What Are Ghost Followers on Instagram and How to Remove Them?
If you have been experiencing a decline in your engagements on your Instagram account, even though you are posting quality content with an engaging call to action for your followers, then there is a chance that you have a ghost following problem.
What are Ghost Followers?
Ghost followers are those accounts that are part of your following but never view or interact with your posts. They might have been the result of actual people who simply no longer use their accounts anymore. Additionally, they might have come from buying fake followers or due to your account being very old. This article will explain how to unfollow people on Instagram fast, without altering any security issues on your account.
Why Remove Ghost Followers?
Having a few ghost followers is not a concern for most users, however, influencers or business accounts have to take into account their engagements on posts, which would not be ideal if there are lots of ghost followers in your following. If maximizing engagements is your thing, then you should be aware of the ways how to get discovered on Instagram, in addition to removing fake accounts and bots.
How to Remove Ghost Followers
The best way to remove ghost followers is by removing them manually. Although it is a slow process, it is the safest since Instagram has banned the use of apps to remove them and may suspend your account.
Remove Inactive accounts
Go to your following and analyze which followers have not interacted with your posts in any way for a very long time.
Manually remove these accounts, however, do not unfollow too many accounts in an hour, which may trigger Instagram’s security.
Remove suspicious accounts
An account with a strange username, ridiculously high number of followings and absolutely no followers might be considered a suspicious account. Unfollow all such accounts as they are most properly bots or fake followers who do not serve a purpose except to increase following,
Use third party experts
Hiring a freelancer specialized in the task might be a good option if there are far too many bots on your following.
How to Avoid Ghost Followers in the Future
It is important to know how did your account got ghost followers and to avoid making the same mistake again.
Avoid buying followers
Followers bought are generally bots, and very few providers give genuine followers to your account. Buying followers should be done with more caution.
Avoid buying engagements
Similarly, getting paid engagements to your posts are likely to be bots and not actual people. Such service providers should only be used if they claim to give 100 percent legitimate engagements.
Don’t buy accounts with pre-existing followers
There is a chance that these accounts have few real followers. Buying an account with fake followers have little benefit, and should be avoided.
Try to create original content that actual users are interested in, to keep your account free from bots and uncharacteristically high ghost followers.
