Our Grade – D+
A masterful job in deceit.
At a Glance
Socialmeep is in the big leagues! At least, the big leagues of lying to naive Instagram users in order to get them to pay for a basic botting service. Socialmeep pulls out all the stops, including having the most saturated Trustpilot page filled with what appears to be 1000 fake reviews.
This service is relatively new, and has permeated search rankings by aggressively running Google ads.
One thing we found especially intriguing was that this service used to claim to have been “Founded by Ex-Instagressers.” Due to the legal ramifications, I highly doubt that anyone affiliated with Instagress (considered the forefather of Instagram growth) would use this affiliation to market a brand new service. Also, the name of this company is awful and is an insult to the intelligence of the Instagress folks.
Business Analysis
| Item | Result |
| Growth Type | “Advanced” botting |
| Quality of Service | Unknown |
| Business Registry / Location | USA |
| Traceable Team | Likely single owner |
| Functioning Phone | No |
| Longevity | 1+ year |
| Doesn’t Misuse IG Branding | True |
| Active Blog | Yes |
| External Sites | No |
| Dashboard / Account Management | N/A |
| Offsite Testimonies | Trustpilot |
| Forthcoming About Password Handling | N/A |
Pricing
Socialmeep has reasonable prices. $49 per month is pretty consistent and they’ll turn the knob a little bit in your favor if you double that and give them $99.
Service Details
This service openly admits to using software to grow your account. Though this is against Instagram’s terms, this causes us to have a higher baseline of trust for this provider. At least they’re honest… well… kind of.
I found this statement in one of their paid blog placements. Some of us here at Pretty Good Reviews have computer science backgrounds. This statement is laughable.
First of all, all Instagram bots use “artificial intelligence.” That’s the logic that allows them to run without human interaction. This term is completely overloaded and is absolutely meaningless. General rule of thumb: whenever you read “Artificial Intelligence,” there’s a high chance that someone is trying to sell you something that doesn’t strictly use AI.
Next “Computer Vision.” Tesla does computer vision. On Instagram, by definition, this isn’t possible, and would roughly translate to image processing. This usually just isn’t worthwhile to do and to conflate “computer vision” with “image processing” is just ridiculous.
We also have “Advanced machine learning.” Do I believe that any successful bot service extracts some insights about accounts and then tunes their bots? Sure. Do I think they have advanced machine learning models? No. Customers wouldn’t really benefit from this anyway.
If you put lipstick on a pig, it’s still a pig. This is a basic botting service that might have a few bells and whistles, but, in the best case scenario, your results won’t differ much from other services.
Integrity & Reputation
This business throws up so many red flags that we doubt we’ve identified them all.
First of all, the Trustpilot reviews. This is the most insane abuse of the platform that we’ve ever seen.
So, this company has been around for less than a year and they’ve miraculously gained thousands of gleaming reviews? This distribution is crazy! People should study this at an academic level. How can Trustpilot be allowing this to happen.
Looking at the reviews, it’s a pattern of like 1 4-star review for every 8 5-star ones. This is a nice touch, but it’s not fooling me. None of these reviews are specific, in fact, some of them contain conflicting reviews. They’re mostly just spouting completely vague stuff for 1-2 sentences, never providing any specifics.
Some more silly claims:
4500 NEW FOLLOWERS PER MONTH ON AVERAGE! Sign me up. Most services would struggle to get you 450 followers per month and that’s if you had decent content. Advertising nearly 5000 per month is insane. You can’t do 15x better than an Instagram bot. You are an Instagram bot!
Also, 55,000 users? Your service hasn’t been around for long at all. You mean to tell me you’ve generated over $300,000 (at least) and yet we still can’t find any more information about this company anywhere? If you had even 5000 customers, you’d have way more negative reviews. Not implying that the service must be awful, but I know how these things go. People complain for no reason.
Every negative review is specific and, obviously, not responded to. This business seems to be doing a surprisingly high-volume business, but it’s 100% due to the fact that they run ads.
Next, the company doesn’t exist anywhere on the internet outside of their website. It claims to be a part of “LKR Social Holding Group” yet we couldn’t find any records of that company either. We searched so deeply that we actually determined that this domain was previously used by some guys in Ghana for a totally different purpose back in 2012.
Were we able to track down the owner? Well, kind of. There’s this guy named Bryson Edgar who writes their blog posts and also features prominently in their fake blog placement articles:
I’ll give it to him, Mr. Edgar has one of the most complete LinkedIn profiles we’ve ever seen, and we’ve done almost 100 of these reviews now. What’s hilarious is that he doesn’t list his involvement with Socialmeep anywhere on his profile despite purportedly being authorized to speak to the media by his boss…
Hey wait, is there a chance that Bryson is the boss?
Having a background in eCommerce and marketing while now working as a programmer while getting your online STEM masters degree is a likely profile of someone more deeply involved with an Instagram growth service.
On the company’s Betalist entry, two other names appear:
We can see here that Bryson appears to be the head honcho. Alexandra, interstingly, links to Combin, another Instagram growth service, in her Twitter bio:
And Corey is actually a woman who seems to be some marketing “expert.” Definitely not a master coder behind the scenes.
At the tail end of this review, it’s hopefully clear why the owner doesn’t clearly identify himself. This service doesn’t seem to be well-liked by users and there is no way the team is able to accurately handle all of the complaints they get.
Conclusion
Socialmeep is a new Instagram growth service that makes bold claims but doesn’t deliver for customers. They company tricks people by paying for ads, fake blog placements, and hundreds of fake 5-star reviews. While we’re not against bot platforms, we are against ones that deceive customers.