MySocialFollowing Alternative: Why Kicksta Builds Real Followers Instead of Selling Them

If you're searching for a MySocialFollowing alternative, you've probably already got a sense of what that service does well and where it stops short. Maybe you bought a follower package before a launch and watched the number go up, but nothing else really changed. Maybe you're just trying to figure out, before you spend anything, whether a delivered-package model is actually what you want versus something that builds an audience over time.

Both Kicksta and MySocialFollowing operate in the Instagram growth space, and both involve paying for a service that affects your account's numbers. Past that, they're not doing the same thing at all. One sells you a quantity. The other builds you an audience. That difference is worth understanding before you pick either one.

Two Different Models: Delivered Packages vs. Targeted Outreach

MySocialFollowing has been around since 2007 and says it's served over 500,000 clients across Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, X, and other platforms. The way it works is straightforward: you pick a package — followers, likes, automatic likes, views, comments, or some combo — and it gets delivered to your account. Their stated methods are incentivized users (real people who join their network and get promotion of their own content in exchange for engaging with others) and paid social advertising. They're clear that none of it is bots.

Kicksta works from a different starting point. Instead of delivering a fixed quantity of anything, it runs targeted outreach on real Instagram accounts in your niche — following them, viewing their stories, engaging with their posts — so that real people notice your profile and decide, on their own, to follow it. Nothing is delivered to your account from outside. The growth comes from your account actually doing things on the platform, aimed at people who are statistically likely to care about what you post. A follower Kicksta generates is someone who saw your account show up in their world and chose to follow it — not someone fulfilling an order. It's the same logic behind organic growth generally — Kicksta's own guide to growing Instagram followers organically covers the manual version of this same approach — just automated and run at a scale a person couldn't keep up with by hand.

Both models produce a bigger follower count. Only one of them produces people who chose you because of what you actually post.

Targeting and Follower Relevance

This is the part that ends up mattering more than almost anything else. MySocialFollowing's followers come from its incentivized network and ad campaigns — real accounts, but there's no mechanism for specifying that you want people who are actually interested in your niche. Someone in the network engages because they get something back for it, not because your content caught their attention.

Kicksta's targeting works the other way around. You tell it who to go after — followers of specific competitor accounts, particular influencers, hashtag communities relevant to what you post — and the platform lets you narrow it further by follower count, post count, activity level, account privacy, and following count, running up to 30 targets at once. It also pulls from historical performance data across major niches to suggest targets that have already worked well for similar accounts, so a brand-new user isn't starting from a blank slate. A broader look at the best Instagram growth services on the market walks through this in more depth if you want to see how the targeting mechanics stack up against other tools in the category, not just MySocialFollowing.

The practical difference: with MySocialFollowing, you're trusting that "real people, not bots" is enough. With Kicksta, you're defining who the audience actually is before a single follow happens.

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What Happens After Someone Follows

Most growth tools — and MySocialFollowing's model, by design, doesn't really have this step at all — stop at the follow. Kicksta treats the follow as the start of a sequence, not the finish line. After following a targeted account, it automatically views that person's stories, which gets your name in front of them again before they've made any decision. If they follow back, the Like After Follow feature engages with their recent posts to reinforce the connection, and they're automatically added to your Instagram Close Friends list through the Close Friends Auto-Adder — which, in practice, means your new followers start seeing your Close Friends stories immediately, and story engagement from that group tends to show up faster than it would otherwise.

The welcome DM is the part that took the most thought. Instead of firing off a message the second someone follows, which is exactly the kind of thing that reads as automated, Kicksta waits 3 to 4 days, keeps viewing that person's stories in the meantime, then checks whether they actually followed back. If they did, the message goes out. If they didn't, they're unfollowed and no DM is sent. From the other end, what that looks like is someone who followed you a few days ago, saw a couple of your stories in between, and then gets a message that doesn't feel like it fired the instant they hit "follow" — it feels like someone noticed.

MySocialFollowing doesn't have an equivalent to this because its model doesn't involve a follow-back decision in the first place — the numbers you buy are delivered directly, not earned through a sequence.

Safety and Account Risk

This is one area where it's worth being precise rather than persuasive, because overstating a safety claim is its own kind of risk. Kicksta's infrastructure runs on real devices with dedicated proxies per account, spreads activity across the day instead of in bursts, includes a warm-up period for new accounts, and has adaptive cooldown systems that pull back automatically if Instagram signals concern. It's designed to keep account behavior inside what looks like normal usage.

MySocialFollowing has been operating since 2007 and cites a 90% reorder rate, which suggests most customers aren't running into account problems. That said, its engagement is applied to your account from outside — through a network and ad campaigns — rather than originating from your own account's behavior, which is a different risk profile worth weighing on its own terms, not necessarily a worse one.

Instagram's own community standards on authentic engagement note that the platform can act on accounts showing artificially inflated metrics, regardless of how that inflation happened. No growth service — Kicksta included — can promise Instagram will never change its enforcement posture. That's true of this whole category, not a knock on either service specifically.

One thing worth checking regardless of which service you're evaluating: if you're already following and unfollowing accounts manually, or running other engagement activity by hand, layering that on top of an automated platform can push your account's activity pattern outside what looks normal to Instagram. This breakdown of the real risks of Instagram bots covers what's actually at stake there.

Transparency and Reporting

Open Kicksta's dashboard on a given day and you can watch things happen close to live — which account it just followed, whether that account followed back yet, which of your target lists it came from, and whether a story view or a welcome DM went out. It's a running log, not a summary you have to request. MySocialFollowing shows delivery status on your order and an invoice once it's complete — you can confirm the count went up, but there's no way to see who those followers are or why they were included in your package.

Where MySocialFollowing Actually Makes Sense

To be fair about it: if what you need is a quick, one-time bump to a specific number — pushing a follower count past a threshold before a launch, adding visible likes to a key post, boosting views on a Reel before you pitch a brand — MySocialFollowing can do that fast, and the pricing for those smaller packages is genuinely accessible. That's a real use case. Plenty of people searching for a comparison like this one aren't trying to build a long-term audience; they need a specific metric to look better by a specific date, and a subscription-based targeting platform like Kicksta isn't really built to solve that particular problem quickly.

Outside of that specific situation, though, the two services are answering different questions, and most people comparing them are asking the audience-building one.

Pricing

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MySocialFollowing sells one-time packages by quantity — you pay once for a set number of followers, likes, views, or comments, and prices vary by package size, generally staying accessible at smaller quantities. Payment options include credit cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Cash App, backed by a money-back guarantee and a lifetime guarantee on delivered engagement.

Kicksta runs on a monthly subscription instead:

The models aren't really priced against each other — one is a subscription that keeps working every month, the other is a single transaction. Which one is the better value depends entirely on whether you want a number to go up once or an audience that keeps growing.

Getting Started

Signing up for MySocialFollowing means picking your platform, then choosing among followers, likes, automatic likes, views, comments, or a combo package, then a quantity — with all of that spread across Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, and X, there's a real decision to make before you even get to checkout.

Kicksta's setup is more linear: connect your Instagram account, set your targeting — competitor accounts, influencers, or hashtags in your niche — and the platform starts working from there, drawing on its historical performance data to suggest targets if you're not sure where to start. The 7-day free trial means you can see actual results before committing to either plan, with no package-picking required.

Results: What the Numbers Actually Mean

Instagram's algorithm weighs engagement heavily when deciding how far to distribute your content. A sudden jump in followers who don't interact with your posts pulls your engagement rate down, which tells the algorithm your content isn't resonating — and that reduces your reach even among the followers you already had. According to research on social media trends report, engagement rate correlates with meaningful outcomes more directly than raw follower count does, for creators and businesses alike.

Because the followers Kicksta generates chose to follow after a real engagement sequence rather than as part of an incentivized exchange, they tend to interact at higher rates than followers who arrived through a network or an ad. Worth saying plainly, though — no platform, Kicksta included, can make a mediocre content strategy perform well. Targeting the right audience gets you in front of people who are likely to care; what they do once they're there is still on the content.

Data from Sprout Social's Instagram performance benchmarks backs this up at a broader level: accounts with strong engagement-to-follower ratios consistently outperform accounts with inflated follower counts on reach, click-through, and conversion. An account that compounds — where every engaged follower makes the next one more likely because the algorithm rewards it — is a different asset than one where the follower count moved but nothing downstream did. The Kicksta reviews page has examples of what that compounding actually looks like across different account types and sizes.

If you want to see how this same dynamic plays out against other approaches in the category, the Kicksta vs Twicsy comparison covers the purchased-engagement model specifically, and the Growthoid vs Kicksta breakdown looks at how organic targeting compares to other growth methods more broadly. If a more hands-on, human-run service is what you're actually weighing instead of a package deal, the Jumpgram Alternative breakdown covers that side of the comparison.

Which One Fits You

Two questions to sort this out.

First: do you need a specific number to move before a specific date — a follower count before a launch, likes on one post, views on a Reel — and you're not especially concerned with who's behind that number? If that's genuinely your situation, MySocialFollowing will get you there quickly and the pricing is accessible.

Second: do you want an Instagram audience made up of people who actually noticed your account, chose to follow it, and are likely to engage with what you post going forward — the kind of audience that compounds instead of just sitting at a higher number? If that's what you're after, which is where most people asking this comparison land, Kicksta is the platform built around that outcome, and the 7-day trial lets you see it working before you commit to either plan.

Bottom Line

Both services are legitimate, both have been around for years, and neither is a scam — they're just built to solve different problems. But for anyone whose actual goal is a real, growing Instagram presence rather than a one-time number, Kicksta is the stronger choice. Its targeting is precise, its engagement sequence is more thought-through than a simple follow-and-wait, its safety systems are more directly tied to how Instagram actually evaluates accounts, and its dashboard tells you exactly where every follower came from. That's a more complete answer to "how do I grow on Instagram" than a package purchase can give you, and it's worth the 7-day trial to see the difference firsthand.