[thinkloop]

I would have liked to see him continue the test without the photography, keeping just the bots and offshore friend farming - I have a feeling that's most of it.

TL;DR:

How to get Instagram followers:

- photo quality is very important, pay for a professional

- submit 3 posts a day, try to make them interesting, but that's only medium important

- pay for bot to like and comment on posts with similar hash tags, so their owners can see your profile and hopefully follow

- use offshore friend farm to boost numbers. They don't outright say it, but the last service had to be that. One day his followers surged for a couple of hours then stopped.

[Freak_NL]

Presumably without the professional photography no one would be interested in buying advertising space (product placement, hashtagging brands) on his account, so you need a veneer of 'authenticity'. I guess that at a minimum this means having a model unique to your account (himself in this case) along with the other trimmings of an influencer (the muesli with lime curd blob type of shots).

Here is my recipe for a golden (if ephemeral) business opportunity:

* Live in a country with low costs of living, in a city with a historical city centre (backdrops! texture!)

* Have access to professional photography equipment

* Have access to a bunch of attractive, but cheap (hence the locality, think Odessa, Bratislava, or Baku) generic looking models

* Compose a team of decent writers and photographers

* Create 'inspired', 'authentic' Instagram profiles for each model, provide content

* Profit?

Don't forget to tag each post #bohemian. Guaranteed hit.

[mccoyspace]

This is a good idea, but why do you have to actually live there? You could approach this as a co-ordination problem between remote participants. Find a stringer in Odessa and Baku to get a model and photographer. The writers can come from wherever. You are the manager/agency running it all from LA or NYC (where you can make the ftf media deals).

[SuperPaintMan]

The most important is the 20hashtags/post and hiding them eight newlines to be below the fold. Bots can work, but are mostly for inflating numbers to try and game the explore page. Best to have a bot set up to follow other bots and let the hashtags funnel in organic searches.

It's a lame game though. Instagram is a crap platform anything other then mindless scrolling and gaming likes.

>exp: Went from 0-2k followers in a week

[peteretep]

Posted three new photos today with hashtags from the app he mentioned. 10 new followers, which is probably all I've had in the last 2 months. Interesting!

[SuperPaintMan]

That app is shit, great for high volume tags but do you really want to be in a oversaturated space? Use Hashtagify for niche research and Websta Top 100 for some volume.

That and slamming #tfb, #followback, #f4f into the tag orgy helps. Enjoy 50-200 likes and 15-30 follows/post.

[mrtksn]

I wonder what will happen when AI is good enough to imitate real internet users and ad agencies just spin up some servers in some datacenter that handles millions of bots that are indistinguishable from real people and follow the formula of the influencers.

[Paul_S]

Bots creating content for bots to click on. Perfect. Seal it in a bunker and launch into space (together with the marketeers).

[shostack]

Direct response advertisers would see crap quality and stop paying. Brand advertisers would probably be slower to stop but their measurement tools to map impression data to purchases, whether offline or online is improving dramatically.

Advertisers who aren't savvy about analytics will continue to prop up the cottage industry of fraudulent eyeball providers.

[throwanem]

"The Singularity Wears #prada", coming soon to a digital content delivery service near you.

[imh]

That arms race is like some bizarre analogue to bitcoin mining.