What Are Instagram Bots And Should You Be Using Them?

Instagram could be an invaluable tool for your company – but on a platform with 25 million other business accounts, it’s hard to stand out from the crowd.

In an ideal world, you’d draw in thousands of followers with your engaging, on-brand content – and that is possible – but in a competitive market, many business profiles find they have to interact with other users in order to get their attention.
Unfortunately, not everybody has time to like, comment, and follow back users on top of the day-to-day running of their business.

That’s why some brands have turned to bots. Instagram bots are automated tools that follow other users and interact with their content on the premise that they’ll be followed back. They’re marketed as an efficient way to build a following, but like any quick fix, they have their drawbacks. Here’s a look at the pros and cons:

Pros:

Build your followers with minimum effort

Bots are programmed to engage with specific content, allowing you to target users that are likely to be interested in your band. They essentially do the grunt work for you, freeing you up to focus on content creation and running your business.

Interact with other users

By commenting on and liking other users’ content, bots can make it seem like your brand is interactive and personable.

This may or may not be good for your image, depending on your brand identity.

Cons:

Awkward, tone-deaf interactions

Bots have zero cultural sensitivity. Their activity is determined by their programming, and on a social media platform, this can yield some unpredictable results. A bot could inadvertently comment a smiley face on a funeral photo, or follow an offensive profile, damaging the image of your brand. Even if the bot does manage to avoid offense, automated interactions can come across as creepy. By commenting blindly on other users’ personal photos, a bot might be more likely to turn people off than draw them in.

Burying relevant posts

If you’re at all invested in your business profile’s Instagram feed, bots are not for you. A bot’s ‘follow’ function will fill your feed with the content of random users. If you want to see the content of accounts you’re interested in, you’ll have to search for them on your profile. That may or may not be an issue for you, depending on how you use Instagram.

Violating Instagram’s Terms of Use

This is probably the biggest setback of Instagram bots. Instagram bots violate the platform’s terms of use – which is why popular bot website Instagress was shut down in 2017. If your account activity looks unnatural to Instagram, it will impose a ‘shadowban’, so you won’t be discovered as easily by new people. This could be detrimental to your social media strategy.

Overall, bots aren’t a great idea if you want your brand to maintain a sense of authenticity. If the public has reason to believe you’re using deceptive tactics to build followers, you might lose the audience you’ve already got. Instant followers aren’t worth sullying your image. The best way to build your Instagram following is to hire a social media strategist who understands your target audience and how to best engage with them.

What is Content and why do I need it?

We want to have a chat about the c-word. No, not that one. We want to talk to you about content.

In the world of digital media, it seems everyone is creating content. Where once you’d see copywriter, filmmaker, photographer or blogger, you’ll find ‘content creator’. And of course, everyone knows that in 2022, content is king. But what does that actually mean?

Feeling Content?

Content is defined as ‘the information or experiences that are directed towards an end-user or experience,’ which is a broad description, to say the least. To be simultaneously more and less specific, it’s anything you interact with – it could be a film, a book, a song, the radio, a photograph, a piece of artwork, an event – anything that is meant to engage the senses and deliver some kind of message.

Digital content can be blogs, videos, music, websites, eBooks, email newsletters, social media copy, photographs, design, AR, VR, apps, games and anything else you could possibly create online.

A content creator is a person that makes these things – creatives, artists, marketers, bloggers, filmmakers, musicians – all could come under the banner of the content creator, and whilst it becomes a necessity to diversify skills in the digital age, a single content creator could fill all of these roles.

Content is a currency of the digital age.

In the era of social media, content gets attention, likes, shares and eyes on your brand. Further still, content is the core of your brand, your brand DNA. On its own, a great logo and a snappy name may make your brand memorable, but creating a story around your brand and engaging your customers with ongoing related content will build loyalty, and draw new customers.

Building A Brand is Telling A Story

Your social media and online presence acts as a shopfront for your brand, no matter how big or small, it’s a point of engagement for your customers and exists for a single reason – to connect to your audience. A strong content strategy based on audience-led analysis (which is part of our Business Case service) will determine the strongest forms of content for your brand, and the most efficient ways to leverage the content for the best audience engagement. Accumulated content creates not only a strong image of your brand for the public, but a traceable history, this continuing story increases the ability for loyal and untapped customers to trust your brand.

Google Glory

Everyone knows that a successful brand needs a web presence – social media accounts and preferably a website, but to get your brand seen on Google, you need to get onto that front page. There have been studies, courses and millions of words written on SEO, but content is one of the most organic ways to get those keywords read, and get your brand climbing the ranks. Content on websites and social media should always strengthen your brand – and keep in mind that video content will be prioritized, as Google favours YouTube results and shows them at the top of the page.

Fortunately, building a strong brand and creating content is becoming easier and easier. It no longer requires a marketing manager or an advertising agency. Content agencies, like DOTF, can create bespoke content strategy that is cost-effective and tailored to your brand, using audience-led analytics to understand your brand, rather than applying a one-size-fits-all strategy, helping you to create content and tell your story the way you want it told.

Why Integrated Marketing Communications Are Vital For Your Brand

Picture this: you’ve just launched an expensive new ad for your business. The ad is everything you could ask for – slick, on brand and engaging – but you’re still not seeing an increase in customer interaction. Why?

Your website design hasn’t been updated, and it looks clunky in comparison. Your social media manager has been getting creative, but they’re failing to capture your brand’s key messages. When customers interact with your business, they’re getting a disjointed picture of who you are and what you do, and it’s preventing you from making a lasting impression.

Here’s where Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) comes in. IMC is a strategy that involves coordinating you various marketing channels to ensure they reinforce and complement each other. It can be as simple as making sure a key message is promoted across print, social media, and online, or adapting graphics to work across different channels.

IMC gives your brand a sense of consistency and credibility. It strengthens campaigns by reinforcing them across multiple platforms, ensuring your marketing is efficient and cost-effective. Customers will get a clear, reassuring sense of who you are and what you do. Better still, they’ll remember your brand.

We live in a world full of competing organisations, all trying to broadcast their own unique messages. Consumer attention is fickle and fleeting. It’s up to your business to make sure that when you do have your target audience’s attention, you’re always saying something clear, consistent, and on brand; something that matters.

IMC requires excellent internal communication. Throw out the silo mentality: your PR, marketing, sales, and design teams all need to be communicating with each other to ensure you’re projecting a consistent image.

How can you implement IMC? Effective organisation is key. Ensure senior management are briefed on the benefits of IMC. Make internal communications a key priority. Develop a new communications plan that involves all the departments in your organisation, and be prepared to discard anything that isn’t clear, consistent, or in line with your brand values.

Work smarter, not harder – that’s the principle underpinning IMC.

Why Is So Essential in 2022?

Content is one of the most important tools in your brand toolkit – whether it’s to create awareness or brand identity, or to directly drive revenue, become more cost-efficient and personalize the customer experience. Which is to say, a brand can use content marketing to do far more than marketing.

According to Forbes, content marketing is more than just a one-way interaction, throwing information into the faces of your potential customers, clients and community. At its heart, content marketing seeks to create a conversation with your consumers. This type of conversation is vital to any brand’s marketing technique as traditional above-the-line marketing techniques are expected to be bolstered by a community and a direct line of communication through socials.

At Department of the Future we’ve always championed the power of video content – especially short form digital video. After years of watching our videos work hard for our clients, engaging and creating conversations with their audience, we finally have the statistics to back our experiences up. Turns out, people really, really like watching videos. In fact, video is the best performing content format– in terms of engagement across every industry and every geography. In particular, short-form video, which is less than two minutes, was the ultimate top performer.

With over 78% of consumers saying that personally relevant content increases their purchase intent, an integral part of our work at DOTF is understanding how audiences think. An essential part of our content strategy processes, involves identifying both the correct audience and the optimal channel for your comms.

Plus promises of transparency are very important as well, with 73% of consumers saying they’ll pay for a product if transparency is clear. Content marketing provides opportunities to engage your audience with authenticity and transparency. Showing products on video, presenting testimonials from genuine customers, maintaining a social media presence and flow of content that reacts to current conversations are all ways in which content marketing can help a brand to create an environment of transparency and trust.

You might also be surprised to learn that companies are using more financially-focused metrics such as efficiency (23%) and conversions (23%) to measure the success of their content strategies. At DOTF, we believe in content marketing because it has a greater ability for conversions than traditional marketing methods – because a piece of content can be tailored to specific audiences across the channels and spaces they know and love. Whilst you’ll see a lot of strategists showing views and engagements, we believe that it’s better to start a conversation and build a connection than it is to have 2 million people scroll past your ads – and that’s what content marketing is all about.

Why use emotive storytelling in your creative?

In 2016, Colin Kaepernick, American NFL player, chose to kneel – rather than stand – during the pre-game Star-Spangled Banner, as a form of peaceful protest against racial injustice in the United States. His decision attracted praise and criticism from around the world, including a tweet-flurry from Donald Trump. No team has signed him since, and his activism has continued.

In September 2018, Nike released an ad for their 30th anniversary: a black and white portrait of Kaepernick, and the words Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything, followed by the iconic swoosh and Just do it tagline. And the world went crazy. Longtime Adidas and New Balance fans showed photos of their new Nike kit, whilst conversely photos and videos of the less impressed showed people burning, slicing and binning their socks, shoes and clothing. Happy or mad, Nike is trending worldwide – all thanks to the power of emotional engagement.

University of South Australia’s Ehrenberg Bass Institute for Marketing Science research has embarked on the largest ever investigations to determine how to create the perfect ad, working with Mars Inc, US-based MediaScience Labs and their own Cognitive Neuroscience Lab, using multiple medical, psychological and neuroscientific methods to quantify emotion and attention responses in the body and brain.

Their early insights include the following:

  1. Emotional content can grab and hold attention
  2. People seem to be more willing to watch enjoyable emotional content over and over, rather than skipping or avoiding the content in other ways
  3. Emotional content is generally processed more quickly than factual information
  4. Emotions help people to remember information
  5. 95% of purchasing decisions are made emotionally.

These insights are significant to creating content across all industries, as whilst rationality must underpin all emotion, just stating the facts – even if your product or service is the best – is not always enough to win over your audience, you must humanise your brand through an emotional experience relevant to your demographic. In fact, these insights may be even more significant for a brand providing products or services that may be technical or abstract, or don’t immediately engage the senses, as you want to create significant and positive emotional memories associated to your brand – which is more difficult for say, a business consultant service than a gourmet chocolate brand.

Keep in mind, we’re not just talking about the tearjerker, the relatable and the sad-turned-success story, engaging emotions can come with humour, intrigue, surprise and as Nike have just shown us, outrage. (Although, we don’t really recommend the latter unless you’ve really profiled and understood your demographic.)

On the other hand, achieving the perfect balance of emotive storytelling and brand messaging is essential to a campaign’s success. Think of the times you’ve engaged with a campaign, laughed or puzzled, only to go back and think… wait, what was that for?! Balancing the appropriate messaging and brand strategy with emotive storytelling will determine the effectiveness of the campaign – without emotion, there’s no connection to the audience, but without rational brand messaging, there’s no point in creating the campaign.

Play Video

Our work for Our Watch’s youth organization The Line must always achieve a balance of authentic emotional storytelling and important key messaging through a direct engagement with real people telling real stories in their own words. The Asking For A Mate webseries campaign focuses on dispelling stigma and myths around sex, gender and relationships for young people, with a wider scope of preventing violence against women through education. Whilst the content and messaging of the campaign is not disparate to what is taught by psychologists, and what should be taught in health classes and Safe Schools programs around the country, presented in this authentic and emotive manner, it engages the emotions of the viewers and allows a connection that’s more authentic, and more memorable than a teacher in class, a chapter in a textbook or an article online. As part of the process of making this content, it’s reviewed by a committee of young people to ensure that the language and style connects in the right way – unlike the infamous “milkshake consent” campaign commissioned by the Australia federal government.

Play Video

Using emotive storytelling creates a bond between brand and audience, and allows messaging to be turned into memories. It gives a brand a personality beyond the promotion of its products; it gives your brand an influential voice in the hearts and minds of your demographic.