# Strategy #1: Automating your King - Follow/Unfollow

This here is the oldest strategy in the books, dating all the way back to the early 2010s when Instagram was still in its infancy.

To this day, you’ll find many people continuing to utilize this strategy, albeit far less effectively. It is, however, the most cost-effective method and guarantees some semblance of positive results faster than many others.

In a nutshell, you simply automate your main account to perform follows with profiles that exhibit an interest in your desired niche. In my anecdotal experience, following your targets delivers far better results than any of the other actions which is why I believe this method has managed to survive as long as it has. It taps into the immense power of reciprocity, one of the principles covered within Robert Cildiani’s book “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion”. The targets you interact with are most likely to reciprocate or mirror whatever action you took to first initiate that interaction. If you liked one of their posts, they’re more likely to like one of your posts. If you commented on one of their posts, they’ll be more inclined to comment on one of yours. Therefore, someone who is trying to gain followers will likely get the best results out of following others. It really all just boils down to the simple concept of reciprocity.

You’ll find that this method has the highest ratio of growth to executed actions because there’s fewer barriers one has to traverse to reach your desired account. It’s so simplistic that its trajectory can be summarized in just three junctures:

1. You perform some sort of interaction with a target user that derives a notification (in this case, a follow)
2. User sees a notification featuring your profile
3. User clicks on your profile out of curiosity, checks out your content and makes a decision as to whether or not to follow you (or check out the link in bio or whatever your ultimate objective for the traffic is)

It’s that simple. It’s even easier to think of the trajectory as like a customer journey. Or I suppose in this scenario- the “follower” journey. Each additional step within the trajectory is an additional barrier within the follower journey, similar to how every click leading up to the checkout page is a barrier within the customer journey. The fewer the steps within the trajectory, the greater the growth/action ratio.

That is why this methodology is still so prevalent. If set up properly, it tends to get decent output with minimal input.

The array of existential and behavioral variables are still very much applicable to this strategy. You’d want your account to be at least a couple of months old, have human activity interspersed throughout scripted actions and utilize at least several [accelerators](/chapter-2-using-instainfantry/the-use-of-accelerators.md) to ensure your King account is only using its limited API calls on actions that bring traffic (which in this case are follows).


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