Businesses have been told for a long time that Instagram engagement is amazingly high and powerful.

They hear that taking advantage of Instagram’s over 500 million monthly active users is a great way to gain customers and increase sales.

The most obvious or surface-level sign of Instagram “success” is the number of followers. Some have gone as far as using automated tools to help them get more followers faster.

Big, big, big mistake! Here’s why and what you can do instead.

How It Works

To help you gain followers, automated tools use a trick that people have been doing to get followers for years.

They will follow other Instagram accounts en masse, either “liking” or commenting on several of each one’s pictures in order to elicit the maximum number of “follow-backs.” This technique works because it plays off common Instagram etiquette—follow me and I’ll follow you back—but here the other account gets unfollowed after a few days.

Almost all of these tools work in essentially the same way:

1. Link your Instagram account. It doesn’t have to have any posts or followers to work.
2. Choose your targeting criteria: common ones include followers of certain accounts, users of common hashtags, geographical locations, and gender.
3. Finally, set a timer for when you’ll unfollow these accounts—usually a few days.

And that’s it. Then you sit back and watch as a bot grows your Instagram following for you by following and liking the photos of as many accounts as you choose.

Compared to the fake accounts powering paid Facebook likes, this is definitely more powerful. You’re getting real people to follow you. It’s easy, it’s inexpensive, and it can get you a ton of followers very quickly.

But buying Instagram followers is the surest way to set yourself up to fail from the very start.

Importance Of Engagement Rate

Social media gives you the ability to engage with your audience. Having a large number of followers shows you’re good at playing the game, but it doesn’t mean you’re connecting with people or converting them to paying customers.

To measure your engagement rate, combine the number of likes and comments on a post and divide by how many followers you have:

For a more rigorous estimation of your engagement rate, you can scale up to the last 10 posts.

Engagement rate is especially important when using Instagram—its per-follower engagement rate of 4.21%, calculated using 1.5+ mil interactions over 160 Instagram posts, is 58 times higher than Facebook or Twitter—which means you’re missing out on a huge opportunity to build a real following when you bot to grow yours artificially.

What Happens When You Automate Engagement

The problem with buying followers is that they won’t actually like or comment on your posts. They weren’t organically added followers and so likely don’t care much for your content. Your follower count will grow, but all you will get are other bot accounts, zombie accounts, and people who only followed you because you followed them.

Without adding “real” followers who actually enjoy your content, your engagement rate will remain stagnant—or fall.

But when you grow your followers organically by posting great content, you’ll be getting followers who actually like and engage with your content. This will continue to build on itself as people will see that your content is popular and feel like they can join the conversation because there’s actually a conversation going on.

A trend like this won’t happen when every other comment on your picture is a bot account spamming “GET FREE INSTAGRAM FOLLOWERS CLICK LINK IN BIO”.

Harnessing the power of a truly high Instagram engagement rate can really bring your business to a new level.

Knowing Your Customers

Having an engaged audience allows you to truly know who your audience is. The audience you should be targeting is your buyer persona.

A buyer persona is someone who will buy your product. But they aren’t just a customer, they’re the ideal customer. Someone who understands the true value of what you do and values what you can do for them enough to keep coming back for more.

But what makes a good buyer persona? Not only do you need to consider their demographics and goals, but you also need to truly understand your customer. These are real people with real social identities, personalities and things they identify with.

Knowing the real people who want your product and interacting to find out more about them can improve your initial idea of your buyer persona. This helps you better understand what they really want from you. The more engaged you are with your followers, the more engaged they will be with your product. This, in turn, improves your product, ads, and marketing, leading to more followers and customers in a never-ending virtuous cycle.

How Organic Engagement Helps You Make Better Buyer Personas Faster

Instagram’s high level of engagement means you have an incredible opportunity to build great buyer personas quickly.

Interaction with organic followers is the best way to learn about your audience. Whether it is through the comments on your pictures or visiting their Instagram pages, learning what your followers are truly interested in can help you find your niche in the market.

Furnishing store Pottery Barn knows its Instagram audience is looking for inspiration and examples of good design. They interact with their audience often by featuring customer’s photos on their Instagram while also providing the inspiration that many of their customers come to their page for.

Focusing your message and your content on one thing your buyer persona can relate to will target the specific audience that will actively enjoy and purchase your product. These users will likely bring in their friends and soon enough, you will have formed an actively engaged community that you can then expand on with future products.

There Are Better Ways

Instagram has a huge potential for marketing and engagement success if you use other techniques. Whether it’s through using hashtags, interacting with your followers or just simply having good photos, there are plenty of ways to build a dedicated follower-base.

There’s no point in wasting time and money for superficial followers with no returns. Even worse, you run the risk of your account being banned, which is very difficult to recover from.