What Are ‘Engagement Groups’ and Should I Be Doing It?

There are many ways to grow a following, and the best and most proven effective way to generate leads and sales is the organic route. Throughout the course of the lockdown, we have seen a rise in many ‘follower loops’ and ‘follow trains’ that aim to bring a bigger following to your profile as well as the others involved.

There are pros and cons to being involved with these kind of engagement groups so what are the types and should you be participating?

Types of engagement/follow interactions:

• Follow Friday posts

• Engagement Groups

• Follower Loops

• Like/Comment Pods

• Niche/Broad groups

What are they for?

• To increase engagement (likes/comments)

• To increase followers

• To boost engagement in the eyes of Instagram

• Reach new people/potential customers

• Increase the chance of being featured on the Explore page

So let’s take a look a little deeper into these methods. Sometimes they can be great to give your follower count and post comments a boost, but you have to consider whether these methods are sustainable. If you’re looking into a more long term solution, would it be best to connect differently with other accounts to establish more of a relationship? It can help you to find new accounts of things you may be interested in as a consumer or accounts you’d like to keep seeing, but a lot of the time it can result in mass unfollowings so you could end up back at square one. They can also be strict on the rules which we will cover further down. Just make sure you know that this method won’t make you a social sensation overnight!

Are the people/followers relevant to me?

This is perhaps the most asked and most relevant question when considering these methods. General engagement groups and General follow loops are not normally targeted at specific accounts or types of account. These will simply be someone who wants to boost their following so gets as many people as possible involved and asks them to message other accounts inviting them to join as well. These people could be anyone from brands to bloggers, entrepreneurs to scam artists. You never know really who is involved in these unless you look through all of the accounts involved which is both time consuming and can result in you getting ‘blacklisted’ from the group if you don’t follow each account involved.

The more niche loops/groups work better as it will be a group of small businesses for example, or a group of fashion bloggers or food bloggers. This means each follower and each person you follow will be part of the same niche, so increasing the chance of them continuing to follow you once the loop/group has run it’s course.

What’s the difference between a ‘loop’ and a ‘group’?

So, you have loops which go round Instagram and everyone follows each other, keeping an eye on the group for new people joining. If you don’t follow all the accounts back you risk being ‘kicked out’ of the group and some even ‘name and shame’ (no we aren’t still in school though it may feel like it), so that everyone else can unfollow you for being ‘selfish’ (insert eye roll). This loop will run it’s course until no one new is added and it eventually dies and you have gained X amount of followers. This could be 20-2000+ depending on the size of the group.

Now let’s move on to groups! Groups are more of a long term thing rather than a quick ‘burst’ of followers. They will mostly be engagement groups that mean you will have to interact with everyone in the groups posts to be allowed to promote your posts in the group. Normally how it works is something like this: Make sure you follow everyone in the group > Each person will post an emoji in the group when they have posted a new Instagram post > you then have to like and comment on ALL of these > you can then post an emoji in the group when you post a new photo for everyone else to interact with.

PHEW! But there’s more …… if you don’t engage on other peoples posts then don’t expect them to engage on yours. This is called freeloading and no one likes it when people don’t work as a team inside these groups. You may leave the group at any point, however you may lose some followers as people may see you not engaging or unfollowing them. People may also ask you to engage on their stories like voting/asking questions/completing a poll etc which you can also ask the others in the group to do as well.

They can be great for engagement and some accounts may even continue following you and commenting even if you leave just because they now love your content and are invested in you! But more than likely its about a numbers game rather than anything else.

Expect the engagement but don’t expect them to buy from you or purchase things you recommend (bloggers mainly) because they do not trust you yet or even really know who you are.

So how do I join one?

If it sounds like something you might be interested to try (there’s no right or wrong here by the way) then there are a couple of ways. You can keep following accounts that seem relevant in the hope someone will pop up with a group. They tend to fall in your DM requests from time to time asking if you want to join. But if you want to be REALLY proactive you can start one yourself. Set out the rules early on in the group, create a group chat on Instagram and before you add people, make sure to DM them separately asking if they want to be involved. If this sounds like a lot of work then that’s probably because it is, in a way! It can be fiddly especially if you’re the owner of the group but most people tend to know how they work.

If you already have a group chat between some businesses then you can always ask them in the group to go and like your new post and comment on it if they don’t mind, however if it isn’t a specific engagement group then they may see it as a bit spammy to do it every time.

Another tip - ALWAYS reply to peoples comments left on your photos. No one likes a blogger or brand thats too ‘busy’ to say thankyou. You should be doing this whether the comments come from a pod/group or anyone else.

Is it organic engagement? Is it even SAFE?!

We all know Instagram is tough on bots and they have really cracked down on fake accounts (even though we still seem to see them all the time), but as this is a group between user accounts it seems to be a loop hole. It is TECHNICALLY organic engagement in the eyes of the coders, but it’s not actually organic as you’ve asked people to comment and like your post, if you get me?

Instagram sometimes doesn’t like it if it gets too ‘same-y’ so try not to comment the same thing all the time or always just put ‘fire emojis’. The platform may recognise that this is regular and not really tailored to the photo and discount the engagement from your analytics because it realises it’s ‘fake’. But that’s a whole conversation with Instagram no one has really had an answer to.

Once you stop using the pods and delete the follower loops chats, you’re pretty much kissing goodbye to all that extra engagement and extra followers. You may have gained 300 but over the course of the year you may lose another 300 because they all gradually unfollowed you, so it’s all about personal preference and whether you think you can gain anything else out of it.

I DO NOT RECOMMEND PAYING FOR BEING A PART OF ANY KIND OF FOLLOWER/ENGAGEMENT GROUP OR LOOP.

What’s ‘Follow Friday’?

This is probably the most organic option of everything we have mentioned. It’s a nice way for businesses to all share each other in their Instagram story, in the hope that their followers will like your account too. You can take a screenshot of their account or share one of their posts to your story, add the #followfriday and then tag them in, even using the new Instagram Small Business sticker too! They will then share this on their story and either do a separate post for your account or share your tag when they repost.

It’s a much more organic way to gain followers and if theirs like your account, they are more likely to be a customer and be loyal long term as they have chosen to follow you and not ‘had to’.

So to summarise….

Pods/groups can have benefits but they can also put you right back to square one at the same time. Think about the reasons for partaking in one even if it’s just to give it a go. Don’t expect too much from it and also don’t put too much pressure on yourself. Some of these groups can have 20 people in, all posting twice a day, that’s 40 photos you have to make sure you comment and like before you can even ask for the same on yours! They can get a little overwhelming at times so just make sure you’re not getting too stressed by them! They are an addition, not a necessity.

I hope that’s given some more insight and is probably the longest post i’ve ever written, HA! Let me know if you have any questions or pop it into the Facebook group!