As a business owner, you should use social media to boost your business’s coverage, connect with your customers, pitch your content, and sell your products. However, the commitment and dedication needed for this growth are quite huge and may not be easy for an entrepreneur. Hence, some would opt for bots to grow their Instagram accounts and engage with their posts on their behalf.
Automating your business social media account has a lot of advantages, but it also comes with certain disadvantages. Read more about the pros and cons of using Instagram bots for your business socials.
Pros of Using Instagram Bots
The advantages of using Instagram bots include:
1. Speed and Efficiency
Business owners often use an Instagram bot to increase their followers on their social media accounts. Moreover, even the most zealous and hardworking entrepreneur wouldn`t have the time to engage with Instagram followers, comment on pictures, and reply to comments 24 hours a week. These robots could help solve these challenges as their efficiency can’t be compromised. You could also check a list of the top Instagram growth services you can use.
2. Increased Followers
One way to increase followers is through likes, comments, and following other accounts. Instagram bots do this automatically and efficiently. This high rate of activity by these bots leads to more visibility which might ultimately lead to an increase in followers for your Instagram account. Another advantage of bots is that you don’t have to manually search for your target audience or potential customers, as they will do the job for you.
3. Increased Engagements
Instagram algorithms show you don’t only need many followers but also need enough engagements on your account. This is important so that your Instagram audience wouldn`t leave and potential followers will come across your page. With bots, it simultaneously keeps your existing followers and adds new ones. Don’t forget that this happens automatically and won’t require your manual input. You just have to program a specific sentence to post in response to a corresponding hashtag.
Cons of Using Instagram Bots
Using Instagram bots comes with certain disadvantages, such as:
4. Poor Reputation
Instagram bots are just machines and they can’t consider the context of certain content or its caption before posting a comment. Once they are programmed to drop a comment to a specific hashtag, they do so without filters.
For example, if you assigned a bot to comment ‘This is beautiful’ to any hashtag, such as #Country, the bot does as commanded on every post that has the hashtag #Country even when the picture of war is in context. Moreover, some social media entrepreneurs have fallen victim to this con of bots which has cost them a lot. The worst part is you won’t know when this happens unless someone tells you about it.
Although bots can help build your brand, they could also potentially destroy it. Since bots could post insensitive comments, they could go around social media and destroy your reputation. This can however be maneuvered or avoided if you program a generic comment on bots.
5. Violation of Instagram’s Terms of Use
Instagram Bots are not allowed as they access Instagram`s Application Programming Interface (API) without permission. They violate the following terms of use:
- Instagram’s API must not be accessed by means other than those permitted by Instagram.
- Instagram’s login credentials should not be stored or cached.
- You shouldn’t use Instagram API to display user content, manage Instagram relationships, import or backup content without Instagram`s permission.
- Businesses should not be allowed to take more than one action at a time on Instagram.
- Comments are to be specific to each person. Unauthorized commercial communication or spam is not allowed on Instagram.
- Do not use an unreasonable amount of bandwidth or impact the stability of Instagram servers or the behavior of other apps using Instagram APIs.
These are some of the terms violated by Instagram bots which have led to the shutdown of some popular bot services.
6. Unauthentic Engagements
Since they’re robots designed to drop program comments, the engagements generated are not real. To avoid comments that could be insensitive, simple and generic comments are often used which will not induce any genuine reaction. If your automated comment is ‘lovely,’ it will create little or no comment from other users. This could be a huge disadvantage to your business as it is supposed to be a platform to interact and connect with your potential customers.
Bots can make your news feed become clumped up and juggled with a lot of posts that are not within your niche or that you aren’t interested in. Bots can follow tens and hundreds of Instagram users in an hour and your business account might become a place for relevant and irrelevant posts.
Conclusion
You should first consider the pros of using Instagram Bots for your business social media accounts. Although using bots have many advantages, you need to evaluate the disadvantages before settling whether to go for them or not. Make sure its usage aligns with your goals and helps expand your business.
