Instagress Review - Does It Really Get You More Instagram Followers? 2017

Hello there, I'm Tod Maffin. Happy Monday. Welcome to the series that still has no name where we basically take our money, we test some really interesting digital marketing products, and we tell them whether you should spend your money on them. And here's one you should not spend your money on. It's called Instagress. Now, before I badmouth Instagress, because it actually does what it says, it's just the question is whether you want it to or not. Let's back up with a little bit of history. Instagress, what it does is it will automatically like and comment on a variety of Instagram posts. The idea being that if people see that you're active on their posts, that they might follow you. Some history. When Instagram first started, this was a big thing. And it's still kind of a big thing with Follow Friday, although not as much. You know, if you tag people or if you go onto their photos and you say, "This is a great photograph," that hopefully people will see, "Oh, that's interesting. Someone left me a comment," and they click on your name, and if they like your account, they'll follow you too. So it's kind of a passive way of growing your Instagram. Instagram following. Does it work? Yes and no. It does work. You will get more followers, probably not as much as you're expecting, certainly not as much as these services are promising, but the quality of the followers is what the issue is. So let's dive into one of these services which we've been testing for about a month now, um, to see whether or not it makes a difference. We've got some hard stats to show you what the actual results were. Uh, this is Instagress, and so you can see basically the way it works.— and all these sites always promise you the world. You'll get thousands of more followers and so on, and maybe you will, but you don't want any of those followers. Just as an aside before we go on, why don't you want bad quality followers? Because remember, one really effective way of reaching out to people on Instagram is to target your followers. And so if you've amassed a whole bunch of low quality followers, people who have followed you because your bot automatically said, "Great photo!" photo, now you're paying to reach them and they haven't organically followed. They haven't truly followed you because they're really genuinely interested in, in what you're saying. Maybe a few, but not that many. When Instagram first started, as I mentioned, this was a big thing. These bots were everywhere. They were very basic. They weren't nearly as detailed as what I'm going to show you. And you could amass thousands and thousands and thousands of followers, tens of thousands of followers. And then there came a point where Instagram deleted all those fake followers and then people kind of got back to normal, which was kind of a generous thing they did for people who use these bots. The way Instagress works is it basically, as you can see here, it's right off their website. It automates everything and I do like their pricing system. Let's dive into the backend so you can kind of see what it all does. All right, so I've had this running on my account for about a month or so. One of the nice things about it is you can turn it on and off. When you buy, you're buying really server time. Take a look at these prices here. When it says you buy for 3 days, you're actually getting 3 days of server time. If you turn it on for 6 hours and then turn it off and then turn it on for 18 hours and turn it off, you still got 2 days left. It's not from the point— It's not like usual monthly services where it's that way. You can get somewhat targeted. Now remember, the goal of this is that its job is to go through all of Instagram and find various things. So find hashtags or find genders or ages and automatically like those photos. We can take a look at what it's liked on my account. Just a few seconds ago, the bot automatically liked from my Tod Maffin account this photo. Let's click on it and find out why it did. So here's why it did it, is that it found this hashtag called #socialmedia Now that's one of many hashtags that I'm searching for. Now who is this person? I don't know. Let's check them out. They're online, they sell jewelry. Does this have any interest to me whatsoever? No. And that's why I choose only to like these accounts and not to follow them automatically. But as you can see, I mean, it goes on forever and ever and ever. I mean, it's just liking all sorts of spammy, weird, bad stuff. Now, We'll talk about whether it works or not because it kind of does work in just a moment. But let's back up so you can see the sort of the setting filters. By the way, this gender filter, be very careful when you see Instagram services claim that they can target by gender. As you probably know, there is no gender input on Instagram and so it's making some guesses. If the name is Paul, it's going to say that that's a guy. If the name is Kris, K-R-I-S, it has no idea. Pat, it has no idea. It's really that kind of stupid. Let's take a look at the targeting here. You can say to Instagress, "I want to target people that are using certain hashtags and I want to like their photos." We can go in and take a look at the hashtags that are doing that down below. You can change it to certain follower accounts and so on. Activity speed, this is how fast it does it. Now, why do I have it on slow? Because Instagress themselves will admit, "Listen, if you crank this up to high and you do it a lot." Facebook or Instagram, which doesn't like these services, may come and shut you down for using an automated bot. So leave it on slow if you're going to do it, and you can do all sorts of various things. So here is where the targeting comes into play. So I've got just a whole bunch of stuff here. Marketing, marketing, digital, social media marketing, keynote, keynote speaker. You know, maybe once in a blue moon, and honestly, if it weren't for this video series, I would not be using this at all. We just kind of wanted to test it to just to see what actual results were. As soon as this video is over, I am turning this off. But you go through and keynote speaker, if someone uses the hashtag keynote speaker, they might be interested in what I do. Probably not though. Chances are they are a keynote speaker. They're not a buyer of keynote speakers. It's a bit strange. Canada, again, this can only be as precise as people input into their bios. You can add block words and so on. You can stop after a certain number and all that kind of jazz. You basically just set it running. You can turn it on and off if you want. You can also have it automatically follow that person. Now, if you have a brand account and you're not using your Instagram account on a day-to-day basis for actually looking at Instagram, maybe, maybe you want to turn this on. You might get more follows that way. Honestly, this is my real account, and I check my real account, you know, every day or so to see what my friends are posting on Instagram. So I don't want to follow these people. Now, There are ways to have it automatically unfollow them if they haven't followed you back in 3 days and it just gets messy. One thing that all of these services like Instagram do is they want to put comments. They want to add comments to it. So instead of just liking a photograph, it'll add a little bit of a word there. And you can change what those words are. If you go into this comment section, it's got all of these goofy phrases. Neato, gorgeous, pretty nice, the cutest, inspiring. Inspiring, gorgeous, love it. Here's why you shouldn't do it. I think the reason is obvious, is these comments are A, stupid, and they kind of look like bot messages, but also they're not being posted. They're just randomly being applied to these photographs. So imagine that your thing here has picked up Keynotes and it's found a photograph on Instagram and someone has used hashtag Keynote. "#keynotespeaker." And so your bot comes along and sees it and likes it and adds "Whoopie!" Unfortunately for you and the bot, the photo was of someone delivering a eulogy at their father's funeral and they hashtagged "#keynotespeaker" and your bot came along and gleefully added "Whoopie!" You know what I mean? So don't use comments. Don't use comments. You set it running. Then you can turn it off. You can say, "Stop doing it," which I'm now going to do. You can actually set it to have a schedule, so you can have it run on certain days to make it a bit more looking like it's someone that might be. That's Instagress. Let's talk about the results. All right, so I had this running for 10 days. I've actually had it on for about a month or so. I was turning it on and off and seeing how. How all that stuff worked. So we should be able to see a growth in follower count. Again, to follow the train, what's happening is I come along and like a photo, well, my bot comes on and likes a photo on your Instagram feed and maybe you see that notification and maybe you check out my bio and maybe if you're interested in what I do, you follow my account. Or maybe it's bot wars. And your bot sees that my bot liked your photo, so your bot has auto-followed me. You know what I mean? This is why these things are not, are not a great idea. So we should be able to see a rise in, uh, in the actual follower count. This is, uh, a great backend tool we use for our analytics. I'll be doing a video on it shortly. Um, and so let's take a look. And indeed, there is a rise, uh, starting from roughly— I turned it on sort of roughly around here about a month ago, so December 20th-ish. We are the 26th. Are we really that— wow. You can see there is a rise, but not a great rise. Let's look at the numbers here. I started at 788, and today we're at 869, so not bad. Here's a more interesting account, is this one. Shows the actual— it's not a continual growth, it just shows where those followers are coming in. And there was a bit of a spike on a couple days there. I had 8 on one day and 9 on another day. Interestingly enough, a bit of an increase in people that stopped following the account as well. So, Instagress. Should you use it? I don't know. Probably not. If you really care about your brand, don't— you know, you don't want— you certainly don't want it adding follows. If you want a small bump, The prices are fairly reasonable for a month of server time. And again, if you choose to use that only on Mondays, then you will have half a year worth of service. $10 US, I guess it's okay. I guess you'll see a bump. Are they good followers? They probably are not good followers. As I mentioned, I have now turned this off for good. So that's Instagress. Next week we'll be taking a look at Social Report, which is that backend system I showed you. It's going to be a huge video. Of course, if you like what you see here, please do make sure you follow this channel and give a little thumbs up down here on the YouTube video. I'm kind of brand new to YouTube. My buddy Steve Dotto is teaching me everything I need to know about it, and it is a crazy scary world, and I'm still a little bit terrified of it. That's it for right now. Thanks a lot. We'll see you again soon. Bye.