Getting likes on any social media platform is one thing that every brand wants to achieve. This brings more attention to your brand, which leads to more revenue.
Naturally, the internet has become filled with companies that will help you get more likes on social media. In the case of Instagram, this can be through organic or purchasing methods.
However, we will first discuss the differences between organically purchasing likes and gaining them.
Gain Likes
Buying Instagram likes has a bad stigma. This is mostly because buying likes is associated with using bot-created accounts to generate those likes.
There is one major problem with using bot-created accounts to generate those likes – it is against the Instagram Terms of Use.
That’s right. Purchasing Instagram likes violates the Instagram Terms of Use, which means your account can be banned for purchasing likes.
Fortunately, Instagram does not like to ban accounts for purchasing likes. This is because they cannot determine who purchased the likes. This policy prevents competing Instagram accounts from purchasing likes for their completion with the hope of getting banned.
Just because your account probably will not get banned does not make purchasing Instagram likes a good idea though. The other negative effect of purchasing Instagram likes is that it can negatively affect your brand, which is not what any brand wants.
It can negatively impact your brand in a few different ways. They include the following:
- Erodes Brand Trust: Most Instagram users can detect when an account has purchased likes. They have to look at the accounts that liked the post. The easier method is to just look at the likes-to-comments ratio. The account probably purchased likes if the post has 1,000 likes and 3 comments. This makes your brand look very bad.
- Creates an Unnatural Engagement Ratio: You naturally disrupt the engagement ratio when you purchase likes. For instance, if you have 100 followers and purchase 1,000 likes on your picture, you will have an unnaturally high engagement ratio. This is bad because the Instagram algorithm penalizes content with an unnatural engagement ratio.
Those are the two most common ways the purchasing likes can damage your brand or make it more difficult for your Instagram account.
The main point is that just don’t bother with purchasing Instagram likes. The long-term benefits of purchasing likes are just not worth it. Fake likes only benefit accounts in the short term, but the real problem is that nothing exists behind the bot.
It is just a façade to fool real users into thinking your Instagram account is popular. Not a good strategy.
Organic
Organic likes are a simple concept to explain. Real Instagram users find your account through normal methods and then like the content.
These methods include using the discovery feature, searching for hashtags, or seeing the content in their news feed.
Organic traffic like that is the best type of traffic for one reason.
Real people can talk about your brand, purchase products, and interact with your Instagram account. This is much better than bots, which cannot buy products or talk about your brand.
Plus, a real person's likes indicate that your content is good. You do not get feedback like that from a bot. Quite frankly, you can put up terrible content, purchase likes, and never know the content is bad.
Focusing on gaining organic traffic is the only real way to build a long-term brand on Instagram. Organic likes have real people behind the account. Real people that can buy your product and talk about your brand. Furthermore, Instagram can easily detect when accounts use artificial likes, making it an ineffective method that could even lead to banning your account.
3 Useful Instagram Apps That Will Help to Get More Organic Likes
We discussed why artificial likes are bad and organic likes are good. We will now focus on apps that can help you get more organic likes.
Upleap
Upleap works by helping you discover an Instagram manager. This manager can help you choose the right quality content, engaging audience, hashtags, and more. Basically, the manager will manage your Instagram account, which frees up time for you to focus on the business.
RiteTag
RiteTag will automatically suggest hashtags for you. This is not based on random data either. They actually use data from Instagram to analyze hashtags that work and hashtags that do not work.
RiteTag will only suggest those tags with a track record of success.
Keyhole
This app will help you track your hashtag data. This is a great tool when combined with an app like RiteTag.
RiteTag will suggest the hashtags, and Keyhole will track them. It also tracks keywords and puts account data into a nice graph. This great app will help you with all aspects of growing your channel by organic methods.
Final Thoughts
The main message of this article was to focus on organic methods to grow your Instagram account. Purchasing likes is just a bad method in general. It lowers your brand trust and engagement rate and can even get you banned from Instagram.
Instead of purchasing likes, you should focus on developing an excellent Instagram strategy that puts your best content in front of real people. Remember, real people can buy the product and talk about your brand. Bots cannot talk about your brand, nor can they purchase the product.
The three apps listed above are a great starting point, but apps will only get you so far. Other factors go into developing a great Instagram strategy. Those factors include posting good content and maintaining a consistent brand message.
However, once everything is in place, the apps make an excellent addition to a good Instagram strategy.