7 Seriously Cool Tools to Step Up Your Instagram Game in 2021

Free Instagram Tools to Help You Grow Your Account

Instagram has proven to be a strong player in the social media world for quite some time and doesn’t show any signs of slowing down this year. There are some free Instagram tools that have been changing the game as of late; so we created this article to show you how you can use them to step up your Instagram game in 2021!

Please note that while these tools may be great time savers, they are not magic and won’t be much help unless paired with an effective content strategy. With algorithms getting smarter every day, the old “spray and pray” approach rarely works anymore in any form of social media.

Chrome Extension Instagram Automation Tools

One of the best things we’ve seen lately when it comes to free Instagram tools is the use of Google Chrome extensions. These tools are “safe”, given that they only use the Instagram desktop website to work their magic. Applications that use Instagram’s API or other methods of interacting with the app which can flag your account and get you in trouble with Instagram.

Shadowban Warning

Instagram automation does come with some inherent risks. If you break the rules of Instagram, you run the risk of having your account “shadowbanned” or “action blocked” by Instagram.

Instagram will shadowban an account if they have reason to believe that you are violating their terms and conditions. This includes the use of Instagram bots on your account, the use of banned hashtags, if your account is often reported as spam, or if you exceed a daily limit of liking and commenting on posts or following accounts.

If your account is shadowbanned, Instagram will limit your engagement and ban you from following accounts or liking posts for an unspecified amount of time. When this happens, your posts will only be seen by your followers and your posts will not appear in hashtags.

There is a “trust score” for Instagram accounts. This trust score cannot be seen by a user, but Instagram keeps tabs on accounts. If you’re using sketchy third-party applications on your account, have several login attempts from strange locations or your account is regularly action blocked, it will lower your trust score and your account will be under more scrutiny from Instagram when trying to automate.

There is no standard limit on how many actions you can perform in a day. Given that there are some powerful Instagram Automation tools out there (just like the ones presented in this article), it is possible to do too much in a day and have your account action blocked.

Accounts that have been “warmed up” or in other words, the ones that have been using automation for some time tend to be able to like and follow more users before being action blocked than brand new accounts. If you’re action blocked, you will not be able to follow or like any posts for a period of time. It’s no fun! It really defeats the purpose of Instagram and it is something we definitely want to avoid.

Given that Instagram is constantly updating its algorithm and working to combat spam, we cannot guarantee that these tools will work and be safe forever. However, we currently use some of these extensions and have found them to be safe for our own Instagram account. Most of these tools use Instagram’s desktop website to interact with your account and have settings to give the automation the appearance of being “natural”.

Everliker – Instagram Automation Tool

Everliker is one of our favourite Instagram automation tools as of late. It’s a free Google Chrome extension with an optional paid subscription that can enable you to spur some organic growth on Instagram if used correctly. 

The beauty of Everliker is that it takes a batch of hashtags that you enter into the extension, and it will randomly like a specified number of posts from those hashtags in a day. It takes breaks, mimics human interaction, and has safety measures included to avoid being perceived as a bot and having your account shadow-banned by Instagram. 

Think about it this way, if you aren’t doing any outreach, how are you going to raise awareness for your Instagram business account or let people know that you exist? Being able to like a ton of posts every day means that there is the potential for new people to find out about your brand each and every day. When it comes to outreach, Everliker is one of the most powerful free Instagram business tools available. 

For a very reasonable $5 per month, you can unlock some pretty impressive features that really open up the true potential of Everliker. On the paid subscription, you’re able to like more posts per day (air on the side of caution with this, it can lead to your account being banned), you can like posts in a specified location, like photos in your own news feed, and like photos from another user’s followers or users that they are following. 

If you are looking to grow your account’s presence, Instagram organic growth is one of the most valuable ways to create real engagement and grow your audience right now. If you’re looking for a free Instagram automation tool to step up your Instagram game in 2021, we highly recommend Everliker.

Ig Follower

Instagram organic growth can be hard to achieve if you are only liking posts. If you want to take a more aggressive approach, you can follow user accounts to entice users to follow you back. However, following multiple user accounts can be a tedious process. Thankfully, we have found one of the best Instagram tools to help with this process.

IG Follower is a Chrome extension that adds a little interface to any Instagram desktop page that you view. It has two buttons for “Follow them all!” and “Unfollow all!”. Now, it’s valuable to follow as many accounts as possible, but if they follow back, we may not want to unfollow them. Stay away from the “Unfollow all” action, for now; we’ll show you a better solution later in this article.

All you need to do for the extension to work is; find an account with followers that you would like to follow as well, click on their followers to open up the followers window, then click “Follow them all!”. After that, the extension will work its magic and follow all of the users listed on that page. Following new accounts doesn’t get much easier than that!

Note: When doing this, please be cautious. Just like any other form of Instagram Automation, if you do too much at once, it will raise a red flag to Instagram. Everything in moderation is key!

Nfollowers – Instagram Unfollow Tool

A very popular way to grow an Instagram account is by following similar accounts in hopes of earning some follow-backs. To help you with the process of following and unfollowing, this is a very valuable Instagram unfollow tool to help clean up your Instagram following user list afterward. The Chrome extension, nFollowers audits the accounts that you are currently following to determine who has followed you back and who hasn’t.

If someone has followed you back and is regularly engaging with your content, there isn’t a reason to unfollow them. They’re a good follower, and they’re actually helping to improve your engagement. That’s why we would recommend staying away from the “Unfollow all!” option with IG Follower. It’s worth keeping that mutual relationship going to continue to grow your account.

However, if someone hasn’t followed you back within a week or so of following them, you may want to unfollow them to keep your follower/following ratio in check. They’re either not interested in your content or are just not active on Instagram.

Once you’ve installed the nFollowers extension on Google Chrome, all you have to do is click on the nFollowers icon in the toolbar of your browser. The app will open a new tab and generate a report of who hasn’t followed you back. From that interface, you can click on the account of someone that isn’t following you back and unfollow them.

For those of you that are looking to keep a tight ratio between the number of people you’re following and your followers, this Instagram unfollow tool is going to be invaluable to growing your Instagram account organically and keeping that list of the accounts you are following under control.

Just like following too many users, trying to unfollow too many can also land you in trouble! Please unfollow cautiously, take breaks, and don’t unfollow too many users at once.

More Valuable Instagram Organic Growth Tools

In addition to the awesome Chrome Extensions above, there are some other great free Instagram tools that can help ensure that you get the most reach out of each post that you make.

One of the biggest challenges with Instagram marketing is the time it can take to curate content and research relevant hashtags for each post. As a marketing agency, we know that Instagram marketing can be time-consuming.

These tools are free to use, and they will help give you get the most reach out of every post that you make on Instagram. They will save you countless hours of content planning and research so that you can reap the rewards of Instagram without spending a ton of time using the app every day.

For Display Purposes Only

Hashtag research can be a real pain! Determining relevant tags and which tags will be valuable to your business or the occasion at hand can take hours. To help solve that, For Display Purposes Only was created. Instagram organic growth can be hard to achieve, but the use of relevant hashtags is a great way to organically extend the reach of the content that you post on Instagram.

For Display Purposes Only is a free hashtag research tool. All you need to do is enter a tag related to what you’re going to post, and the app will generate a batch of related tags for you to use in an Instagram post.

For example, I’m about to post one of my mountain biking photos. To get a batch of tags, I entered #mtb and set the selection to auto and the limit to 30. This is perfect as Instagram only allows users to include 30 hashtags per post.

All I have to do is copy these hashtags and paste them into my next post. If you know how hashtags work, this is extremely valuable in increasing the organic reach of each post that you make. With how much time this can save on hashtag research, it is definitely one of the best Instagram tools available.

Later

If you find it hard to find the time to make a post on Instagram every day, Later has your back! Later is a free Instagram post scheduler that can help you stay on top of regularly posting new content to Instagram.

Later’s interface allows you to upload content into its media folder. After the content has been uploaded, you can then drag and drop your content into a calendar and schedule posts to go out at a later date and time. Later also allows you to connect your other social media networks to get your content posted on all of your business’s social media accounts at the same time! Given that you do not need to post things multiple manually, Later is easily one of the best Instagram business tools for saving time with your social campaigns.

As you may know, the best way to improve the performance of your posts is to post them when the majority of your audience is online. This will ensure that your content will be seen by as many eyes as possible. More eyes mean more likes, reach, engagement, and a better organic social media marketing campaign!

Later also has some free Instagram analytics available and can tell you when your audience is online. For example, after looking at the Instagram metrics and analytics that Later provides, I know that the majority of my audience is online at 9am on Wednesday, but I can’t post content as I will be driving back to work after an early weekly meeting. With Later, I can schedule the post earlier in the week from my computer and Later will post it for me.

Another awesome time saver when using Later is the “Saved Captions” feature on the post creation interface. This is a great place to enter the hashtags you generated with “For Display Purposes Only” to make sure you’re nailing all of those awesome hashtags with every post that you put out. This is one of the best ways to gain more exposure with each post that your business makes. Later is one of the best Instagram business tools for increasing productivity with your social media campaigns.

Canva

What good is promoting, scheduling, or growth hacking if your Instagram content is sub-par? None at all! If you want to step up the quality of your Instagram content, this is a tool you NEED to know about. 

Canva can help you make stunning graphics, logos, and anything else you could ever need to make your Instagram feed look amazing. Want proof? Take a look at our Instagram feed. About 80% of the content you see in the feed was created with Canva! 

Canva is so good, agencies (like us) are starting to use it over more expensive design tools. Even the free version of Canva is packed full of awesome features! Their templates make it a breeze to size up posts for different social platforms and formats. For example, with a quick click, you can design a 1080×1080 standard Instagram post, a 1080×1350 portrait post, a 1080×1920 story post, and more!

Their built-in templates, fonts, design elements, grids, and more are a great way to create professional-looking content without having to open a user manual or take a course to learn a high-end design tool. If you’re looking for a quick and easy, yet powerful online design tool, Canva is the way to go!

Inshot

As many of us marketers have come to accept, video content is quickly becoming the most engaging form of online content! However, it’s not just as easy as shooting a single take and uploading the video directly to your Instagram feed. Chances are you’ll need to edit your video content to really make it pop on Instagram.

InShot is a great app for easily editing videos shot with your smartphone device. Instead of uploading your videos to your computer, you can edit your videos directly on your smartphone.

The app gives you tons of editing tools including the ability to add music, stickers, text, or filters to your videos. With the app’s ‘canvas’ tool, you can change your video size ratio to fit the dimensions required for Instagram Stories or feed posts. You can also add multiple different video clips to create a multi-clip video!

This tool is especially useful for adding captions to Instagram Stories or an IGTV post. The app allows you to set the duration of the text you add to the video, which is perfect for changing the captions as your video progresses. Instagram reports that 40% of Instagram Stories are viewed with sound off . InShot is the perfect way to make your videos more accessible to silent listeners so you don’t miss out on this potential engagement.

Boom, You’re on Track to Awesome Instagram Growth!

Well, there you have it! These are 7 of the coolest free Instagram tools that we have found in the last while. If you implement these and create a good strategy to go along with them, you will be on track to seeing some serious organic growth on Instagram.

As always, if you need help growing your social media presence, Konstruct Digital can provide you with the strategy and assistance you need to grow your audience and generate more leads for your business.