Playing the numbers game on Instagram is not a sound growth strategy. In fact, we’re advocates for reducing your followers when they are of low quality or are ghost followers.
Ghost followers: friend or foe?
A ghost follower is an Instagram account that follows you but doesn’t actively engage with your page.
Ghost followers can negatively impact your engagement rate and take your organic posts away from the feeds of genuine followers.
How to recognise a ghost follower
They usually have one or more of the following:
- 0 followers
- 0 posts
- No profile picture
- High ratio of people they follow-for-follow
- 0 posts
How to remove unfriendly ghost followers
Generally, there are two ways you can remove spam bots, ghost followers or low-quality followers.
Manually or with a third-party app.
Manual
To block ghost followers manually, find their profile by tapping the (…) in the top-right corner and hit ‘Block’.
While this can be time consuming, eventually you will have a clean account which will positively impact your engagement rate and reach.
Use an app
There are a few paid and free apps out like Cleaner, Mass Unfollow and Follow Meter, available on the App Store.
Just remember, even with these apps, Instagram has limitations on the number of actions performed within one hour.
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