Why People You Don’t Know Watch Your Instagram Stories

It’s PSL season. And you’ve probably recently posted one of these original boomerangs where you’re cheering with your Starbucks cup with your friends on your Instagram stories. Or maybe you bought the latest iPhone 11 Pro Max, and you decided to show your followers the difference in perspective of the three cameras through three pictures in your story. Or perhaps you wanted to show how crazy night mode is on the new iPhone 11 by posting a comparison.

In any case, while looking back at your stats to see who viewed your stories, you started noticing that random people that you don’t know at all are watching your stories on Instagram.

Out of curiosity, you click on the profile of one of these accounts, and you realize that this person watching you is running a massively followed account! How did they find you? Why do they have an interest in your content, but don’t they follow you? Let’s try to answer that question.

Instagram Is Full of Bots, and This Is One of Them

It’s a new phenomenon. Quora and Reddit are full of posts asking why strangers are viewing their stories.

If you’ve been using Instagram for a while, you probably remember those times when you got started — when you were getting followed by random people that you’ve never met before, or when you were getting likes 3 seconds after posting a picture.

Back then, you were also probably surprised by that, wondering how they had found you.

But it didn’t take you long to realize that bots made these interactions.

It’s the same thing here.

You probably know by now that most automation tools, such as follow-unfollow tools or auto-likes bots, are not working anymore. And even if some of them still are, Instagram got a lot better at spotting them and usually blocks the account from pursuing these fake interactions with the other users.

Because these “traditional” tools don’t work anymore, some marketing “geniuses” came up with that new trick: having a bot watch thousands of stories per hour. The strategy is quite simple: out of all these people, some of them will get curious and click on the unknown account and start following them.

Does it work? It’s hard to tell. The method is relatively new and is mostly used by Russian accounts for whatever reason. I guess people are now a lot more aware that interactions on Instagram can be faked. Therefore, I don’t think that the conversion rate (from seeing that a story has been viewed to becoming a follower) is that great. However, if an account sees thousands of stories per hour, we can probably expect decent growth in terms of followers, related to the high volume of interactions.

It’s a less direct notification than a follow or a like. And I don’t think that everyone looks at their Instagram stories stats carefully enough to realize that a random account has been watching their content.

On top of that, stories are usually more personal and more private forms of content and noticing that you’re being watched by someone that you don’t know, and that doesn’t know you, can definitely seem creepy and can lead to you not wanting to follow that account, and maybe even to take action and block that account.

For these reasons, this new automation technique is probably not as effective as a regular follow-unfollow or mass-liking method.

Why Do People Keep Coming Up With Such Hacks & Techniques?

Because they work fast! Which leads to business opportunities.

Like me, you know how hard it is to grow followers on social media. When you discover a follow-unfollow tool, everything becomes easy. You passively get subscribers. You don’t even have to post a thing!

And of course, as you may have guessed already, it can lead to a job opportunity for them. When a brand or a small business is struggling with their social media account, and they come up with an easy solution to solve their problem, they get paid a lot!

But here is the thing: nowadays, mass-following is dying. And lots of marketing experts and agencies are freaking out because their entire business model is relying on these tools.

So what do you do when your business is about to collapse? You try hard to find new ways to get the same results.

But it’s just a matter of time. Instagram is already aware of that new method and is already working on ways to make it not doable by either setting up a limit of stories that you can watch per hour, or by simply tracking down what kind of software is taking control over an actual user on an account.

Hacks and Techniques Don’t Work Long-Term

Instagram is getting better and better about spotting accounts using hacks and obscure techniques to fake engagement or to grow their followers unusually.

If your only way to get followers is through some hacks, obscure techniques, and shady software, you probably need to stop using those right now and start working on a different way to build an audience!

It’s regrettable to notice that being social and interacting with others is an underrated method to grow followers, yet it is the quickest, the most affordable and the most effective way to do so.

Getting followers is not about the number; it is about gathering people that care about your message.

You could have 2 million followers and feel very lonely, or you could have 200 followers that believe in you, love your content, and buy your products.

I would choose the latter any day.

Get away from the quantity mindset. Millions of inactive followers are as valuable as having no followers at all. Except that, with millions of followers, your ego is satisfied. And through that satisfaction numbness, you become passive and inactive.