In the world of social media, building a strong and engaged following on platforms like Instagram is essential for success. One effective way to manage and grow your followers is through automation. Today, we will explore a detailed walkthrough of how to effectively manage Instagram follower growth through following and unfollowing strategies.

Automations for Follower Growth Management

The key to successful follower growth management lies in the implementation of smart automations. By utilizing tools like Google Sheets and automation software, you can streamline the process of following and unfollowing users on Instagram.

Scraping and Storing Usernames

The first step in this follower growth strategy is to scrape a list of followers and following from specific Instagram profiles. By using automation tools like Task Magic, you can easily extract these usernames and store them in a Google Sheet for easy access.

Following Automation

The following automation focuses on looping over the usernames in the Google Sheet and clicking the follow button on each user's profile. This process also includes liking the most recent post of the user, adding a personal touch to the interaction.

Unfollowing Automation

In parallel, the unfollowing automation works to unfollow users after a certain period. This process is designed to maintain a healthy follower-to-following ratio and ensure that your follower list remains relevant and engaged.

Best Practices for Automation

To maximize the efficiency and effectiveness of these automations, it is crucial to set certain parameters. This includes specifying the number of rows to loop at a time, adjusting the frequency of automation runs, and setting time constraints for optimum performance.

Customization and Adaptation

One of the key advantages of this follower growth strategy is its flexibility. You can customize the automation process based on your unique needs and preferences. From selecting the profiles to scrape to adjusting the scroll time for username extraction, the possibilities for customization are endless.

Okay. So here is a quick walkthrough of the automations you have and what this is going to look like to manage. So I'm going to share this Google sheet with you, which is what I'm using to store all of the usernames. Basically, what we're doing is we're constantly filling up a username with new people to go follow.

That way you have that constant following happening. Then another automation uses the same exact sheet as people to unfollow. And that unfollow automation should just start like a week late or something. So there are four different automations that we have here. Two of them are very similar, and I'm just going to show you how we use these.

So scrape list of followers and scrape list of following are going to be the exact same. The only difference is, is that when we are doing something here, it's scraping the followers or it's scraping the following. So it'll pick one of the two, right? It's just you pick the automation and then it'll decide and follow the appropriate list.

Followers or following of the person. So the way that you use this is if I wanted to scrape the automations of UNLV, for example, what I would do is I would grab this URL, the entire URL of that Instagram profile, then I go into task magic and I go into either the scrape list of followers or scrape list of following.

And then I edit the URL right here to be that URL, click save, and then, uh, scroll down. This is how long we should scroll down inside of the pop up for. You can adjust this to be whatever you want. I think we talked about this a little bit ago on, uh, what's going to be the best, uh, to load. I guess. Most recent usernames, you probably want to do something like 300, which is going to be five minutes.

So it'll scroll down for five minutes, which will probably get you a few thousand of the most recent followers. So you don't need to edit that step every time, but you can adjust it based on the profiles if you want to. After you do that again, all you did here was edit the page that it was going to go to.

Then we just click play steps and this is going to go to Instagram, click on the followers, then scroll down and scrape a list. And it's going to put all of those usernames in this Google sheet. If you wanted to push it to a different Google sheet, you can click send to Google sheets here and then select a different worksheet or enter a different spreadsheet here.

And that's so that you could do something custom like real estate person, one that your fault, right? This is how you could customize that to be a little bit better. Uh, when you're scraping things.

And then, um, that's it for scraping. So we just edit the URL and we click play steps, and that's going to put everything in the Google sheet. Then we have two different automations. We have the follow and the unfollow. The way that this works is this follow automation is going to loop over every username in this Google sheet.

And, uh, click the follow button and then like the most recent post. So go to the page, wait a second, click follow. And then this is the step to click the latest post. If you don't want this, you can just disable these steps and then it won't do the whole liking process. I'm not sure. What you want to do there.

Um, but what this does, again, it loops over all of these and follows that user. It knows how many to follow at a time, because when we click on edit your list trigger, we specify how many rows or loops to run, how, sorry, how many rows we want to loop at a time. So this is probably going to want to be like 10 and you run this every hour.

Um, but you can adjust this based on frequency. It's just something that you want to be a little bit cautious about. So, uh, you don't want to overuse how much you're following people cause Instagram might stop you from doing so. What this is going to do though, is the first time it runs, it's going to grab 10 rows of data.

These 10. I think it's that these 10 and it'll follow all 10 people. Next time it runs, it'll grab the next 10 and so on. And it makes its way all the way down this list. And that's why you would just keep scraping new usernames. Whenever you're getting close, we can edit the URL that it's starting from, or sorry, the row number that it's starting from by changing this number here.

Uh, so we're starting on row two in this example. All right. Um, like I was saying for the schedule, what I would advise you doing is you make this run every hour and then you turn on time constraints and then you make it run only between like nine to 5 PM. So we can do something like this. What this means is the automation tries to run every hour, but it only actually run between 9 AM and 5 PM.

It doesn't skip over any of these usernames. It's just going to make sure that we're basically following 80 people per day. Okay. And that's all you need to do for this automation. Go ahead and turn it on. Or anytime you want to run it, you could click place steps. If you didn't want to have this be automated, um, to run every single day, every single hour.

But I think that's what you're going to want in this case, just like other ones. So you just turn this on from desktop and you're good to go. The unfollow automation. Actually, sorry. Last thing on this follow automation, we connected our Google sheet right here to the other one right here. So if you wanted to change the Google sheet that we're pulling usernames from, because you set up something different, you would want to add that sheet here and then update the.

The trigger of the follow automation to use that new sheet and then check your row numbers and things Here. The unfollow automation is almost identical. It is looping over this list of users and then it clicks the unfollow button, um, after it clicks because you have to click following and then unfollow It goes through and does those steps.

So again, what the, what I would advise doing for this one is you probably have this run. Um, at the same time as the follow user one, so we can have this one running hourly too, but you should start this one like a week late. So when the follow automation, let's say that you start this tomorrow, Tuesday, um, the follow automation will be on row two.

And then let's say five days from now, it's going to be on like row, you know, 500 or something. And the unfollow automation will be on row two. So it'll be working its way down this list, unfollowing everybody that you recently followed. Let me know if you have any questions about it. Um, those are kind of the steps for managing the Google sheets, refreshing it and things like that.