Quality over quantity. In the business world, the above statement is always right. In order to achieve your end goal and enhance your brand awareness and credibility to increase sales, or perhaps more collaboration in the case of influencers, engaging followers of 500k may be way better than 2M followers with a low engagement rate.
One, if not the first and most common, reason for having low engagement when you have a high follower number is having what we call ghost followers. The problem of ghost followers on instagram is a real issue that is unfortunately not taken seriously or discussed properly.
A ghost Instagram follower affects the account’s credibility and, thus, your brand’s growth and image. Since it is important to address such an issue, in this article, we will first explain what we mean by ghost followers, then how to identify them, and the ways to remove these followers after explaining why we should do so.
What Are Ghost Followers?
A ghost follower refers to either an inactive Instagram follower who does not interact with your posts and will never be or a fake follower with no real user behind it. Bots usually create the latter, so these are totally fake.
Ghost followers may contribute to your overall follower count, but their inactivity will affect your reach, which, of course, interferes with your goals.
How to Identify Ghost Followers on Instagram
There are several ways to detect Instagram ghost followers. It is not hard to identify if a particular account is an Instagram ghost account, but it may be time-consuming if your Instagram follower count is large. For this reason, there are tools that can help you to identify which of your followers are ghosts.
Let us have these ways put as steps like this;
Analyze the Engagement
First, you need to get the engagement ratio of your followers with your content. So that you will know if there are ghost followers, or not.
How? By calculating the engagement ratio which is your followers’ engagement to your total follower number. If the result is low, then there is a high probability that you have ghost followers.
Also, look for followers who never engaged in your posts, stories or reels. Even followers who rarely like, share or comment because these are indications of ghost followers.
Followers’ Account Activity
Another way that can tell if there are Instagram ghost followers is by checking your follower accounts’ activities by visiting their profiles. This is called a manual activity check.
If you come across a profile that has no information, such as no photos, posts, or even followers, you can easily consider this account to be an Instagram ghost account.
Also, a following-follower ratio is a good indicator for you. Here, you compare your followers’ account’s follower number to their following accounts. Usually, ghost followers of Instagram would follow thousands of accounts and may have very few numbers of followers, if not zero.
Review Comments & Likes
Review the comments and likes you receive. Watch out for any generic comments that sound automated, such as ‘nice pic- cool photo’ as these may be from a ghost follower.
Also, if you notice a follower who constantly likes but never comments, this account is probably a ghost Instagram account.
Monitor & Check Your Follower List
keeping a constant monitor and periodically reviewing and checking your account follower list makes it easy for you to detect ghost followers and clean your profile.
You may also be interested in this Can someone see how many times you viewed their profile? article!
Third-Party Tools
However, if manual ghost follower identification is not practical for you, you may opt for tools such as HypeAuditor, GhostHunter, and SocialBlade. These apps provide analysis of your follower list and engagement metrics.
What’s So Bad About Ghost Followers?
The question now is, do ghost followers have a bad influence on your account?
Yes, and there are main reasons to consider having ghost followers in Instagram is a bad idea.
Negative Effect on Engagement
Since ghost followersdon’t interact with your account activities and have low engagement. This will impact on how Instagram users view your content. Therefore, it will negatively affect gaining prospects or potential new followers, clients or collaboration.
Negative Effect on Your Reach and Visibility
Again, due to ghost followers’ low engagement and interactions, the Instagram algorithm will never consider your content and will not suggest your content.
That is because when you post a new post Instagram shows it first to your followers, in case they don’t interact then the Instagram algorithm does not suggest your content as considering it of low quality.
Therefore, your account reach and visibility will be low. Your account’s chance of reaching a wider audience, thus generating more followers, will be low.
Harm your Credibility
Instagram users who might be potential business collaborators or followers will question the gap between your follower numbers and post interactions. Thus, it will affect your brand credibility, and the chance to get more followers or business partners will be low as well.
Inability to Understand Your Audience
Ghost followers skew analytics, leading to the inability to analyze your followers or audience properly. You will not understand what they need, like, or want, and as a result, your marketing plan and strategies will be affected as well.
Losing Opportunities
Brands and businesses prefer working with influencers with active followers who would share, comment and like their posts. In this way, the brand guarantees to reach their potential clients. However, if your followers have many ghost accounts that don’t engage with your content or posts, the chances of sponsorship or partnership are doomed.
Potential Scammers
A ghost follower might be a scam account that follows others to sell fake followers or provide fake services for the sake of getting money.
Their bad influence not only scams you, but they may trick you into buying followers who are not real and this will lead to another problem, which is Instagram penalties that may lead to locking your account.
Should You Remove Ghost Followers on Instagram?
The obvious answer is definitely Yes! As we have discussed above, there are several harms ghost followers can cause you, so removing them will have a good impact on your overall account performance. It is beneficial for several reasons;
Improve your Engagement Rate
After removing your ghost followers, your current active followers will create a logical ratio for your posts’ engagement and thus will attract more new followers.
Boosting Your Reach
A natural consequence of your high engagement rate is a boosting algorithm. Instagram will consider your content worth sharing and suggesting, which will lead to reaching a wider audience. You can buy real Instagram followers to give your account a proper boost.
Better Marketing Strategies
As long as you have no ghost followers, then you can rely on more accurate analytics, and this will help you plan and create better strategies.
Boosting Your Credibility
Having good engagement that leads to wider reach will give authenticity to your account. This will positively affect gaining new followers.
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Also, you will attract more brands and businesses for collaboration.
Better Targeting
Getting rid of ghost followers will attract more new followers and enhance your audience analysis. Therefore, you will be able to target your audience better and tailor your services accordingly.
How to Remove Ghost Followers on Instagram?
Removing ghost followers is essential to overcome their bad influence and enhance your account’s overall performance.
There are two main paths you can take to remove your followers, either the manual path or built-in tools such as Instagram insights.
- But, let us give you a few tips before proceeding to how to remove ghost followers.
- Try to clean your account at least once a month or spend 10-15 minutes on a weekly basis to clean it.
- Immediately remove spam or suspicious accounts
- Don’t stress yourself trying to remove every single account. If you missed a few, it is fine.
- Remove inactive accounts that don’t belong to your niche or business.
- Remove gradually, not as bulk action to avoid triggering Instagram anti-spam measures.
Now, let us see how you can remove ghost followers.
Remove Them Manually
As the name suggests, this way means checking your follower list manually. Course, you should first do your investigation and check your ghost and inactive followers. Then, display your follower list and then remove the ghost followers one by one.
Use Instagram Insights
You can use Instagram insight business tools to help you in the process of identifying and removing ghost followers.
It is important to note that Instagram insights will not remove directly or point out to you which accounts to move, but you need to use it to analyze and figure out which accounts are inactive to remove them.
So how does this work?
Here is a step-by-step guide;
- Switch to a business account in case you have not.
- Open your profile and click on the three dots located top right corner.
- Select insights and then select a time period to analyze the engagement.
- Identify the ghost followers by checking their interactions.
- Remove ghost followers based on your analysis of what Instagram insights provided you.
As you can see, Instagram Insights does not remove ghost accounts, but it provides useful insights to make it easier for you to identify inactive followers to remove. You can learn more about it at Instagram Help!
Final Thoughts
There is an unwanted follower type that is known as Instagram ghost followers who are usually inactive, fake or spam accounts. These accounts harm your reach, visibility, and credibility, which, in turn, negatively affects your chances of reaching clients or potential business partnerships. Luckily, you can easily identify ghost followers on instagram and remove them to enhance your account’s performance.
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