In this article, we’ll take an in-depth look into what kind of actions Kicksta will take on your IG account. By the end of this read, you should understand what the service looks like and how it can fit your needs.
As you’re probably aware, Kicksta uses Follow-Unfollow automation to grow your IG presence.
The process is pretty straightforward:
- You connect your account
- Add targets whose followers you want to attract
- The Kicksta system starts doing a series of actions on your behalf to make that happen
In essence, the service consists of Following and Unfollowing, Story Viewing, and Posts Liking.
After connecting your Instagram account to Kicksta, the first thing you need to do is set up your Unique Targeted Audience, or AKA Targets. Those can be IG accounts or trending hashtags, but either way, the targets should reflect the type of users you want to attract to your Instagram account.
Once set up, the Kicksta system focuses on finding suitable and active users to follow based on the selected targets and filters that have been set. After the initial 24-48 hours warmup period, real fun begins.
The Kicksta system starts following users in small batches, roughly 15-20 a day until it acclimatizes to your user behavior. Since Instagram lets you do only so many Follows in a day this is quite necessary to keep things under the radar and make your interactions look genuine.
When fully warmed up, the Kicksta system can perform anywhere from 100 to 350 follows a day based on different criteria. IG Follow limitations are not exactly set in stone so the Kicksta system uses its accumulated experience and knowledge to determine how many follows can be done within 24 hours window.
At that point, users see the Follow and decide whether to follow you back or not, but to make them nod in the right direction, the Kicksta system starts viewing their stories to make your presence even more noticeable.
After the initial follow, the Kicksta system gives the users 2 to 4 days before unfollowing them regardless of the outcome.
If, and only if, the system determines that a user gave you a followback it likes anywhere from 1-3 most recent posts from a user that has followed you back ensuring your activity seems even more genuine and organic!
You might ask, but wait, why is the system unfollowing users who gave a followback to begin with? To answer your question, we need to look at this from a different perspective.
Firstly and most importantly, we need to make sure to maintain a healthy Following-to-follower ratio. A large number of followed users won’t give a followback, so this cleanup is not only justified, but it’s necessary. Secondly, Instagram has an upper following limit of 7.5k users. If the Kicksta system were about to keep following all the users that have been followed your account would reach the upper limit pretty fas, and the service would be…well, unusable at a certain point.
By default a total Followings count is never increased by more than 800 users from a starting point but, of course, this can be tweaked and changed based on the needs and preferences.
An important thing to address is that the Kicksta system always unfollows all the users followed by it. If you made a few valuable connections along the way, you can always whitelist the users to ensure the system skips them during the unfollowing stage.
We made sure to keep your previous following intact at any given moment so, in simple words, the system won’t be unfollowing any users you were following before joining Kicksta. Your previous following is automatically whitelisted so you don’t have to worry about unwanted unfollows.
That’s it, I think we pretty much covered the essentials here, you guys! Now it’s time to dive deeper into the setup and explain the main features that keep your growth going!
How to set up your Instagram Account
The first and most important step is to actually connect your Instagram account to the Kicksta system and this can be done by clicking the “Connect Account” button on the banner at the top of your dashboard screen.
Clicking the button will open this secure popup where you can enter your password to log into your Instagram account. This will allow the Kicksta System to establish a stable connection with your account.
Since this will be your first time connecting with Kicksta servers, you’ll get a prompt in your IG app to confirm if this was really you logging in.
Kicksta servers are located across the globe and we do use proxies so don’t get surprised once you see a login attempt from an unusual location. Just make sure to confirm it by clicking “This was me” on your IG app and we should be good to go!
Once the connection has been established, all there’s left to do is to start adding the desired targets which we’ll cover in the next section!
What is Target, anyway?
Okay, so before we get into the specifics of targeting, you should probably get a better understanding of what targets actually are.
In simple words, ‘targets’ help the system understand which followers you’re looking to attract using Kicksta. We’ll briefly cover how each targeting type actually works.
When adding a target, you can choose between IG Accounts and Hashtags, but a good mix of both is always a great option!
If you decide to stick with the IG accounts as your target, the Kicksta system will find and follow users who are in fact following the accounts you selected!
You can take this to your advantage and focus on the accounts of your competitors, influencers in your niche, or even complimentary brands. Remember, If your account is in the same niche or has content similar to the selected accounts, those users will have a higher chance of following you back and engaging with your content. Easy math!
On the other hand, if you decide to stick with the Hashtags, the Kicksta system will try to find and engage with users who have included the selected hashtags in their recent posts. Hashtags are always a great option if you’re familiar with the interests of your audience and are in fact looking to target niche and location-specific users.
Now that you have a better understanding of what targets are, we can explore best practices and useful tips for target selection!
Tips, Tricks, and Best Practices for Targeting Selection!
We already discussed the types of targets you can go for in the previous section, and although the most important thing is to make sure the selected targets match your audience, there are a few important things to keep in mind.
For starters, let’s discuss the size of the targets you should consider using. Smaller targets, AKA targets with less than 10k followers or posts, if we’re talking about hashtags, will be drained out too quickly, which will ultimately force you to keep on updating the targets every other day.
On the other hand, larger targets, AKA targets with more than 250k followers or posts will take much more time to be analyzed and these usually tend to give lower-quality followers.
Accounts with larger numbers of followers always have a big portion of bot or ghost followers, and viral hashtags are…well, used by everyone and it’s quite hard to get to your ideal audience using these types of hashtags.
Keep in mind that the accounts you’re planning to use as your targets should not be private or verified accounts. In both cases, the Kicksta system is not able to access their followers list so make sure to follow this rule at all times!
When choosing targets you can always get creative, but we’ll briefly cover the 4 main types of targets that are proven to be the most effective:
- Direct Competitors: These are the easiest and most common targets. If someone’s following your competitor, there’s a big chance of getting a followback, especially if you offer more engaging content or better products!
- Complimentary Brands: Accounts that are somewhat within your niche, but not exactly competing with you on the market. For example, if you’re a hair artist, the local nail salon will come in quite handy.
- Influencers & Bloggers: Users with authority in a specific community or your industry.
- Localized hashtags: Hashtags that are tightly connected to your niche and are in fact targeting the audience from a specific location. For example, using #food and #foodnewyork will make all the difference for a small NY restaurant looking to get new customers through Instagram.
The common practice is to monitor the performance of your targets. Ideally, you’re looking to accomplish a 10% follow-back rate from each target, meaning that for every 1000 follows the Kicksta system does, we’re expecting you to get around 100 followers. With that in mind, targets should be optimized every month, and underperforming ones should be switched with new batches for the most optimal results.
How to Set Your Targets and Use Filters!
In this section, we’ll cover how to actually add your targets and learn how to use filters!
The Targeting Tab lets you enter, filter, and optimize the targets and the type of audience you want to attract and engage with. In short – this is the most important place on your dashboard.
You can use the tips and tricks you already learned or you can utilize the Targeting Suggestion feature and use some of the preselected targets the system found to be the most effective for your niche.
The next thing on the line is the Filtering feature. Filters are the best way to narrow down the type of IG user you are trying to target. They focus on the more technical aspects of your audience like their number of posts, followers, following count, etc.
Filters come pre-loaded with optimal settings, but you can still change them at any given moment depending on your preferences and industry.
For example, if you want to target users with less than a thousand followers, lower the following filter. If your ideal audience needs to have more than, let’s say 5k followers, raise the followers bar! If you prefer to target only private accounts, switch the filter to private only! And if you prefer your followers to be active and have a lot of posts, set up the filter to a decent number. We did make this easy for you so you’re free to explore the possibilities.
To sum this up, there’s room for 30 targets in total, so take your time, experiment, and have fun with it! You can always come back with a new set of targets and filters to try on and monitor the results you’ve accomplished!
The Types of Growth Kicksta Offers
Everyone has different goals for their Social Media Marketing. Some Users are looking for maximum growth and exposure, while others want to focus on engagement rate and building a dedicated audience. That’s why Kicksta introduced two types of growth you can choose from and get you up to speed!
Targeted Growth:
At its core, the Kicksta system is designed to attract an organic, engaged audience to your account, based on the targeting and filters you set on your dashboard. Although nothing beats the Targeted Growth method, it can take time, and results can vary depending on the content, niche, targeting preferences, and even luck.
If you’re just getting started and need to quickly build your audience, this growth method might not be ideal, but you can always switch to Kicksta’s Maximum Growth method and get that extra boost!
Maximum Growth:
This growth method is all about growing your account as fast as possible. Kicksta employs a variety of promotional strategies in order to ensure you are getting a steady increase of followers every month – guaranteed.
This means your account is regularly included in different types of giveaways, influencer DM promotions, engagement groups, and more!
Disclaimer I: The Targeted Growth method is always working in the background, even if you switch to the Maximum Growth one! These work beautifully together, and you can consider the Maximum Growth method to be an additional boost of followers, on top of what the core service provides.
Disclaimer II: If Targeted Growth only is enabled, we won’t be able to guarantee a certain number of followers you’ll be receiving every month but the followers you’ll get are going to be 100% targeted within the niche you preselected.
Main Kicksta Features
Along with already discussed Following, Unfollowing, and integrated Story Viewing features, we’ll briefly cover the 3 most valuable side features Kicksta offers in this section!
Whitelist & Blacklist
These features allow you to either whitelist the users you don’t want the Kicksta system to unfollow or blacklist the users you don’t want the Kicksta system to engage with.
Disclaimer: The Kicksta system never unfollows the users you were following before joining the service. Although not visible, your previous following is automatically whitelisted!
Like after Follow
As you already know, the system is designed to follow and unfollow targeted users in order to organically grow your account. These actions, by themselves, are more than enough to boost the engagement levels of your account, but since we want to boost the engagement even further, we introduced the Like after Follow feature.
This feature automatically likes anywhere from 1-3 posts from a user that has followed you back which essentially ensures your activity seems even more genuine and organic!
Here are a few useful things to know about the Like after Follow feature:
- This feature is a core system feature, which means it’s on by default but can be toggled at any time on your Dynamics page
- The number of likes the system does is always adjusted to the number of posts the user has
- The system ensures it likes a user’s posts right before unfollowing them, and it always prioritizes the most recent content.
- Since liking only occurs during the unfollowing stage there’s always gonna be a delay of a day or two before you notice an update on your Like after Follow counter.
Welcome DM
So first things first! Let’s discuss what the Welcome DM feature does. Well, it allows you to send a personalized welcome message to all new followers you gain through Kicksta.
This feature is, in fact, designed to build engagement with your new followers, but there’s so much more to it since it can be a great way of boosting your marketing efforts and increasing sales at the end of the day. You can use it to pitch your products, redirect users to other social media platforms and websites, push your newsletter, do surveys, I mean…the possibilities are endless.
Welcome DMs are configured from the Dynamics Page and you can turn them ON or OFF at any given moment with a simple toggle.
To set this in motion, your growth settings must be set to Auto mode, but other than that, it’s pretty straightforward. Simply enter the message you would like to send to your new followers in the text field and voila, you’re done!
Since IG has a daily limit of DMs you can send to users not following you back, Welcome DMs are sent during the unfollowing stage only. In other words, the DMs are being pushed once the system determines whether or not the user actually gave you a followback.
This can cause a small delay between someone following you and them receiving a Welcome DM, but you can track everything in this section of the dashboard.
I think we pretty much covered it all for now! For more information, you can always get to our agents through the live chat support and get all the additional insights you need.
