Happy Tuesday, beautiful people, and welcome back to my channel.
My name is Ortal Levitan, aka The Workout Unicorn on all social media platforms.
I've gotten about 10 DMs in the past two days asking me about this, and I think it's because
this service or company has been running a promotion.
I've actually seen their ads as well, but I've gotten the DMs, and they were asking,
"Do you recommend these auto-liker services?"
Now, if you guys don't know what these services are, essentially, they are services where
they will like, comment, follow, unfollow on your behalf, and they are totally safe
according to their advertisements and promotions.
Are they legit?
Are they full of B.S.?
I will tell you guys.
I'll break it down for you in this video.
Before we get started, do me a huge favor and subscribe to my channel and, of course,
give this video a thumbs-up.
It really, really helps me out with the YouTube algorithm, and I greatly appreciate it.
Okay, so let's dive in.
I'm sorry.
I'm already laughing because I would assume that people would kind of know where I stand
with anything paid on Instagram.
My answer is no, never pay for anything, but I'm going to dive a little bit deeper instead
of just telling you guys no and ending the video there, because that would be a very
short video and probably not very helpful, so let me kind of explain what the heck these
services are.
I'm sure you've seen advertisements for them.
I see them on my Insta Story all the time.
I know that a bunch of my followers do because they send screenshots to me asking me what
I think about it.
These services are essentially ... and there's a bunch of them.
Don't get me wrong.
There's a bunch of them.
There's not one specific company, but there's a bunch of them.
Essentially, what they do is they tell you that they will like, comment, and engage on
your behalf so you don't have to spend any time on the app.
They will auto like for you.
They will auto comment for you.
They will follow, unfollow for you.
I hate follow, unfollow, but totally other topic.
On your account's behalf, this is like a algorithm or software doing this.
It's not a real person.
You don't have to do anything, and you will gain hundreds of followers every month, and
if you buy the boosted service, you'll gain thousands of followers every month, and they're
targeted, and they're niche-specific, and they're really, really great.
Obviously, these are some pretty big claims.
Me being the person that I am, the neuroscientist in me was like, "Ooh, I got to research this.
I want to figure out how this works.
I want to understand what's going on," so I asked my sister.
I didn't run this on my account.
I asked my sister, bless her soul, because she is not in the whole Instagram thing.
She's just like, "Sure, you can use my account."
She has, I think, 5,000 followers, and she just uses it as a personal account.
She does have a business account, so for all of you business accounts out there, she has
Insight, she has analytics so I could peek into all that.
She let me use her account.
I purchased this service.
What I ended up doing is I paid for the service.
It was 30 bucks for a month.
I think it was 30.
Yeah, so it was 30 bucks for the basic option, and there was a $99 boosted option.
Now, the only difference between this is how much the software ... I'll call it the software
because that's what it is, it's a software ... how much the software will actually engage
on your behalf.
With the basic service, from what I noticed looking at her account, it'll do it in five-minute
bursts, I'd say, five or six times a day.
Then, with the upgraded service, it doubles that or triples that.
I got the basic one.
I was like, "I know this is not going to work, so I just want to see what it does anyway."
When I signed up, they ask you for your username and your password, so you do have to give
them access to your account.
They ask you two turn off two-factor authentication so that they can have access to your account
and, essentially, they're not getting flagged.
You will still get this alert from Instagram like, "Hey, this account from fricking Zurich
or whatever is trying to access your Instagram account, and we know that you're located in
the States.
Is this you?"
You have to repeatedly go through this and say, "Allow, allow.
Yes, this is me," which is a pain because you're doing all this through email.
This isn't an actual person.
You are writing and corresponding back and forth via email.
Eventually, we finally got it to work.
They had access to my sister's account.
Then they ask you for this.
They offer different services, and so, obviously, you can pay for more or less.
Like I said, I chose the basic package, so what I got was auto liking, auto commenting,
and auto following and unfollowing.
Now, essentially, how do they determine ... this is their whole marketing thing ... the niche-specific,
the targeted ones, not just random followers?
This is how they do it.
They ask you for a list of 10 to 15 accounts that have your ideal followers on them.
For example, if you are a fitness coach, you would probably want to attract people that
are into fitness or people that are looking to get fit.
If you're a fitness coach that is looking for targeted followers, you would give an
account like Kayla Itsines, or BBG, or any other account that has a fitness program,
or an account that has your ideal follower in, essentially.
You would give them these names of the accounts, 10 to 15.
Then they also ask you for a list of 10 to 15 hashtags that you want to engage on.
Again, these are hashtags that would have your ideal follower on them.
For example, if you're a fitness coach, it would be like bbg, bbgtransformation, gymsharkwomen,
tillyoucollapse, [inaudible]active, whatever.
Those are the two main things that they ask for.
Now, how to do they actually do it?
I went for all the options.
I was like, "Give it to me all.
Whatever you can do, do it."
Okay, so what I noticed is what they'll do is they'll go into each of these accounts.
Let's say I gave them three accounts.
It was BBG, Kayla Itsines, and Gymshark Women.
Those were the accounts that have my ideal followers on them.
Again, this is all theoretical assuming I'm a health coach.
That was the mindset I went into this with.
Those accounts do not have my ideal followers on them.
I gave them those accounts.
What they did is they would go into, let's say, BBG.
They would go into the followers, and what they would do is they would follow.
They wouldn't even engage or anything.
They would just follow the 10 or 15 most recent accounts that followed BBG, so if you happened
to follow BBG in the time that this software was running, I would follow you, or my sister's
account would follow your ... the software would follow.
It would automatically follow you, and that's it.
Then what it would do afterwards is it would go to the hashtags, and it would like as many
pictures on that specific hashtag that you gave it.
Again, #bbg, it would go and like as many pictures as you possibly can on that hashtag
before you get blocked.
Now, this is the key word here, and I'm going to touch on this in a second, but it'll like
as many photos until the app will give you a notification that's like, "Hey, you've used
this function too fast.
You're going to be blocked for 15 minutes," or something like that.
That's what it would do with the hashtags.
Oh, this is another thing.
When you sign up, it'll auto comment, so you can essentially let them pick what they want
to comment on the photos.
I let them do that for two days, I think, and it was just the most generic, spammy,
stupid comments ever.
This was on BBG.
This girl was posting a picture of food, and it was like, "Oh, my gosh.
You're so pretty," or something stupid like that.
I was like, "Oh, my gosh.
This is terrible," and so then I asked them, "Is there a way for me to customize the comments?"
They were like, "Yeah, absolutely," and so then I sent them a list of five different
comments.
It's was just emojis.
I literally just put three heart emojis, or three smiley emojis, or something like that,
something that is applicable to all pictures.
Then it just went to the hashtags, and it would like the photo and comment.
It would comment the same thing on all the pictures in the hashtag until it got blocked.
That's essentially what it did.
Now, I let this run for a month on my sister's account, and then I deactivated it, obviously,
because I was like, "This is ridiculous."
What is the end result?
Did she actually get more followers?
Yes, gus, she did.
She got more followers.
I think, in a span of a month, she increased by, I would say, 100 followers, which is kind
of what they promised.
She got 100 new followers, but that is the upside.
Yes, the service does get you the followers.
Are they targeted?
Are they niche?
Are they specific?
Heck, no, they're not.
I looked through the followers that she gained to see, if I was a health coach, if these
followers would actually be ideal for me.
They were not.
These were people with very small accounts that essentially saw that I followed them
or I commented on their picture as part of the software, and they just followed me back
right away.
Now, another thing, the software will let you do follow, unfollow, so all those accounts
that you gave them the accounts, it would follow those people on the accounts.
You could set a specific time how long you want to wait until it unfollows them.
I think the basic option was a week, so it would follow these people and then, after
a week, it would unfollow them.
That's another way to get an increase in followers.
Now, this happened a month ago.
Let's fast-forward to today.
I said she got 100 new followers, right?
She did.
Over the span of the month since she canceled the service and she wasn't actively engaging
and all that stuff, she just went to her normal activity, she lost all those followers, obviously.
That's not to say that the software wasn't working.
The software worked, but you have to keep paying for it to keep maintaining these number
of followers, because guess what?
They're not like loyal followers.
They don't really care about your content.
They probably just followed you because you liked or commented on their photo as part
of the software, and they decided to follow you, but then when they noticed that you either
don't follow them back, or you unfollowed them, or you're not creating content that
speaks to them because, obviously, they're not targeted and they're not your ideal followers,
they unfollowed you.
Overall, she lost all those followers.
That is not even the worst part of it.
The worst part of it, for me, was I noticed something which I was like, "Holy shucks.
This is not great."
Like I said, these softwares, they will like and comment until they get blocked, okay?
They're going to like about 20 photos in a span of a second.
This is not a human being actually liking the photos.
This is a software, so they can go super, super fast.
They like 20 photos in the span of a second.
Now, I don't know if you guys know anything about Instagram, but that is a huge red flag
for Instagram, huge, not to talk about the fact that they commented 15 comments in the
span of, I don't know, 20 seconds on a bunch of photos, again, until they got blocked.
Instagram has these barriers in place to prevent spam, or bot, or algorithms, or softwares
from doing this because they want to maintain their user base to be as authentic as possible
and the engagement as authentic as possible, any deviation from your usual engagement.
My sister, she does not comment 15 comments in the span of 20 seconds, so Instagram flags
that as a deviation from her normal engagement, and so it blocks her.
That's something that was very, very curious because one thing we noticed is, I think three
or four days in, what ended up happening was that the software was running, and it was
great, and it was commenting and everything, and then she actually tried to go into the
app and comment by herself, and she got blocked because the software had just run, I guess
prior to that or whatever, and she was still blocked because the software had run, and
it got blocked, and so now she is blocked.
She waited the 20 minutes, and then she could comment again, and it was fine, but she went
in the next day to try to post something, and she got blocked from that.
She could upload a picture.
She couldn't put a caption.
She couldn't comment anything.
She couldn't like any photos.
She was completely blocked from the app for 24 hours.
At that point, it was closer to the end of the month, and so I was just like, "Look,
we got to cancel this, or your account's going to get deleted."
She's like, "No, I don't care if you really to do the research with this."
I was like, "No, no.
It's fine.
I don't want you to get deleted.
Your friends know you."
That was the bigger thing is that, in the short term, this is fine, and I'm sure if
you keep running it and you don't actually use the app yourself, you could maybe get
away with it, but if you engage on the app, if you use the app at all, this is terrible.
Overall, my verdict would be don't even bother with these softwares.
Best case scenario, you get some random followers that are going to follow you because you followed
and unfollowed them or you commented on their photo and it was something generic.
Worst-case scenario, your account's going to get flagged, you're going to get blocked
from being able to do regular functions on the app, or worse, your account might actually
get deleted because if you get flagged repeatedly by Instagram, your account gets shadow banned,
deactivated, or deleted altogether.
It really depends how pissy Instagram is that day.
Not really, but you get what I'm saying.
That would essentially be my verdict.
Do not invest in these softwares.
I don't care how safe they say they are.
Instagram is not okay with any third-party software unless it specifically states on
that website.
There's an app that I use, later.com, to schedule my posts sometimes when I can't actively post.
That app is certified with Instagram.
It has access to Instagram's API, the back end, and you can schedule a post, and you
don't have to actively be on the app.
All these other apps require your username, your password.
You're giving your account, essentially, over to someone in some other country, some software.
You don't know what's going to happen.
It's really not worth it.
Whether you're small, whether you're big, I don't recommend it.
Honestly, if you just figure out your Instagram strategy, put some time, 15 minutes, 20 minutes
a day into actively engaging like I recommend in my course.
Figure out your hashtag strategy.
Utilize all the functions that Instagram offers.
Your life will be a lot easier, a lot better, and you're actually going to get followers
that care about your content and are loyal to you so that, when you decide to sell something
or when you're promoting something, they will buy from you, and not just random people that
decided to follow you because you followed, unfollowed, commented, whatever on their page.
I hope that helps, and I hope I saved you guys some cash.
These services aren't that expensive, but even 30, 50, 100 bucks, not worth it, and
this is for every month, by the way.
This is a recurring subscription.
It's not just a one-time fee.
I hope that helps.
I hope I can save you guys some money.
If you enjoyed this video, make sure to give it a thumbs-up and subscribe to my channel.
As always, if you have any questions, follow-up questions, whatever, drop a comment below
or shoot me a DM, workout_unicorn on Instagram.
I would be more than happy to answer your questions.
Thank you, guys, so, so much for tuning in.
I will see you all next week.