Social media has become a powerful tool for success in today’s digital world. Whether you're an influencer, a small business owner, or someone trying to grow an online audience, one question always comes up: Should you use automated services from a cheap SMM panel or rely on organic marketing strategies?
This post breaks down both options and helps you determine which technique suits your needs the best.
What are Automated services?
These are tools that help you grow your social media accounts quickly. They are offered through platforms called SMM panels, also known as Social Media Marketing panels.
With the help of these services, users can gain followers, likes, comments, shares, views, and more on popular platforms like Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, and Twitter.
One of the biggest benefits of using these panels is the speed and ease. Furthermore, instead of spending a lot of time trying to grow your account, you can pay a small fee and get results instantly.
These are tools that help you grow your social media accounts quickly. To understand how this compares with organic growth, read our blog on SMM Panel VS Organic Growth.
Benefits of Using Automated Services
Now that you understand the meaning of automated services, let’s understand the benefits of using automated services:
1. Provides Speed
With the help of these panels, you can see the results quickly. Whether it is likes on a photo or followers on a profile, it happens almost instantly.
2. Reduces Manual Labour
If you focus on organic marketing techniques, you have to do all the hard work. Whereas with a social media panel, you just place an order, and the service handles the rest.
3. Great for New Accounts
With social media being too competitive and new social media accounts find it difficult to gain traction. These panels help you gain more followers and likes to make your profile look more active, which may attract real users, too.
4. Cost-Effective
Most social media panels are budget-friendly, especially if you are a small business or just starting and want to build some social proof.
Disadvantages of Using Automated Services
Once we have looked at some cons of these automated services. Let’s look into the disadvantages of using these automated services.
1. Low-Quality Engagement
While most of the social media marketing providers provide high-quality services. Some provide likes and followers from chatbots or accounts of people who are not real. This leads to no proper engagement with the users’ content.
2. Risk Of Penalties
When users receive engagement from accounts that are not real, and social media platforms detect fake activity, they flag or restrict your account.
3. High Drop Rates Over Time
Another disadvantage of using automated services is that the followers you gain often don't stay. Many of them unfollow after a few days or weeks, or their accounts get deactivated by the platform.
Due to this sudden drop in followers, your profile looks unstable, and it hurts your long-term growth.
4. Damage To Engagement Rate
When your followers start to drop off, your engagement rate, such as likes, comments, and shares, also drops. Furthermore, having a low engagement rate can make it harder to reach real audiences through social media algorithms.
What are Manual efforts?
Also known as organic growth, manual growth includes growing your social media presence by creating content, engaging with your audience, and using strategies like hashtags, collaborations, and posting content consistently. This approach takes time and effort, but the growth is real and long-lasting.
Advantages of Using Manual Efforts
As a brand or a business, most people focus on organic growth, and below are some of the advantages of using organic marketing techniques:
1. Provides Real Engagement
With the help of organic engagement, you receive an audience that is real, and they follow you because they like your content and want to interact with you.
2. Creates Stronger Brand Trust
Users and followers trust creators or brands that are growing naturally, as it leads to loyal followers and customers.
Moreover, when they see people have real accounts engaging with your content, it helps develop a sense of reliability and credibility for them.
3. Creates More Opportunities
Brands and businesses are more likely to work with people who have genuine followers and high engagement.
They prefer to work with these people as they have honest engagement, and it shows that your audience truly cares about what you share.
Disadvantages of Using Manual Efforts
1. Growth Is Slow
Organic growth is slow. Even with regular posting and engagement, growth can be very slow. There is no guarantee your efforts will always pay off, and it may hurt small business owners or people who have just created new social media accounts.
2. Users Face Algorithm Challenges
As a social media user, you know that social media algorithms keep changing. If you had some content that was ranking, it will drop, leading to a drop in engagement as well. This makes it difficult to understand which content is working and which is not.
3. Time-Taking
If you use organic marketing techniques to grow your social media accounts, it takes a lot of time. You have to post regularly, reply to comments, stay active, and keep coming up with new ideas. Unlike quick results from paid services, these take months or even years to see substantial changes.
Can we combine them both?
Yes. You will get better results when you use a balanced mix of automated services and manual efforts.
As a brand or a user, you can start using automated services to get a head start, then follow up with organic techniques such as posting engaging content, replying to comments, and consistently posting to build your followers. You can use insights and analytics to track what works and adjust your strategy.
Conclusion
People, brands, and businesses are always on the lookout to search different ways to grow on social media. There are two ways through which you can grow on social media, such as Automated services and Organic techniques.
Both of them have their pros and cons, but it is always best to use a mix of both of these techniques to grow your online presence.