Updated April 2025. If you are trying to gain followers, you may be tempted to join an engagement pod or group. Well that is one of the biggest mistakes you will ever take when trying to gain followers. The idea of these games to increase engagement and gain followers seem harmless and overall beneficial. But doing this will have long-term damage to your social page.

Engagement Pods (on Instagram or Facebook)

Engagement pods are a group of people who agree to try to help each other advance their post engagement. On a small scale, people can do these with a small group of friends on Instagram. Essentially what they would do would be to send their post to a group DM. Then the group members would go to that post to like, comment, and share. Although we love seeing friends supporting friends, this doesn’t work.

The reason it doesn’t work is because if the same 10 people are liking, commenting, and sharing as the first engagements to the post, it reads as spammy. Especially because they aren’t finding the post organically in their feed. Coming across a post organically holds so much more value in the algorithm than having a direct share from the owner of the post and clicking it.

Nowadays the idea of engagement pods has grown to MASSIVE sizes. And now they have moved to moderated Facebook Groups.

Facebook Engagement Groups

Back in 2020, I joined an engagement group on Facebook that had over 5,000 active members. It had strict rules for participation and had many different opportunities per day to join games to increase likes, comments, Story Views, Tik Tok views, etc. I felt confident that I would be able to gain more traction on Instagram. Since there were many members, there were 50-300 participants per game depending on the type of game. I thought that even 50 extra likes on my content would be a win!

But I was wrong.

Having all those people flood a direct URL link to my page hurt my organic reach and engagement. ANd thereby negatively affects you trying to gain followers.

Think about it. How often do you send people an Instagram link OUTSIDE of Instagram? Odds are you aren’t texting your friends an Insta URL. You’re just sharing it to them directly on Instagram.

After a few weeks in the group, I found that I had to play two or three of these games to get my post’s engagement back to what I was getting organically before playing the games! Having those people ‘like’ my content that were receiving a direct link, that were not my followers, that were not my target audience, and did not spend more than a split second on my post did it’s harm. It made the algorithm read all of those actions as “FAKE”.

It was ruining my post’s opportunity to be pushed to the lucky 10% of my followers. And thereby when the game stopped, so did the engagement.

The algorithm will always be smarter than us when it comes to trying to gain followers.

Pinterest Group Boards

Group Boards are a way for many Pinterest users to Pin their content to one community Board. They tend to have many members posting to the board constantly. When you post a Pin on a Board that constantly has other people pinning items too, your Pin quickly becomes old news. Inevitably that Pin will only show a few views, if you’re lucky, and 0 engagement. And that severely affects your engagement rate.

Lower engagement rate = lower opportunity for new people to see your content = lower opportunity to gain followers.

Not to mention that the only people who post on Group Boards are influencers who are trying to do the same thing you are. Boost their own engagement. Which means that they post and leave. They are not there to find new content to Repin. They are there to post their content in the hopes of someone seeing it and boosting their own engagement. Essentially you are posting on a dead Board. Keep your valuable content to your Boards ONLY.

For reference, pre-Group Boards I had about 300k monthly viewers on Pinterest. Now I average about 60k.

Loop Giveaways for trying to gain followers

Many influencers believe that this is a great way to gain followers on Instagram. And although you will receive more followers, you won’t receive better engagement. Why? Because the people gained in these giveaways are not there for your content. They are there for free stuff and that’s it.

By gaining followers that don’t care about your content, your engagement rate will tank. Because when your content is published to Instagram, it will get pushed to a very small percentage of your followers. If those followers interact with your content, then Instagram will keep pushing it to more users. But if it gets pushed to one of these giveaway followers, odds are they won’t like, comment, share, or save.

Ditch the loop giveaways and the fake following. No one wants that lack of engagement from that following anyway! Just don’t do loop giveaways.

Final Thoughts on trying to gain followers

Now I know all these things will continue to entice you with a good time and the prospect of trying to gain followers on Instagram. And trust me, I know everyone’s experience is different when it comes to each one of these things. But each one of these things, including paying for followers, will only hurt your page in the long run. Avoid these actions at all costs.

If you are a creator or influencer and want all the best information? Check out my blog series, License to Influence. Not only do I work on social media for myself, but I also have worked as a few brand’s social media manager too. I have seen both sides of the algorithm. And instead of making a course and selling it like so many influencers do, I just want to get the information out there for anyone else looking to do more with their content. So check it out, and I hope you find it helpful!