This Powerful Tool Can Drastically Increase Your Social Media Growth

One of the first things I learned as a social media consultant is that most people don’t know a lot about launching and maintaining effective social media marketing campaigns. Most entrepreneurs and business professionals who seek out my services, don’t have time to learn and understand engagement metrics.

But there’s one metric all my clients care deeply about: followers.

It’s no secret that social media is essentially a glorified popularity contest. In all forms of marketing and advertising, consumers’ attention is the real coin of the realm. More simply, followers are currency—the thing you want more of.

When my friend and Mentor Kasey Jones (Twitter: @ABetterJones) introduced me to the game-changing technique that allows me to drastically accelerate follower growth for my clients, I had no idea it would become one of the most powerful tools in my social media marketing business.

In this age of social media manipulation by foreign hackers and other malevolent actors, “bots” is practically a dirty word. All the big social media players prohibit aggressive botting practices on their platforms, and this is understandable. The internet can be a pretty shifty place.

But bots, or software that performs programmed tasks on your behalf, are also used ethically to achieve positive outcomes in myriad applications. And the reality is, if you want to accelerate the growth of your social media channels, bots provide the best method of achieving that goal ethically and organically. Say that with me now: Ethically. And organically.

Check this out.

Organic traffic is key to growing your social media following, but it’s a labor-intensive process. Engaging your audience with quality content and a unique voice are your vital first steps, but achieving organic growth quickly is a difficult task.

Fortunately, there’s a pretty simple recipe for building up your followers as quickly as possible. It’s the tried and tested technique of using follow/unfollow chains. Start with this (not-so) secret sauce: Follow 100 people per day.

At least 1 out of every 10 people you follow will follow you back, and that ratio rises as your total number of followers grow. But here’s what the process looks like without bots:

You log into your Twitter or Instagram accounts and look at the top recommendations for people to follow. Then you click follow until you hit at least 100 accounts. It was quick, easy and probably didn’t take you more than one to three minutes. Unfortunately, you will be lucky if even one of them follows you back.

Most of the time Twitter and Instagram’s algorithms are showing you profiles that are either popular or fall into the “rising star” category. This means your follow is one of hundreds, they received during the week, which means your content is buried in their feed and they probably never noticed your account.

The next time you try a more targeted approach. This time you did some research and found an account with 5,000 followers in the industry you are targeting. You perform your 100 follows, and maybe 2-3 follow you back.

Why such a low follow-back ratio? You probably followed a bunch of robots or users who just aren’t very active or engaged enough to follow you. Even worse: Twitter and IG restrict your total number of daily actions, meaning every random, unresearched account you followed is a marketing opportunity you can’t get back.

Performing this work manually and efficiently can become a fulltime job on its own.

That’s where consultants and our powerful software—bots—come in. Automating smart, programable robots is the most efficient and cost-effective way to grow your social media following. I’ve personally seen stagnant accounts with minimal posts go from losing followers every month, to increasing their followings by 33 to 79% month-after-month just by using a robot to follow and unfollow on their behalf.

I want to clarity that there’s a difference between the type of automation I’m recommending and services such as Circle Boom or Crowd Fire. Both of those services are more effective than manually following and unfollowing accounts. However, they are less than optimal for two reasons.

First, you still must know who to target. These services require the user to tell the program who’s following to go after. If influencer and keyword research isn’t part of your marketing wheelhouse, you may grow your following, but it won’t be a very engaging.

The other issue is you can’t customize the search or follow parameters on any of these platforms. Follow/unfollow services are constantly playing a game of cat and mouse with social media algorithms. Twitter and IG adjust their software periodically and without warning to catch these tools.

The result is services that are conservative in their approach because they are less interested in growing your account than they are in making sure their service doesn’t get banned or Twitter and IG figure out a way to permanently block their application.

This leaves you with two options.

You can either spend the next three to six months learning how to program smart robots that will filter your targets so you don’t waste time following fake accounts and users who are barely active, or you can hire someone like me to program your automation for a monthly fee.

Unlike Circle Boom, Crowd Fire or their competitors, customizable bot software allows you to screen targets based on banned-word lists, keyword lists, average number of tweets per week (you want to target people who are fairly active), last login, exc.

These robots can also be programmed to appear far more human than the average user. You can program the bots to scroll through a Twitter feed and like a random post or one that features specific key words before following, or even program them to scroll through the feeds of users it doesn’t intend to follow at all. You can even space out the number of likes and follows per operation.

The total number of filters, parameters and human mimicking features these robots offer would take a human years to master, and new features are constantly being added.

Interested in seeing how this kind of automation can grow your social? Let's chat.