In this article, I will teach you how to save time on social media platforms and boost your rankings with easy copy-and-paste scripts for the following:
I hate social media. It is such a time trap, designed impeccably to fulfill your egotistical addictions. Just like sugar, ice cream, and romance that boost your serotonin, as do follows, comments and likes on your personal profile. The platform doesn’t matter, they are based on the same fundamental psychological principles: a very fast feedback loop and emotional spikes of dopamine.
From one perspective, there are three sides to social media:
You can be one, two or three of those sides; each one a time sink. If you’re a consumer, it’s easy to lose time. If you’re an advertiser, it’s challenging to produce persuasive content. Besides spending money, you have to know who is your audience, choose the demographics, the right keywords and show them interesting stuff media.
The most challenging of all three is producing. This is especially true when you are starting in a saturated and highly-competitive market. You might think to yourself, just as I did. “Wow there are all these silly profiles, ugly selfies and unentertaining ads getting tons of views so it must be easy to achieve.”
Let me at it!
Social media account created. Step 1 complete. Okay, I got a cool username and an idea to show the world my awesome photos of photoshopped celebrities with pet memes. Based on keyword searches, those should be irresistible to watch. They are called memes for a reason. But I don’t know that reason, I just want you to see my perspective because it’s freakin’ cool to me so it’s going to be cool to you... or is it?
2,000 hours, thousands of opportunity-cost dollars, one broken camera later your results are different. Mine had one account suspended after a few days and the other shadow banned.
Am I in a parallel dimension of social media? I thought I got it. All the successful people say “don’t quit, keep going, you’re almost there, be consistent, follow your passion”. Even after paying for social media growth courses, the instructional content becomes useless due to the changes in the rankings algorithms designed by the platforms.
I want to tell you the single most important thing about social media but before I do that, here’s what I learned from my mistakes.
I’m not claiming to be a social media expert at this time, I just don’t want you to lose as much time as I did. Other than video courses, I also received advice from major influencers which have over 300,000 followers.
Their account has a high engagement-rate on instagram and is in the same niche as mine.
To summarize the their advice, it is to proactively seek out and engage your target audience outside of Instagram.
That is if your content is great.
You should also be careful when dealing with social media marketers which use hacking tactics. They seek out exploits in the specific software
platform which allows them to get a huge growth on a handful occasions before said platform discovers it and suspends any additional account attempting the hack.
It happened to one of my accounts after applying the tactic I received from a growth hacker seminar in San Francisco. The thing about that is if you hear a recommendation for a growth hack, it may be for a specific scenario and certainly won’t mention any drawbacks which may happen to your
account.
Growth hackers may take precautions not to get your account suspended but only after hiring them. Thus when you are starting off, you have two options: be prepared for a long journey or spend money on your own ads.
There are actually more options like outsourcing the work to grow your social media. “Follow-unfollow” takes time. A bit more later on that.
As a disclaimer, I don’t have an instagram business account, it’s a personal one. I have considered making it a business account, but several people told me my current engagement would drop with Instagram expecting me to buy ads. I also have not bought ads for social media and I don’t use any third party services. However I have used some self-hosted bots to auto-like, auto-comment, auto-schedule posts.
To be transparent, my social media growth is slow and mostly
organic. For instagram, I have participated in a contest as a paying sponsor. The contest nearly doubled my follower account but it was temporary. Prior to doing the contest, I specifically asked the host if the followers will be genuine and I was confirmed they would be. This was not entirely true, now I’m stuck with ghost followers and some real followers. Therefore, my return on investment was minuscule.
With further observations, I had a good experience with the bot script that seemed to get my account more noticed than before. The auto comments got me responses as long as my pre-written comments were specific and
highly-relevant to the keywords I selected. The important part was throttling the bot so it would behave more human like.
Many services already exist to automate social media publishing for you. I haven’t used them but should you want to learn more, they are Hootsuite, Planoly, and Later, etc.
My idea with the comment bot was to survey instagram users in my niche so I could build rapport. The messages were open-ended questions about the niche of the specific accounts. The comments I sent asked about their motivation and why they got into the niche. Those two comment topics worked the best. Generic greetings, compliments and questions were ignored.
At this point, I realized that engagement is important. Coincidently, it was annoying to be on the receiving end of bots especially the emoji-only comments. It made me into an anti-emoji person. It was like fighting fire with fire except we were all trying to increase our followers or make a sale.
There’s a requirement before you think engagement is all you
need. Writing great comments and tapping likes all day may get you eyes on your account but you still need unique, quality content on your end. Wait a minute, I’ve heard that so many times said by so many people: “quality content”. It’s such an ambiguous description for a goal and highly subjective. What is high quality to you may not be high quality to me!
So please allow me to refine the objective of “quality content”. Quality content is creative material produced for a specific audience to be emotionally appealing or thought-provoking. After long thought, I have
clarified and re-spun the meaning into two words: “emotional gold”. That is
coined by my so you may use it from now on.
If there were any great social media courses for me to recommend, they would be on creating content for a specific audience.
There’s seems to be a lack of content creation courses and an abundance of social media marketing courses. If it’s not obvious why, it is because content-creation is subjective to quality while marketing is just psychology. This is like a grey area, so you can say almost anything and you don't have to prove it. In the future, I plan to write an article on content creation but until then it’s a good idea to get feedback on your content from friends. Then boost your account with the following free scripts.
Due note that you should take precautions before using these
scripts as they may go against some of the terms of use on their respective
platforms. But relax, there are tons of people using automation service so the terms are not strictly enforced. First of all, don’t try it on new accounts
because that is when the platforms are most sensitive to bots. You will have daily limits on the script actions.
I would suggest using an account which has been open for a minimum of 30 days. It would also be helpful to create a test account so you can test the scripts before applying them to your most valuable account. Even though the following scripts are powerful, they are not as risky as using
actual bots.
As long as you can copy and paste code, you will be able to
benefit from my scripts.
Event though I suggested not buying social media marketing courses, I will admit that this article was inspired from growyourclicks.com by David. He provided me his course for free. David has shown evidence of his social media accounts having lots of followers and engagement. That hooked me
into his course, although his accounts are not personally-branded. They are the niche compilation type which are known to be popularized easier than a personal brand. Some of the scripts provided here are from David’s course.
Next thing you might have on your mind is why should I use the boost scripts. So far we have established that we need “emotional gold” for
content and engagement from others. To get engagement you have to engage others. It is in favor of the ranking algorithms.
If you have been on the receiving end, then you have seen the generic comments and emojis which I need not repeat here. The direct messages trying to sell you a service in the first message are the most annoying. It’s like the CD scam when a stranger approaches you on the street telling you to buy their CD, yet they have no knowledge of what music genre you like.
There is a 5% chance that your profile gets a comment or follow from a greater influencer account followed by over 15,000 other users. You get a big hit of dopamine, smile, and think to yourself “Wow, my content is getting better since this popular model or wealthy 18 year-old investor noticed me.” I’m so happy now.
Well, don’t hold any expectations at this time; wait a few days and check your account again. Did that popular individual unfollow? If so, you have been a victim of the “follow-unfollow” method. Get used to it. In fact, do the same thing. Just kidding don’t do the same thing, but instead do it better.
The big famous accounts already do what I’m about to teach you. It’s normal and mostly artificial but it works. Nobody really wants to spend all day on social media if they don’t have to. It’s also unhealthy. That’s why you will want to apply the scripts to reduce the time you are on social media.
The idea behind the script is to discover and engage more people (accounts) which may like your content. Hashtags have been around for a
long time now so that is the old fashioned way to search and find niche-related accounts. The newer and better method is to engage followers of accounts in your niche which are the most popular social media accounts.
For example, if you create content about the wine industry or social media growth, you will want to follow Gary Vaynerchuk and communicate with his followers such as liking their comments, following them and responding to the comments they wrote. The scripts provided here will help you do this much faster.
If done manually, you will spend one hour picking the right followers thinking they might like your content in hopes of following you back. With a script you can do this in bulk and spend only ten minutes getting a higher return (replies and follows).
The following scripts should work on Chrome, Safari and Firefox. They are not intended to be used on mobile devices. They work only in an open browser session which means once you close the browser window, the script stops and disappears from the browser. It will have to be re-pasted into the browser console to run again. Each platform has its own limits of amount of people you can follow. Don’t exceed these limits.
Alternatively, I have developed a Chrome Extension for non-technical people so you don't have to mess with any code, just try out my extension free from the Chrome store by clicking here. The scripts are as follows:
1. Open the browser javascript console (CMD+Option+I on Mac, Ctrl+Shift+J on Windows)
2. Paste the corresponding code
FACEBOOK Like all posts and invite users of a group
// Like all visible posts in a group
// https://www.facebook.com/groups/[groupname]
var inputs = document.querySelectorAll('[data-testid="UFI2ReactionLink"]')
for(var i=0; i<inputs.length; i++) {
if (inputs[i].children.length !== 0) {
//inputs[i].click();
console.log(i);
}
}
// Auto-invite fan post
var buttons;
buttons = document.getElementsByClassName('_42ft');
for (var i = 0; i < buttons.length; i++) {
if(buttons[i].getAttribute('ajaxify') != null){
if(buttons[i].getAttribute('ajaxify').indexOf('invite') != -1){
buttons[i].click();
}
}
QUORA Follow followers and upvote all comments
// Navigate to profile https://www.quora.com/profile/[username]/followers
var buttons = document.querySelectorAll('[role="button"]');
for (var i=0; i < 39; i++) {
buttons[i].click();
}
// Upvote all comments
var buttons = document.querySelectorAll('[action_click="AnswerUpvote"]');
for (var i=0; i<buttons.length; i++) {
buttons[i].click();
}
TWITTER Favorite tweets and follow others
// Favorite tweets on the page
a = setInterval(function () {
window.scrollTo(0,document.body.scrollHeight);
$('.ProfileTweet-actionButton.js-actionButton.js-actionFavorite:visible').click();
}, 1000)
// Follow daily limit 35, depends on account
var FOLLOW_PAUSE = 1000;
var FOLLOW_RAND = 250;
var PAGE_WAIT = 2000;
__cnt__ = 0;
var f;
f = function() {
var eles;
var __lcnt__ = 0;
eles = jQuery('.Grid-cell .not-following .follow-text').each(function(i, ele) {
ele = jQuery(ele);
if (ele.css('display') != 'block') {
console.trace('Already following: ' + i);
return;
}
setTimeout(function() {
console.trace("Following " + i + " of " + eles.length);
ele.click();
if ((eles.length - 1) == i) {
console.trace("Scrolling...");
window.scrollTo(0, document.body.scrollHeight);
setTimeout(function() {
f();
}, PAGE_WAIT);
}
}, __lcnt__++ * FOLLOW_PAUSE + Math.random()*(FOLLOW_RAND) - FOLLOW_RAND/2);
__cnt__++;
});
}
f();
MEDIUM Follow followers of an author
// Click on an author and click on their followers
var inputs = document.getElementsByClassName('button--follow');
for (var i=0; i < 150; i++) { inputs[i].click(); }
SOUNDCLOUD Follow people of a profile or audio track
// Follow people of a Profile or Audio Track - daily limit 40
var inputs = document.getElementsByClassName('sc-button-follow sc-button sc-button-small sc-button-responsive');
for(var i=0; i < 39; i++) { inputs[i].click(); }
LINKEDIN Add connections
// Add connections
var currentSuccesfulConnections = 0;
var totalConnections = 0;
var totalInvitations = 0;
var inviteText = "";
function addConnection(connection) {
var btn_type=connection.text().trim().split(' ')[0].trim();
if (btn_type!=inviteText) {
connection.trigger('click');
currentSuccesfulConnections+=1;
} else {
totalInvitations+=1;
}
}
function createConnections(text_invite,max_succesful_connections) {
inviteText = text_invite;
var connections=jQuery('.button-secondary-small');
totalConnections=connections.size();
if (max_succesful_connections==0) {
max_succesful_connections=totalConnections;
}
connections.each(function(index, value) {
if(currentSuccesfulConnections<max_succesful_connections){
setTimeout(addConnection($(this)), index * 1000);
} else {
return false;
}
});
console.log("Possible total connections: " + totalConnections);
console.log("Succesful total connections: " + currentSuccesfulConnections);
console.log("Total invitations avoided: " + totalInvitations);
}
PINTEREST Follow people in a category
// Follow in category
var buttons = document.getElementsByClassName('RCK Hsu mix');
for(var i=0; i < 39; i++) { buttons[i].click(); }
YOUTUBE Comment Liker
// Click on a video and load all the comments.
javascript:var inputs = document.getElementsByClassName('style-scope ytd-comment-action-buttons-renderer style-text size-default');
for (var i=0; i<inputs.length;i++) {
inputs[i].click();
}
Summary
In this article you have learned that social media is a time sink and an addiction. You cannot trust growth hackers finding exploits at any given time. Ranking algorithms due change frequently and what gained growth on your account before may not work any longer. Spending time on engaging other users is just as important as creating your own content. Outsourcing your social media growth to a virtual assistant can be a more efficient use of your time. You will get spam comments and direct message just as you do by email. Reduce your time spent on social media by applying automation scripts to your social media accounts.
Finally, follow me on Twitter and Instagram to get notified of new tutorials and if you need custom scripts. The scripts in this article can also be located on github.com for quick reference.
General tips not to forget