What is Mass Story Viewing on Instagram and is it Worth it?

Mass story viewing, or sometimes referred to as mass looking, is a way of Instagram promotion that allows you to attract a new audience by watching their stories in bulk automatically. This promotion method appeared in 2019.

Often, this method doesn’t imply actual viewing of stories, which means you won’t see the content of the story but your Instagram nickname will be visible to the story author. So don’t mix it up with anonymous story viewing — you won’t be anonymous when mass looking, that’s the whole point.

Does Mass Viewing Work in 2020?

Pretty much but only for accounts with few followers. Why is that? Because only users who don’t have lots of followers care who view their stories and pay actual attention to it. If a user has more than 500 or 1000 followers, focusing on the story viewers doesn’t make much sense.

As you might have guessed, celebrities and bloggers don’t actually view your stories; they simply don’t have time for that. If you see some celebs or influencers in your story viewers list, 99% they’re using mass viewing.

With mass story viewing, you can watch hundreds and thousands of stories in just a couple of minutes. It largely depends on the service you use for this and its pricing tiers.

Mass looking, just as mass liking, commenting or follow/unfollow, is a grey-hat way of Instagram promotion. Generally speaking, all that doesn't include paying to Instagram for targeted ads is considered grey but it doesn’t mean it’s not efficient.

However, this way is not so pricey as influencer marketing, easier than paid social, and with Instagram stories not going anywhere (even growing), that’s an efficient way of Instagram promotion.

Instagram now doesn't give much credit to such methods and reduces limits on actions such as comments, likes, follows, and stories viewing.

Mass story viewing limits 2020

Back in summer 2019, Instagram introduced limits to actions, mass looking included. Now, the limit for mass looking is about 15,000 story views a day. Note that these limits are different for each account and largely depend on various factors, such as account age, level of activity, stats, interaction with other users and so on.

How to Grow Instagram with Mass Story Viewing?

Ideally, mass looking should work as follows: a user analyses its story viewers, sees an unknown Instagram account, taps on it and follows it if the content in the profile is interesting.

If you want to promote your brand or personal blog with mass Instagram story viewing, you can achieve the following:

Attraction of a new audience. But again, it mainly works if the account whose story you’re ‘watching’ is small. In this case, they might be interested to know who watched their story and follow you. If this is a blogger with thousands of followers, they probably won’t be so eager to know who you are.

• Reach increase. You can use mass looking to watch stories of your own followers and thus remind them about yourself and increase organic Instagram reach.
• Profile visits growth. Even if people don’t follow you when seeing your account in their story viewer list, they can at least visit your profile and grow your performance.

As you already know, mass looking is possible only with special tools that automate this activity. Combin Growth is one of them. How to use Combin Growth for mass story viewing we’ll cover below.

Here are some hacks for you to leverage mass looking in 2020:

1. Pick funny profile nicknames that draw users’ attention and incite their interest.
   
2. Create engaging content on your page so that a person wouldn’t want to leave it after they visit it. Use different kinds of content: videos, IGTV, stories, contests, quests, and so on.
   
3. If your business is bound to a certain area, add this location into your bio.Don’t be too pushy when talking about your products in the posts. Such obtrusive advertising sacres people off.
   
4. Build visual aesthetics of your Instagram page. Use mass story viewing on your target audience only!
   
5. Add offers or discounts to your Instagram name. For instance, Get a free cup of coffee or 5% OFF for new followers. When people notice your account in their story viewers list, they can only see your nickname and name. Attract their attention with your creative name or user handle.

Mass Story Viewing Tools

The latest update of Combin Growth has this feature which allows you to “view” stories automatically in a batch when you’re searching for content and within users’ lists. You can’t actually watch Stories in the app! Combin does it in the background mode.

To set this task, you just need to start a new search as you normally would.

When setting up the search parameters, make sure you search for a target audience only: pick relevant geotags, hashtags, or search by followers, followings, likers, or commenters of your competitor.

You can also search for specific users’ list or bio keywords.

Then at the bottom of the screen find the ‘View the poster’s Stories’ button and select users whose Stories you want to watch. Tap on the button, and the task will appear in the taskbar.

Note though that this isn’t a way to watch stories anonymously! Your account will be visible to the story owner on Instagram.

When the app completes the task, your account name will appear in the story viewers list. If you’ve set the targeting right and your profile is interesting for these users, who knows, maybe they’ll become your followers and customers!

Combin Growth also will stop all the activity as soon as your account reaches daily limits thus avoiding a ban or flag from Instagram.

The Bottom Line: Is Mass Story Viewing Worth It?

It is, but as with any other automated promotion, it requires conscious effort from you; now tools can do almost everything for you, not completely everything though. Make sure you choose the right audience, correct targeting settings and use proper tools for mass looking.

Since this is a cheaper and easier growth method than paid social or influencer marketing, you should definitely give it a try if you want to increase your account followership and exposure.

Previously published at https://blog.combin.com/mass-story-viewing-way-of-instagram-promotion-b8b991ceccb6