You’re bound to have some ghost followers in your Instagram account. It may sound like it is not a big deals, but the problem is these ghost followers might seriously harm your chances of making money as an influencer/micro-influencer.
Fraudulent accounts will inevitably exist.
Unfortunately, there are individuals that willing to pay for more followers to be added to their accounts, thinking it will optimize their credibility as an influencer. However, buying fake followers is no longer a viable option for anyone that seek to gain credibility in today’s market.
Because of this, there are a lot of Instagram accounts with an outsize number of inactive or bot followers. Same goes to you, you may also have acquired ghost followers in the past or accrued a large number of inactive followers on Instagram.
If you did purchased followers in the past or maybe were randomly followed by many fake accounts, and wanted to get rid of these ghost followers, we’ll show you how to fix it in this post.
What Is A Ghost Follower?
So what is a ghost followers? On Instagram, “ghost follower’ are defined as any inactive or fake followers who do not engage with any of your content.
These “ghost followers” may also be the work of a “bot” software. As a result, it automatically goes through the Instagram sign-up procedure to post spam messages and comments to other people.
Most of the time, it is quite easy to for you to distinguish which accounts are fake or might be a ghost follower. For fake accounts, it is common for them to have usernames that make no sense and digits tacked on for no apparent reason.
In most cases, the number of followers on this type of accounts is uncommonly low. Yet, at the same time, they tend to follow a large number of people.
How to remove ghost followers on Instagram
The most secure approach to remove ghost followers is to do it one by one. Thus, you will need to screen through all your followers, removed and blocked any accounts that looks suspicious and funny.
We recommend you not to remove more than 30 accounts in an hour. This to avoid flagging Instagram and prevent them from thinking you are a bot.
This method does required a considerable amount of patience, but it is the safest method so far.
We’ve been on the lookout for a tool that can not only identify but also delete ghost followers in bulk without hurting ordinary users. Unfortunately, such tool does not exist. Instagram itself has blocked any tools that do such jobs, hence manual process is the only way.
Why is Important to Cleanse Your Account?
If Instagram detects any suspicious activity in your following, you will risk having your account deleted. Social media sites employ sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) to identify such behaviors.
If you acquire 1,000 new followers overnight, your account will surely be noticed. The thing is, Instagram’s algorithms are always improving.
Instagram is continuously working to improve its service for businesses that advertise on it. You might dodge away with any trick in the short term, but this situation won’t last long.
Every dime spent on advertising by businesses must be justified. When it comes to paid influencer, one of the most important parts of the argument is proving that the account they are collaborating with has a positive return on investment (ROI).
Is buying followers and engagement worth it?
It’s an easy answer, NO! Buying fake followers, comments and likes on your posts may helps you to improve your engagement, which in return might helps you to get sponsored on Instagram.
However, in the long run, this will have the opposite effect on your organic reach and interaction, especially with your real followers.
Your brand’s value will plummets as a result of this since companies can detect the cheating easily. Besides, it is also a poor idea to utilize automated engagement methods, considering how annoying it is for all the genuine followers of yours to read fake comments in your posts.
They certainly do not want to be notified of fake comments or spam messages whenever they like a post of yours, or being tag by all these ghost followers.
An average Instagram user has a very short attention span. By engaging such practice, it might lead them elsewhere if they feel your post is full of spam.
As a result, your followers may start unfollowing you. Remember how annoying spam comments can be and this would inevitably decrease the amount of organic reach you can get.
End of the day, you could find yourself with 0 followers.
If you still think t’s worth buying Instagram followers and engagement, that such practice is a good Instagram influencer marketing method, we encourage you to read how you might be hurting your organic growth by engaging such practices.
How to avoid Instagram ghost followers
If you want to prevent having ghost followers on your profile, here what you can do:
- Build a community around your Instagram account. Having a large number of real people following and liking your posts is crucial in preventing accounts from getting banned.
- Spammy behavior such as buying likes, comments or shares will bring attention to Instagram’s spam detection and cause your account to be blocked and removed.
- Be wary of how you interact with other Instagram users, on how many likes or comments you receive from certain accounts. If the interactions are low but they do follow a large number of people, these profiles are most likely to be ghost accounts.
- Make use of hashtags relevant to your niche and don’t go overboard with them.
- Using bots to like and comment on your posts will make Instagram think you’re a bot and may cause you problems in the future.
- Engaging too frequently with other users can also be suspicious. Make sure you give yourself some time between each post so as not to raise suspicion of spamming.
Conclusion
Ghost followers are becoming more common on Instagram, and to remove them, it requires patience and effort as you will have to do it manually.
Instagram is aware of how easy it is for anyone to abuse their platform. They have made it difficult for users who make use of automation or bots when following or engaging with others.
It’s unclear how much Instagram actually cares about deleting ghost accounts. But to remove ghost followers on Instagram is still reasonably straightforward, although you will need to remove it one by one.
Nevertheless, cleaning your account certainly benefits you. The more organic your following becomes, the more genuine you seem and the less likely you are to get in trouble for having fake accounts following you.
