This Instagram photo got over 2,000 likes in under 10 minutes.
Well, because I bought those likes.
Let me start from the beginning, this is my real instagram.
I've a little more than 700 followers and I started this account on September 10th 2015.
I posted on occasion, but not often.
With friends and family, I eventually rose to around 300 followers.
On March 15th 2017, I finally started to get to where I am now by posting more consistently
and interacting with the community, but to be honest its a lot of work and takes a long
time.
I decided to do an experiment.
When you post a picture on Instagram and caption it with a hashtag.
Say the hashtag travelstoke, when you click that hashtag you find the people that are
talking about that specific hashtag and it's divided into 2 sections.
One of the sections is called recent posts and those are the pictures that are uploaded
according to time.
The more recent the picture, the higher it is on the rows but the more people that are
talking about that hashtag the quicker it is for your picture to go down in the rows.
My goal for this experiment is for it to reach the top post section.
The pictures in that section stay up there longer, leading to more exposure, more likes,
and more followers from people talking within that hashtag.
Now when I did this for a brand, I found that was the easiest way to grow other than cross
promotion.
How to get up there though is via instagram's algorithm.
People have theories but now one knows exactly how it works.
What all these pictures have in common is that they have a lot of likes, so what If
I just bought some to get up there?
created a 2nd account for this experiment and picked a photo from my original account
that seemed to get a lot of likes.
his photo I took of the LOVE sculpture in New York City has almost 300 likes, so it’s
a pretty decent picture.
With the same caption and hashtags, I uploaded the picture.
I then bought 500 likes for $6.95.
Seconds later my likes were there, but is my picture featured on top post?
There I am, but why aren’t I gaining followers.
Maybe it’s my profile.
There’s only 2 pictures, no followers, and I’m following 0.
I decided to make it look more real.
In order to make this profile look more real, I decided to follow 100 people.
I also bought a hundred followers.
A minority of the followers I got was from following people.
As far as likes this is the photo I bought likes on 566.
This one I recently uploaded.
It has 4.
3.
This one has 4.
this one has 1.
So, my theory is people that saw my profile thought that it was fake so I added more pictures.
I followed more people.
I also bought followers For this next picture, I'm also going to go for bigger hashtags.
I'm going to buy 2,500 likes and 50 comments to fake engagement.
This time I reached the top post of larger hashtags, but I still wasn’t getting the
follower count that usually happens from that.
Why?
I logged into my real account and looked into the hashtag.
Wait.
Where’s my picture?
I see it as this account but not my real one.
Then it hit me.
Instagram’s Algorithm.
With a quick YouTube search, you see hundreds of individuals attempting to explain Instagram’s
algorithm, but the truth is they’re all theories and no one really knows but the company
itself.
So here’s mine, reaching top post is determined by the following, comments, likes, and what
the user likes.
So, comments and likes are engagement and what the user likes is something like this.
When I search hashtag california the top posts are virtually identical except for these 2
photos.
A selfie of this guy appears on my real account, while a pic of the New York Police Department
appears on the fake account.
So, I may have been liking selfies while I liked New York pics with the fake account.
Now when you look at who liked the photos of my fake account, you see they’re all
following the same range of people.
That tells me that these accounts are either fake or hacked accounts used to follow buyers
and like their photos.
If you take into consideration Instagram’s algorithm you’ll see how my plan to reach
top post fails.
Since all the accounts that like my photo are fake, it may show up on these fake accounts
feed, but they obviously can’t continuously like my photo because they’re not real people.
So, it's been about 6 days since I started the experiment and here are the final stats.
I did program some automatic liking bot just to fake engagement on the Instagram account.
I'm going to upload one picture right now and see what happens.
I want to see if these followers are real and if they do like.
So, insagram is a lot harder to hack than I thought and becoming IG famous would take
more than a hundred bucks of fake likes and followers.