Join a Pod or a Megapod
A pod is a group of a few dozen, hundred, or thousand people who agree to like and comment on one another’s photos within the first few minutes of those photos being posted. This activity tricks the Instagram algorithm into assuming a photo is extremely popular. When this happens, the algorithms kick in and the target post is more likely to show up in other followers’ feeds or on the popular page. It’s also often used as another way to pump up the number of comments and likes to impress a brand who has paid the Influencer to generate interest in their product.
I have been invited into many “pods,” but have never joined one, because pods essentially are groups of people who are collaborating to game the system. They do not encourage authentic interaction. Pods are unscrupulous because they are a very poor facsimile of genuine engagement.
Most pods can also be quite draconian, demanding that all pod members comment and like for many hours a day. If you don’t comment and like back immediately, you are kicked out of the pod. The biggest pods often require people to be on their phone for over 10 hours a day.
Lauren Bath, the popular Australian Instagrammer (@laurenepbath), knows many Influencers who use pods to make their posts seem more popular than they actually are. She told me over email that several Influencers “buy engagement through sophisticated (very sophisticated) automation (and) via niche superpods.” According to Bath, huge pods “are still going strong and some of the biggest Influencers in the world have been at the forefront of this craze. To make money, yep!”
How does it work in practice? Let’s say you’re part of a pod. Whenever you make a new post, you notify your pod inside of a group chat. Then, everyone in the group chat is required to go like the post and make a fawning comment immediately. Yes, these comments are technically made by real people who could be interested in the brand you’ve been paid to promote, but it is improbable since they’re just other Influencers. And if they’re playing with pods, their followers are probably not worth targeting for a genuine Influencer.
Members of the pod comment on your post solely to get the same engagement benefit on their own posts. Some pods are huge and have thousands of members who have to adhere to stringent guidelines, which often involve actively being on their phone for over ten hours a day. If they do not, they are excommunicated from the group and blackballed forever. It’s all rotten.
I have a photographer friend in Austin named Gino Barasa (@ginobarasa) who was invited into a pod. He told me all about it.
Quite a while back, a friend of mine was in a podding group with some Influencers with 6-digit followers. He got me into the group and my followers did, in fact, grow by a few thousand in the few months that I was involved. It was mind-numbingly tedious, and you had to stay at it every day, and in the end I was bored out of my mind having to think of new ways to say something nice about all of their posts every day. After I dropped out of the group I steadily lost almost all of the gains over a 3 or 4 month period. I was convinced that I could replicate the growth without podding if I just put up good content with funny stories. But I couldn’t. The dream of legitimately “earning” a large following proved more elusive than self-esteem itself.
So, how did I feel about podding? Not awesome, but it felt more real than buying followers or likes. I was hoping that by having accounts with 25K - 200K in followers comment on my images I could earn my own following. Make a few connections that I would not otherwise have ever gotten in front of. But, the burning question in the back of my head was always, “Why are these big accounts doing this for me? I get what’s in it for me. What’s in it for them?” What I came to realize is that these other accounts were frauds, that had bought their following and they were no more influential than I was. The entire process was a huge circle jerk and a waste of time and energy.
Here, we can see when @ginobarasa joined and left the pod. His followers did grow a lot during the period he was in the cabal. Source: Socialblade.com
Joseph Harper, social media lead for Kellogg’s, found some surprising results when he looked at one of their more “successful” campaigns. They worked with an advertising agency on this campaign and it turned out that most of the comments that resulted from this campaign actually came from pods. He described his findings: “One agency we work with said a campaign was a success because it generated loads of comments, but when we dug deeper into the report, we realized that the Influencers we’d paid had just gone to a WhatsApp group of other Influencers and asked them to make all of those comments.”26
WhatsApp, the group messaging app, is one of the top ways for pods to communicate because the app does not keep a record of conversations. WhatsApp’s conversational data is also encrypted in transit, which makes it a more secure communications platform.
It’s important to note that pods can communicate using many different methods. The screenshots below illustrate Facebook groups that are used for pod communication.
Here’s an example of a pod that communicates via a Facebook group. I found about 100 of these by just searching for “Instagram Pod” through the Facebook search bar.
Recently, Facebook deleted 10 Instagram podding groups after a Buzzfeed article exposed them. One clandestine group, in particular, had over 200,000 people who had all agreed to fake engagement by liking and commenting on one another’s photos.27
What is troubling is that it took third parties to report the problem to Instagram and Facebook. The Facebook podding groups had incredibly obvious names, such as “Instagram Like & Comment” and “Daily Instagram Engagement,” and yet neither Instagram nor Facebook had noticed. Instagram’s PR director Gabe Madway wouldn’t comment, except to confirm to me that this behavior is against their Terms and Conditions, and is the reason for shutting these groups down.
These are just some of the groups on Facebook that people join to get more activity on their Instagram posts. The biggest and most effective pods use private group chats in Telegram or WhatsApp, which are much harder to detect than a simple Facebook group. Source: Buzzfeed
Instagram is truly playing whack-a-mole with these pods. With no real structure or approach, these efforts appear to be mostly ineffective in slowing down the corrupt behavior.
However, podding activity should be straightforward for Instagram to detect. Since there is a network of ten to thousands of people working together, they should be able to map out increased network activity that interconnects those people. For example, I have many friends on Instagram, but I don’t comment on all their photos within the first hour. People in pods do. Therefore, it’s a pattern of behavior that’s extremely easy to detect with statistical analysis.
Even though the Buzzfeed article says that Facebook/Instagram deleted 10 of the groups, there are still a ton out there. And, again, these are some of the sloppiest pods. The more sophisticated ones do not use Facebook groups but rather less easily detected communication techniques that ensures everyone follows the rules or else they get kicked out.
Trade Some Clicks—Credit Card Not Required
We’ve talked about numerous ways some people can buy more followers, likes, or comments, but buying engagement doesn’t always have to cost money.
If you don’t have time for a pod and don’t want to buy followers outright, you can use a “token” system. There are countless apps for iOS and Android that allow you to, in essence, trade followers, likes, and comments with other users based on quantity rather than quality. You provide the app your username and password for Instagram and then you earn tokens by using the app to follow other users randomly and to like their photos. The more you follow and like, the more tokens you get. You can then use those tokens to buy your own followers, likes, and comments. The example below is an app called Fame Boom, but there are hundreds of others I could have chosen.
This is an app called Fame Boom. It has over 1,000,000 downloads from the Google Play store, and it is one of hundreds of similar apps. On the right, you can see I
selected “Easy Mode,” and this began an automated process of following other users and liking photos at random.
After I had a bit of fun playing along and collecting tokens, I deleted the app on my phone. To make sure that it was completely disconnected from my Instagram account, I then logged into Instagram’s website to check the “Authorized Applications” in the settings. Fame Boom didn’t appear. However, because I had previously given them my username and password, they could still have been storing my login details on their servers. Because these third parties have my credentials, they do not even need to use the Instagram API to act on my behalf. So, how were they doing it?
Like some websites we used to buy followers, likes, and comments for our test, we were required to give our Instagram username and password when we signed up for Fame Book. These credentials provide the company with ongoing access to our account, letting them follow, like, and comment on my behalf, even when I choose to stop playing.
Instagram claims to have robust automated services that automatically monitor and remove this sort of activity. “With new apps launching all the time, our abuse-fighting team builds and constantly updates a combination of automated and manual systems,” Instagram said. “We already have about 10,000 people working on safety and security, and we’re planning to double that to 20,000 in the next year.” Alas, while they are willing to admit that podding is a problem, they are still missing the mark when it comes to policing their own system, despite what seems like quite a few humans currently on the task. We talk more about what Instagram can do to stop this behavior later on.
Despite Instagram’s claims of its ability to discover fraudulent behavior, they seem to have little or no power to prevent us from building up our fake Influencer account @genttravel so quickly or the hundreds of other fraudulent accounts we examined.
Do It at Scale Through Farming—Marketing Automation
Why make one fake account, when you can make 10, or 100? Think big!
Farming refers to the idea of managing many accounts at once. Managing one account can be quite time consuming. Uploading photos, making stories, writing, commenting, liking, etc. can all take quite a long time. I personally spend about 30 minutes a day on my Instagram, but I know others who spend hours upon hours daily.
So, it would make sense that there are now services to help make this process more efficient. In fact, there are a variety of online tools where you can utilize all the benefits of scripting and bots for yourself. They can multiply efficiency by allowing you to have maximum interaction on multiple accounts at once.
How does this work? Next, I walk through a couple of websites that allow you to do this.
Jarvee
My first example is the website Jarvee.com. First, you create an account on Jarvee.com. As part of this process, you provide them with your Instagram login credentials. Then, on your behalf, the Jarvee.com scripts will mimic the behaviors of a human being, using some of the techniques we discussed above, to increase engagement on your account. These scripts will do everything from leaving realistic looking comments to liking comments that people (or bots) leave on your photos.
These are only a few of the features that Jarvee.com offers.
The Tutorials page on Jarvee has many friendly videos, including one called “Learn how to automatically grow your social media accounts,” with a rather conniving pitch. The voiceover says, “Why would you follow other people?” Oh, good question, you have me hooked. Then it explains, “It’s based on the reciprocity principle, which is a basic law in social psychology.”
What this means is Jarvee is one of many services that offer follow/unfollow automation. After you set it up, your account will follow a bunch of people (and often bots) at random in the hope some of them will follow you back. What the video fails to explain is these are entirely useless followers because either they are bots or they are completely random individuals who have no interest in the subject matter you post. But if all that matters to you is that your follower count goes up, it’s a success.
The video goes on to explain why Jarvee will helpfully “unfollow” for you automatically. On Instagram, since you’re only allowed to follow 7,500 people at a time, after you reach that maximum you need to then unfollow a whole bunch of folks in order to follow 7,500 more. Rinse and repeat.
This is the same pattern we will analyze with the @amazingthailand account later in the book. It doesn’t mean they used Jarvee, but there are countless online services that offer this service.
Jarvee allows you to manage up to 150 accounts at once, creating a situation called Bot Farming.
Instagram has a steady stream of public announcements to say that they are attempting to crack down on services like Jarvee. However, in a recent article on WIRED, “Jarvee said there was ‘nothing to worry about’ and dismissed claims that Instagram’s crackdown had any effect on its services.”28
InstaBoostGram
InstaBoostGram is another such service and one that looks to be pretty popular. It’s on the first page of Google search results, which I found particularly interesting since their marketing speak isn’t all that convincing in making the practice sound legitimate.
I invite you to read some of the stellar marketing copy in the screenshots below, including such gems as: “One of the most important business chunk is a website. You can get a hype of traffic on your site through Instagram.”
A screenshot showing the homepage, including some of the services you can buy.
Some of the follower packages offered.
Some of their excellent marketing copy.
Are you convinced yet?
What they are not telling you, of course, is your purchased followers, likes, and comments are worthless because they either come from bots or via compromised accounts.
Followadder
Another one of the thousands of sites where you can buy followers is Followadder, who encourages you to “Save time and money by putting your Instagram network building on auto pilot.”
Another one of the many auto-follow sites out there. This one requires you to download a program that runs on your computer all the time so that you can be part of the cabal.
When you sign up and pay money for this one, you are required to download a program to your computer. You must keep that program running in the background. The program is, of course, doing automated things and running bots. It allows your computer to pretend to be multiple accounts, and then follow, like, and comment on countless other accounts. This technique is employed by many other sites as well and, by any objective analysis, it’s quite a sketchy tactic.
Instajool
Naturally, when you see there’s a tool that lets you manage over 100 accounts at once, you know there is some crazy stuff goin’ down. Or at least I hope you do. Instajool allows you to do just that.
Some sites, like Instajool, allow you to manage the automated activities of 100 accounts at once.
The number of these sites operating on the Internet is unbelievable. They don’t even attempt to hide what they are up to, which makes many people believe it must be legitimate.
These services are not necessarily built solely for scammers, but also for regular people who simply want a lot of followers to feed their ego and impress their easily-impressed friends. Many of these sites have free sign-ups, so you can try it out before you buy.
The most active fraudsters on Instagram don’t just use one site like this one, but regularly use multiple. They often justify this behavior as a tribute to their cleverness and their ability to figure out the system. Humans are able to justify a wide range of activities, even if they aren’t ethically sound.
There are indeed a few agencies that use tools to manage multiple accounts for their clients. However, hopefully, these agencies would not actually use a tool like Instajool, because a tagline like “Get unlimited free Instagram followers using the best instagram bot liker,” should let professional agencies know to stay clear. Or do
es it? We’ll find out more in chapter 4.
Oh wow. If this model knew that her stock photo was being used to help Influencers mislead, she would not be so happy.
As you can see in the reviews above, people are able to justify their behavior in a ridiculous manner.
Teach Others How: “Sign Up For My Instagram Follower Course!”
Here’s another outrageous trend: Instagrammers selling online courses to teach others how to cheat the system.
Why? Well, many people, especially YouTubers, make money by recommending different services for users to buy followers, likes, and comments. These Influencers make money this way because whenever anyone clicks on their link to a service, the Influencer gets a kickback.
One highly recommended site is Followadder because Followadder pays a 50% share of the revenue they generate to the person who provided the affiliate link. If someone wants to buy followers, and they click on your link to Followadder and buy $1,000 of followers, you’d get $500 of that money. Pretty sweet deal.
Here you can see the “type-ahead” suggestions on YouTube. If you click through, you find that some of these websites share free advice, but some are selling a paid online course.
Under the Influence- How to Fake Your Way Into Getting Rich on Instagram Page 6
