How to scale Instagram outreach (follow + DM) for 20+ university accounts without getting banned?
I'm running a business targeting university students in Japan.
Our current strategy: We follow the followers of university club Instagram accounts, and when they see our useful content, they convert. The conversion rate has been pretty high, so this method has worked well for us so far.
Now we're scaling up. Eventually we need to expand to 700 schools nationwide, but first we want to test with about 20 schools.
We need to follow the followers of these 20 schools' club accounts on Instagram and also send collaboration DMs to the clubs. The problem is, I can't handle all of this manually by myself (I have too many other things to do).
Here's what I've tried:
- Playwright automation → Account got suspended
- Manual management from a single device → Got rate-limited frequently (can't follow anymore, and this persists even when logging into different accounts on the same device)
My questions:
- Would purchasing residential proxies solve these issues?
- If I create a separate VM for each account, use residential proxies, and automate with mouse movement simulation (to mimic human behavior), would this work reliably without triggering Instagram's detection?
- Is automation possible using Xcode iPhone simulators?
- What about using AI browsers (like browser-use or similar AI agents)? Would that bypass Instagram's bot detection?
Any advice or experience with Instagram automation at scale would be appreciated!