Why You Should Not Use Instagram Bots

Wondering why your Instagram growth service can no longer deliver their service or orders this week? It has something to do with the fact that your service provider relies on automated bots, and those bots rely on an private API that Instagram is constantly adjusting. Therefore, if you are using a bot-dependent service, your account will be impacted. Yup, I said it – – your service provider has conned you into believing there’s actually a real person behind the scenes managing your account. Unfortunately, the reality is that your service provider is managing your account using a bot.

What is an Instagram Bot?

For those that are unaware, let’s first discuss what is a bot.

A bot is essentially a script that AUTOMATES specific tasks. It’s code! Code written to perform specific actions such as:

• Automatically following people
• Automatically unfollowing people
• Automatically commenting
• Automatically posting photos
• Automatically liking photos
• etc.

Of course, these bots all violate Instagram’s terms of service, and they’re doing everything possible to stop them from spamming your IG feed.

These bot scripts are everywhere on the web and finding a “service” claiming they can do all the actions above for only $9 per month is quite common. It’s also a dead giveaway that such as service is actually using a bot. After all, no human can perform the same actions at such a low cost or in the same span of time. Luckily for these services masquerading as social media providers, there are no humans involved – it’s all bots.

Now that we know what a ‘bot‘ is, it’s important to understand the pre-requisites to get them to work.

Why Are These Instagram Bots Not Working?

So what happened recently? All the bots use the same private API to retrieve data and perform actions. For a brief period this past week, Instagram decided to block many of them. THIS IS GREAT, but not for the fake providers claiming they’re manually handling your account with zero risk. In fact, they’re all scrambling to find an alternative method.

The block did not impact all bots or all accounts. Based on my discussions with a few bot service providers, only some of their Instagram accounts under management encountered issues logging in or performing actions. For example, the most common issue was the Instagram verification loop in which an account would not be able to successfully login using the bot-reliant service.

Regardless, the writing’s on the wall. In June, Instagram took a strong stance by forcefully shutting down bots such as Instagress, MassPlanner, and more. Thereafter, many of the bot owners created spin-offs and various other scripts that can be run on your desktop or large VPS servers, all masquerading as legit and safe alternatives. Unfortunately, they’re not!

Instagram is proving that it can cut off their business instantly by closing the private API. My guess – and strictly a guess – is that Instagram is testing what level of bot / spam activity is manifested from use of the private API.

If Instagram learned anything through their experiment, it’s that there’s a TON of spam and fake accounts created by these bots. We certainly hope that’s enough to nudge them to move forward with completely closing the private API to prevent such bot services from proliferating junk on the platform and putting client accounts at risk. Eliminating spam and removing fake accounts is critical to Instagram’s revenue model and long-term success.

No Bots!

Now, there’s nothing wrong with implementing growth tactics into your social media marketing. After all, the Instagram platform works best when you post photos, engage with followers, like photos, add comments, and follow interesting accounts. The key is to never use bots and put your account at risk. Bots are NOT humans and therefore do not have discretion or common sense to who they follow and engage with on the platform.

Your provider has marketed themselves as an actual Instagram growth team or Instagram growth service or whatever other phrase they’d plastered on their sales page. If you want a real team that ONLY manages Instagram accounts, then contact our team here at Ampfluence. We do everything without bots and you can actually talk to us humans!