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How to scale Instagram outreach (follow + DM) for 20+ university accounts without getting banned?
Posted by on April 4, 2026 at 12:57 pmI'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!
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1 Reply
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Scaling from 1 account to 20+ on Instagram is less a volume problem and more a signal management problem. The follow back rate that usually worked at low volume degrades fast at scale because Instagram’s trust scoring is account level, not strategy level. The 700 school goal is achievable but the path probably is not running 20 accounts in parallel, what does your current follow to DM conversion actually look like per account?
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real talk, scaling outreach is less about the number of DMs and more about whether your profile looks legit when they click back to see who you are. i’ve been doing about 15-20 high quality pieces of content a week to keep my page looking active and professional. my stack is basically mailchimp for the newsletter side and runable for all the visual stuff like carousels and video clips because it’s way faster for volume than canva. if your content looks high end, people actually respond to the DMs because you don’t look like a bot.
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