, and unfollows. However, you have total freedom to adjust your engagement settings at any time.
You can also easily keep watch over exactly what this automated tool has been sharing on your behalf.
#25. Ingramer
If you’re looking to make rapid gains in audience growth, Ingramer could be the best Instagram automation tool for you. It focuses on speed and is a potential one-stop solution for every Instagram need, including automated likes, comments, follows, and direct messages.
#26. StormLikes
Another option when speedy Instagram growth is what you need, StormLikes specializes in using its network to get more eyes on your content quickly. This fuels slow, organic growth because having views helps you grow followers and likes.
Meanwhile, StormLikes also incentivizes its network to help give your likes and followers an extra rapid boost when needed. Rest easy though. This service is still free of bots and ghost accounts, ensuring that all new engagement is from authentic, active Instagram users.
#27. Ektor.io
If using a bot-based automation tool is your thing, Ektor.io has you covered. This advanced automation tool specializes in mimicking real human interaction and offers superior hashtag and username-based targeting options.
#28. More Likes
Perfectly true to its name, More Likes is an automation tool specifically created to increase your social engagements on Instagram. It works by mobilizing a dedicated network of users that will be alerted whenever you have a new post in need of likes and views.
More Likes is a powerful automation tool that uses an organic growth strategy to secure extra likes and views for your Instagram posts.
Recently, More Likes expanded its offerings to include more followers, more views, and more saves. Specific prices vary according to the type of engagement that you choose and the amount of engagement that you select.
#29. Task Ant
Does choosing a hashtag feel confusing and random?
Anyone who answered “yes” is in good company. Most people really don’t understand how hashtags work or why one goes viral when another flops.
Nonetheless, hashtags are a vital part of categorizing your social posts and getting them in front of people who care.
Task Ant is an automation tool that focuses on hashtags and empowers social influencers to take some aspects of audience growth into their own hands.
Use Task Ant to research every hashtag you can imagine and to receive recommendations for the hashtags that will work best for you.
#30. PlanMyPost
Finishing out our list of recommendations, PlanMyPost is an automation tool that does the heavy lifting of helping you create content with the potential to go viral all on its own.
Even more important, PlanMyPost helps you schedule content so that your posts are both high-quality and consistent. This marriage of consistency and quality is the gold standard of Instagram success.
We recommend using PlanMyPost alongside the engagement-focused automation tool of your choice. This powerful combination of resources will help you achieve extra attention for short-term campaigns as well as long-term growth.
From customized dashboard settings to image-editing support, PlanMyPost lives up to its reputation as a personal assistant for managing your most pressing Instagram needs.
Best Practices for Using Automation Tools to Grow Your Followers
If you’re going to use automation tools to fuel your Instagram growth, it may be tempting to push them to maximum capacity. Instead, we urge you to use restraint.
Going from slow engagement to massive engagement is a definite red flag.
Other warning signs include repeating the exact same comment across multiple profiles, spamming direct messages, and making comments that don’t fit the context of the thread.
If Instagram detects this type of activity, chances are high that your account will be restricted in some way. Fortunately, there are some simple best practices for using automation tools responsibly and effectively.
1. Adjust your settings to add followers and likes at a more realistic rate.
In the rare event that using Instagram automation tools leads to trouble, it’s important to remain calm. Usually, bans come with plenty of warnings and last from only one to 7 days.
If you receive a warning from Instagram, it’s a smart idea to immediately edit your automation tool settings to reduce your number of daily engagements. Meanwhile, you can potentially avoid warnings completely by starting with a modest rate of engagement and working your way up to more as your account grows.
Instagram uses an algorithm to detect excess activity, and user reports indicate that larger, better-established accounts are typically given more leeway when it comes to their daily activity quotas.
A 2020 study makes some broad estimates about how much engagement you can conduct daily without being flagged. Highlights include:
- 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.
While every person and brand’s situation is unique, you can use the study’s insights as a guide for determining your personal engagement goals.
2. Turn off automated comments and direct messages.
Imagine an Instagram post with lots of authentic engagement. Somewhere in the long list of comments, there are probably a few that sound like ads for something that may, or may not, bear any relationship to the thread.
You may also see the same person popping up all over Instagram to make vague comments, like, “Love this picture!” This could be the authentic work of an enthusiastic individual. However, when no additional comments are present, that’s a sign the account is violating Instagram’s policies and spreading spam.
Another sign that engagement is fully automated is when the short, quick, enthusiastic comments pop up in response to serious posts that call for a different type of response.
To be absolutely sure that you are neither spamming Instagram nor being spammed by it, adjust your automation settings to stick to likes and follows only.
Next, take some time out to occasionally write original comments. This will help give your account a personalized, fresh, and active feeling that both complements and counterbalances your level of automation.
3. Continue to create excellent, engaging content.
When it comes to succeeding on Instagram, content really is the key. No amount of automation will help if the content you’re making isn’t able to stand on its own.
Excellent Instagram content should spark strong emotions within the viewer. It’s helpful for posts to demonstrate action and personal relationships. Posts that offer deeply relatable inspiration, as well as richly helpful information, do the best.
It’s also important to leverage Instagram’s many posting options. You can post a single image, multiple images, or a video. You can stream lives, and you can share posts by your and other public account holders to your daily story.
You can also archive your stories and them to highlight reels that run across the top of your profile. Changing your highlight reel every so often adds interest and flavor to your account.
Linking content across posts is also helpful. So is using posts, stories, and highlights to promote your interactive live streams.
Some automation tools help the most by assisting with post planning, scheduling, and hashtag selection.
4. Give your investment a chance to pay for itself.
Some automation tools act very quickly. However, the decision to grow your followers involves a long-term commitment. So, even if you don’t see immediate changes, keep creating quality content, keep posting on a consistent schedule, and give yourself at least a month to see what happens.
Many people invest in automation tools because they have simply hit a wall trying to maintain Instagram on their own. However, the recommendations on our list do more than provide swift relief.
They have the potential to open up a whole new marketing frontier. By giving these tools some time to work before frantically trying the next thing, you’ll save yourself the stress and money long-term.
Final Thoughts
Using Instagram automation tools haphazardly comes with a few risks. However, using Instagram automation tools responsibly comes with even more benefits. We definitely think that trying out the 30 best Instagram automation tools to grow your followers is worth every bit of effort it takes. Some of the highlights of using the best Instagram automation tools include:
Saving time. That saying about time equalling money exists for a reason. Time is necessary to create content and to develop your business. Without it, you would be stuck, unable to accomplish anything. Yet, maintaining your own Instagram account is a major drain of your time.
Gaining exposure. Instagram automation tools are an amazing way to gain additional exposure for your account. However, they also expose you to more sources of inspiration and information.
In addition to showing more users that you exist, you get to discover potential collaborators, as well as competitors to watch.
Improving your focus. Similar to having time, having focus is essential to business success. When it comes to Instagram automation tools, this works a few different ways.
On one hand, the automated tools are able to focus more intently on account growth and analysis than you can on your own. In this sense, they help you focus more intently on what is actually most relevant to your account’s long-term success.
On the other hand, setting your accounts up for automation allows you to walk away from social media. This provides a kind of freedom, allowing you to focus on other areas of life. Just as a “watched pot” often seems slow to boil, an account that receives too much attention may fail to grow in an organic way.
Sometimes, taking a step back provides the perspective needed to most effectively overcome challenges faced by your brand. After all, you work better with rest than with exhaustion, and having dynamic life experiences away from work enriches the content you create and provides greater insight into what people actually want and need.
It’s increasingly common to feel stuck behind your screen, as well as to assume that everyone’s experiences mirror your own. However, this is not true in life or in social media.
Using Instagram automation tools to grow your followers is an excellent reminder of how wide the world of Instagram actually is. This makes it an eye-opening and effective way to strengthen your messaging, grow your audience, and build a truly landmark brand.
