12 Instagress Alternatives (That Are Here to Stay)

Instagram is a massive platform, which means attempting to use it to grow your brand’s online presence can be daunting. There’s certainly a niche audience out there for you somewhere, but how are you supposed to bring them together and connect with them? There are multiple ways you can attract attention, such as through liking other users’ pictures, commenting on posts, and interacting with other account owners through direct messages—and of course, and most importantly, creating your own high-quality content and publishing it at the right times. 

None of these actions alone will help you build an audience, though. It helps to leverage them all. Obviously, this would be an overwhelming and time-consuming process, but there are profiles that make it work. They do so by using helpful tools. With resources like Instagress shut down, you’ll have to look elsewhere, so here are the top Instagress alternatives that can help you expand your platform presence: 

1. YoViral

Using YoViral can quickly result in real likes and views. When you don’t have to worry about those two aspects of Instagram, it frees up your time to focus on other aspects of your account, such as creating legitimately compelling content (no automation tool will ever replace your own creativity). 

With YoViral, you can select how many likes (and views) you receive each month, and decide how quickly you want them (namely, immediately or gradually). Then it will deliver them to every new post you make, without any monthly limits. It’s a simple two-click process that makes it easy for influencers and brands to build their audiences at the speed they desire. 

2. ViralRace

ViralRace does not rely on phony followers to make your account seem like it’s more popular than it is (the logic behind this practice—known as “social proof”—is that when real people come across your profile and see how many users follow it, they are likely to interpret the number to suggest that you are worth following, that your content is intriguing, and that they won’t want to miss out). Instead, ViralRace allows you to connect with real followers and obtain genuine likes and views. 

ViralRace pushes your content to active Instagram users who have already expressed interest in material similar to yours. This way, you won’t have to waste your time reaching out to a broad variety of users on the off chance that a few of them will follow you. When your posts have higher engagement rates, they are also on a shorter route to the Discover page, and therefore much more visible to other users. 

3. Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a leader among social media management tools. It works across multiple platforms, including Instagram. It’s applicable to different people within your organization, such as social media managers, marketers, social customer service representatives, and social media strategists. Sprout Social helps you grow your online presence not with automation, but with analytics. 

What Sprout Social does is that it provides you with insight into your audience and how your social media campaigns are performing. What are the demographics of people that follow you? What times of day are they the most active, which are therefore the best times to post new content?

What kind of content inspires the most positive responses? When you have a deeper understanding of what your audience connects to, then you can amend your social media strategy accordingly instead of operating it by pure trial and error. 

4. AgoraPulse

Liking and commenting on posts is a tedious task, which is why automation tools are useful. However, creating content is the most important aspect of your social media strategy, which is also time-consuming—but even though you cannot automate it, you can still save yourself the trouble of being online all the time to post at the most advantageous times of day. 

AgoraPulse can tell you what those times of day are with digestible one-click CSV and PPT reports. Return on investment is difficult to measure when it comes to social media (it also depends on what you are measuring, such as follower count increases, engagement rates, sales, shares, etc.), but AgoraPulse is useful for seeing which efforts are paying off the most. Like Sprout Social, it also offers a scheduling tool, so you can pre-schedule new content to appear on your feed whenever you want it to. 

5. Buffer 

Buffer is another all-inclusive social media management platform that enables you to schedule posts, learn about your audience, and adapt your social strategy according to your followers’ reactions.

It also makes it possible to collaborate with your entire team when it comes to creating content: content can be better (especially when you need to generate high amounts) when everyone is given the opportunity to contribute ideas. Buffer also allows you to publish posts on Instagram with a first comment included to encourage other users to interact with you. 

6. Kicksta

Kicksta leverages artificial intelligence to help you grow your Instagram presence instead of using spam, bots, and fake followers. Instead, it helps you find accounts that are similar to yours so that you can tap into their existing audiences, such as complementary businesses, competitors, influencers, and other people who operate in the same niche market. 

Kicksta will then like the posts of individuals who follow those profiles, catching their attention. This strategy is far more effective than liking posts from just about anyone because they have already expressed interest in your brand’s premise. You cannot guarantee that all of these people will follow you back, but hopefully, many of them will—that’s the way the game works. 

You aren’t buying followers or likes—you are simply using a resource to attract people’s attention faster than you could manually. Do away with useless automatic comments (which comes with all sorts of risks, such as becoming wildly insensitive or inappropriate depending on the context) and make more authentic engagements.

7. Upleap

Reports and analytics are extremely valuable when it comes to executing an effective Instagram strategy. Do you nevertheless find yourself wishing for a bit more… guidance? If you are new to Instagram and social media marketing, you may not have an immediate idea of how to implement new strategies or how to factor in what analytics reports are telling you. 

When you use Upleap, you are partnered with a real, human account manager who can walk you through the Instagram growth process. As you know, the best business relationships happen when you are better acquainted with your partners, so you are able to know your account manager’s name, location, and social media management experience. 

This person will handle the automation part of your strategy and help you target Instagram users that are most likely to be interested in your profile. If you need a bit of hand-holding—and there’s no shame in it—Upleap is worth checking out. The company’s Lite, Standard, and Premium plans are $39, $69, and $99 per month, respectively. 

8. Instarget

How would you like to grow your Instagram presence in record time? Like other tools, Instarget uses bot and automation capabilities to follow, like, and comment. There’s more to the Instagram landscape than that, though—you only want to follow people who are providing your account with value, so it’s sometimes helpful to unfollow profiles that you don’t have a relationship with.

Instarget can also automate direct messages and reposts, which boast their own advantages in regard to connecting with other users and keeping a consistent stream of content on your feed. 

Along with standard features like post scheduling, Instarget allows you to connect multiple Instagram accounts if you have more than one brand. Plus, you can specify different kinds of targeting you want to use, including narrowing down accounts based on location and hashtag usage. 

Instarget also includes a caption library to give you ideas when you don’t know what to write beneath your images. As you’re undoubtedly aware, captions are an integral part of catching users’ attention and inspiring engagement.

9. Popsters

You cannot solely rely on automation tools to attract followers to your Instagram account. Your posts need to be high-quality and legitimately compelling. Even if people follow you for a moment because they think your account is supposed to be intriguing based on your existing follower account, why should they stick around if they fail to deliver? 

Your posts need to be good—but this opens a series of questions, all pertaining to one in particular: how do you make them good? Sometimes, it helps to look at what your competitors are doing for inspiration. You should never, ever copy someone else’s content; everything you produce should be original. That does not mean, however, that you cannot mimic your competitors’ strategies. 

Popsters can help you examine what your competitors are doing, which of their posts are their most popular, and help you emulate their effective techniques and ignore the ones that don’t work as well. With Popsters, you can analyze what type of posts become the most successful and compare the accounts of different companies to glean information outside of how your own posts are performing.

10. Combin 

One of the most critical elements of Instagram growth is communication. People don’t want to follow you just to see your posts, they often want you to acknowledge and interact with them. 

A potential follower might find your content intriguing, but if you include calls to action or ask questions in your captions, they’ll expect you to respond to people who actually answer. If you want to grow your audience, then you cannot ignore them. 

Combin helps make this part easy as your audience grows. You can keep in contact with your community thanks to engagement activity automation, track incoming and outgoing followers, and manage up to 15 Instagram accounts from a single device. 

Along with scheduling tools, Combin also helps you find the digital corners of Instagram where members of your niche hang out the most through hashtags, enabling you to become a part of your field’s important conversations and establish your presence there. 

11. Kenji

Kenji uses artificial intelligence to help you find people that are more likely to follow you than others, but you don’t need to install any software. Instead, you can use Kenji from any device (which is useful for brand owners who typically use Instagram on their phones instead of their computers). The service is easy to set up and works around the clock, helping target potential followers for your account and providing you with useful reports. 

It employs targeting techniques based on hashtags, location, and its own HyperTarget feature, which focuses on the audiences of accounts you want to be like, strategy-wise. 

Are you curious about how AI can help you? Kenji allows people to try its services for free for three days. It’s also affordable anyway when compared to many other resources out there with its most inclusive plan costing $29 per month. 

12. Jarvee

Jarvee—which you can try free for five days—offers many of the features of other resources, such as scheduling capabilities, automation, and other tools that help expand your social media presence (Jarvee also works on other major platforms). 

Jarvee is a Windows-based solution, so it’s necessary to have Windows 7 or higher if you want to use it, but it’s advantageous for people who are able to. It’s fast, safe, and can help you drive traffic to your website from your Instagram account and acquire business leads. 

Conclusion 

Instagram is a vast platform that is saturated with other brand owners and marketers trying to do the same thing you are: establish and expand a significant presence. Making yourself noticed is a demanding task that is overwhelming to tackle alone, but, fortunately, there are Instagram growth tools and services that can save you labor hours and assist with implementing a more effective strategy. 

Instagress was shut down for violating Instagram’s terms of service, but there are numerous alternatives available. Which one is best for accomplishing your account’s goals?