Instagram has around 2.4 billion1 users worldwide, and this visually engaging social platform is constantly growing. It’s no secret that more and more businesses use Instagram to promote their products and services. But that can be challenging, especially if you have to manage multiple Instagram accounts.
Worry not my friends, because we’ve got some Instagram automation solutions that will save your precious time and make your lives easier.
There are all kinds of different Instagram automation tools in 2024. When deciding which one you should test, everything really depends on your specific needs and approach to Instagram marketing.
In this article, you’ll learn:
Before we get down to some of the best Instagram automation software, we’d like to quickly touch upon what Instagram automation is, and the infamous Instagram automation bots that are known for following, unfollowing, liking, and commenting on random users’ posts.
Smart Instagram Automation Software For Teams
Schedule Instagram posts, get in-depth analytics and reports, automatically hide and delete offensive comments, find out what to post and when, and more – with an all-in-one social media tool.
What is Instagram automation?
In simple terms, Instagram automation can be understood as the actions of third-party tools to manage your account and perform various tasks automatically.
Instagram automation tools can save you a ton of time and boost your engagement on the social platform. However, not all Instagram marketing automation techniques are allowed by Instagram.
Is Instagram automation allowed?
People say that automation is ruining Instagram. Well, it’s not exactly true.
Some Instagram automation tools are perfectly “legal” when it comes to Instagram’s terms of use. You can automate things like scheduling Instagram posts, deleting and hiding comments, replying to comments, or generating reports.
To be more specific, you can use tools that don’t access Instagram’s private API by means other than those permitted by Instagram. We’ll get to that part later in the article.
Are Instagram bots dangerous?
Is Instagram automation against terms of service? While not all automation features are bad (in fact, almost 50% of marketers admit that they use automation on social media), Instagram bots directly violate Instagram’s terms of use by accessing Instagram’s API without the platform’s permission, more specifically:
- You must not access Instagram’s private API by means other than those permitted by Instagram.
- Don’t store or cache Instagram login credentials.
- Don’t use the Instagram API to display User Content, import or backup content, or manage Instagram relationships, without our prior permission.
- Ensure your comments are tailored to each person.
- Don’t post unauthorized commercial communication or spam on Instagram.
- Don’t enable a business to take more than one action on Instagram at a time.
- Don’t use an unreasonable amount of bandwidth or impact the stability of Instagram.com servers or the behavior of other apps using the Instagram APIs.
This means that your organic reach will plummet, your hashtags won’t work, and your content won’t appear on the Explore page.
Worst case scenario, your account may get suspended or even deleted by Instagram. There are, however, safe ways to boost your results with Instagram automation – we’ll get to that in a bit.
Do Instagram bots work?
Instagram automation bots are known for following, unfollowing, liking, and commenting on random users’ posts.
While they may get your follower count up, the new followers are not going to be well-targeted and therefore will not have much value. Bots only target their actions based on a specific hashtag.
Using Instagram bots can indeed pump your numbers up, but it’s a short-lived victory. And you always need to consider that a big portion of those fake followers will unfollow your account.
So, if you’re asking yourself the question “should I use Instagram bots?”, our answer is a definite no.
Moreover, Instagram doesn’t want any spambots mass following and unfollowing, so it’s imposed official follow limits. You can only follow 7500 accounts, and per hour you can only perform 60 actions (follow and unfollow).
What can be automated on Instagram?
It may sound complicated, but there are many safe tools available. NapoleonCat, for instance, is one of them.
With this tool, you can automate the following actions on Instagram:
- Scheduling Instagram posts (you can also schedule the first comment to, e.g., include hashtags)
- Deleting or hiding comments (works great for offensive comments, spam, and trolls)
- Replying to comments based on specific keywords or phrases that you define
- Scheduling in-depth Instagram analytics reports for your own accounts and competitors’ profiles (so that they’ll be automatically generated and sent out to your client or boss)
You can test out NapoleonCat for free here – no credit card required during signup 😉
Protect your Instagram from hate & spam
Automatically shield your Instagram content from hate speech, inappropriate language, and spam (Instagram ads included) – with an all-in-one social media tool.
Do brands use Instagram automation tools?
People wonder how many Instagram accounts use automation. While we can’t say clearly the number, we know that using Instagram automation is becoming a trend. After all, the main benefits of Instagram automation for businesses include saving time and improving results.
Best Instagram Automation Tools in 2024
NapoleonCat offers some of the best organic Instagram growth automation tools (specially designed for teams), all in one package. The first one is the Social Inbox. Let me break it down for you.
Manage comments from multiple Instagram accounts with one Social Inbox
The main purpose of our Social Inbox is to help you and your team manage multiple social media accounts across various social networks (Instagram DMs and Instagram Ads comments included) from just one place.
It’s all meant to save you a huge chunk of your time, and below you can actually calculate how many hours you can save with our Inbox:
Time Saver Calculator
Save time with Social Media Automation
It’s a great, user-friendly solution if you get a lot of social traffic and spend a lot of time managing comments on Instagram.
How does it all work?
Answering comments on Instagram is an excellent hack for boosting engagement – you answer each comment, and you double the engagement. That in turn results in increased organic reach and more followers.
The tool collects all comments (and now also DMs!) from Instagram in one customizable dashboard. Managing comments and messages from multiple accounts or from different time periods becomes much easier and more comfortable.
Managing Instagram DMs in NapoleonCat.
Even if you receive comments or messages in a foreign language, the Inbox has a built-in translation feature that works in over 100 languages supported by Google Translate. You can use this feature to quickly reply to users from all over the world.
Of course, you can filter the comments and messages you see in your Inbox – you can manage these social interactions for each account or ad campaign individually.
Moreover, the Inbox is great for collaborating with a team of social media moderators. Every team member can see in real time what everyone else is doing:
Real-time updates in the Inbox.
No comment or message can be overlooked, and customers’ issues need to be addressed as quickly as possible. 46% of social media users2 worldwide expect an answer immediately or within an hour.
Timely manual moderation takes care of this, but people need rest, right? It’d be very difficult to have your customer support team online 24/7.
This is where our Auto-moderation feature steps in and saves the day (or the night!).
Automate Instagram comments and save time
With NapoleonCat, you can automate replying to Instagram comments based on keywords that you define. Or instantly block hateful and spammy comments (Instagram ads included).
Auto-moderation – real-time automation for Instagram
Our social media automation feature would be best described as a smart assistant, rather than a mindless Instagram bot.
To put it simply, this feature can automatically:
- respond to comments on Instagram (including comments added to Instagram ads, aka dark posts),
- respond to DMs on Instagram,
- hide or delete comments (also works for Instagram ads)
- forward comments and messages to dedicated moderators,
- and more.
You can set up NapoleonCat’s Auto-moderation rules to set off specific automatic reactions (e.g., automatic replies) to defined triggers (e.g., comments containing a specific keyword).
Moreover, you can create multi-action rules, which means that one rule can perform multiple automated actions at once, e.g., reply both in a comment and in a private message.
Another cool thing? You can create as many rules as you want, there’s no limit!
The effectiveness of your “assistant” depends on how well you set it up. But don’t worry, the process of creating Auto-moderation rules is super simple and quick and doesn’t require any programming skills.
Let’s go through the process of creating a rule against trolls and spammy comments (just as an example).
In NapoleonCat, click on Auto-moderation in the menu on the left. After that, you will access the feature and will be able to create your automated social media reactions.
To create your Auto-moderation rule, click on Create new rule.
Now it’s time to configure your assistant. First, name your rule and choose the IG account (or multiple accounts) you want it to work for.
Then, choose the message type, i.e., something that will activate your rule. For Instagram, it can be any comment or comment under a specific post.
You can also set user tags that will automatically trigger a rule. User tags are manually defined in the Workspace Settings (formerly Project settings) tab and can be applied by moderators in the Inbox.
Once a user is tagged, all of their comments will be marked with that specific tag. As an example, you can tag troll accounts and prevent them from ever commenting on your quality content again.
Here’s the fun part when you’re shielding your Instagram accounts against trolls – you need to type in all the keywords that will trigger your rule. Get creative!
The troll vocabulary can oftentimes be quite “rich”, so just type in whatever comes to your mind or use past observations as a guideline.
By the way, you can also just use our ready-to-go rule templates with keywords that we took from real-life use cases of our customers 😉
You can also turn on advanced mode to better specify your keywords:
Now it’s time to define the social media action that your rule will take. You can create multi-action rules, e.g., one rule can simultaneously hide a comments and reply to it in a private message:
Next, you can choose from various internal actions inside NapoleonCat’s Social Inbox feature. For instance, Auto-moderation can flag the comment, mark it with negative sentiment, and tag it as spam – all at once:
You can also set automatic email notifications for each time a rule is triggered, to keep your team in the loop.
Next, you can schedule your rule to work during specific hours of the day, for example, when your social media team is offline.
However, we generally recommend setting your rules to work 24/7.
And that’s it! Click on Save & run, and your rule will become active.
The main benefits of using Automoderation rules on Instagram are:
- Improving your response times and engagement rates with automated comments, which can, in turn, boost the organic reach of your posts
- Protecting your content from all kind of spam and trolls
- Taking care of negative reviews and other customers’ issues by forwarding them to dedicated customer support team members
We’ve recently added ready-to-go Auto-moderation templates, so the process of setting it all up is even simpler:
You can read more about our Auto-moderation and its use cases here.
Schedule posts on Instagram and save time with the Publisher
With NapoleonCat’s Publisher, you can create, schedule, and auto-publish posts to various social platforms, including Instagram (Reels and Carousels as well), directly from your computer.
Scheduling posts ahead is a great way to save time and keep a bird’s eye view on your Instagram strategy.
Here’s a quick video tutorial to show you how this feature works:
Using the Publisher, you can craft complete Instagram posts (Reels and Carousels included). Upload images and videos, crop them, tag other users, mark the location, use emojis.
You can even schedule your first comment, which can be very useful for people who like putting hashtags as a comment rather than in their posts’ captions. This doesn’t only make your captions look slicker – more comments mean more engagement.
You can also work in a team to streamline internal processes, making collaborative social media management easier. No more guessing who’s done what and when.
You can assign people to work on specific posts or make them subscribers so that they get notified of any changes made to the posts they follow.
In case you need any help, you can also have discussion threads prior to publishing every post and draft. The tool has an internal discussion panel where you can check in with your team for direction and progress updates.
Posting to multiple accounts can get really time-consuming. Our tool is an intuitive Instagram automation tool designed to make your life easier.
You and your team can sit back and enjoy life instead of waiting for that perfect moment to publish your post, which – depending on your target audience – might just be in the middle of the night.
Schedule Instagram Posts
Schedule post to multiple accounts across various social platforms. Work in a team. Review & approve content ideas – with an all-in-one social media tool.
Generate automatic Instagram reports within seconds
With NapoleonCat, you can generate automatic, fully customizable social media reports that show key metrics (from a time period of your choice) for any Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn account – it can be your own account or your competitors’.
You can then download them as a PDF and stay on top of your progress by scheduling automated weekly, monthly, or quarterly reports that get sent via email. Click here to check out a sample Instagram report.
It’s no doubt that our Reports feature will save you a ton of time and effort on tiring data crunching. The reports are also very clear and easy to read.
Social media teams can easily monitor their progress and report it to their dedicated superiors (CEOs of big firms, small business investors, agency clients, etc.)
In-depth Instagram Analytics Tools
Monitor and analyze your Instagram profiles. Track your competitors. Generate reports and improve your strategy – with an all-in-one social media tool.
Wrap up
Instagram marketing is a whole lot more than just posting pictures or videos and counting your likes. It’s a complex area of marketing that requires a lot of work and care – and a solid strategy.
With the help of third-party marketing tools like NapoleonCat, you can improve your social media game, save time, and keep your team and your customer happy.
We recommend you test out NapoleonCat for free – no credit card required during signup 😉
Anyway, have a nice day, and good luck!
Instagram automation – FAQs
Does automation work on Instagram?
Yes, automation on Instagram works, however, you need to use third-party Instagram automation tools to implement it.
Should I use bots on Instagram?
No, you shouldn’t use Instagram bots because they will do your content more harm than good. They violate Instagram’s terms of use by illegally accessing Instagram’s API which may result in your account being suspended or deleted.
Moreover, while Instagram automation done by bots may increase your followers, those new followers will be targeted randomly (and may soon unfollow you) which won’t have a positive impact on your interactions on the platform.
Want to learn more about Instagram growth? Check out our other articles:
- What’s New on Instagram in 2023: New Features and Updates
- How to Analyze Competitors on Instagram
- How to See Instagram Likes
- A Complete Guide to Instagram Follower Demographics
- How I Used Hashtags to Grow my Instagram Organic Reach 20x
- How to Manage Comments on Instagram Ads Like a Pro
- 12 Best Social Media Automation Tools to Save Time
- How to Get More Comments on Instagram
- Understand Instagram Analytics
- +400 Best Instagram Captions
And if you’re looking for more articles about social media automation, read the following articles:
- How to Automatically Block Instagram Spam Bots
- How to Set Up an Instagram DM Auto-Reply (and why it’s a good idea)
- NapoleonCat Feature: Instagram Auto-moderation
- The Easiest Way to Implement Facebook Automation
- Top 11 Facebook Automation Tools
- Your Guide to eCommerce Automation on Social Media
- How to Automate Your Social Media During Holidays
1. Instagram Statistics – Global Demographics & Trends (2024)
2. What is your expected response time for social media questions or complaints? – Statista
