Well, many people invest in buying followers and don’t realize how bad they are doing to their own accounts. More effective would be to invest that money in boosts and ads focused on the interest of your audience and that generate more organic returns, don’t you think?
And if you don’t understand why these followers harm your account so much, take a look at this article where we tell you all about how the Instagram algorithm works and follow below some tricks that will make you understand how to improve engagement without wasting your money. In the past, it was common practice to buy followers, even more so because of the benefits that accounts with more than 10,000 followers received. However, currently, with the adjustments and the emergence of good optimization practices in the tool, many accounts had to get rid of these followers to avoid punishment. So now that the damage has been done, how do you exorcise these ghosts? That’s what we’re going to talk about in today’s article, initially detailing what so-called ghost followers are, the benefits of removing them, and later, how to do it the right way. Yes, we are talking about the best way because there are ways to delete followers that can block your profile. Who knew? So follow our guidelines below on how, and for what reasons, to delete ghost followers on Instagram.
What are ghost followers?
Basically, ghost followers are accounts that follow you but don’t interact with your profile, or accounts that are inactive. There are several reasons why these accounts are inactive on your Instagram. These could be user accounts that are not real, like bots, for example. But they can be accounts created to stalk other profiles, accounts of people you follow to follow you back, or accounts of people who followed you out of interest in your content, but who lost interest and still continue to follow you. The ghost name is exactly because they are accounts that remain inactive on the platform, accounts that do not post, like, or share for a long time, thus influencing the way the algorithm checks the relevance of the accounts. And that is why having this type of follower is not a good idea, after all, if the great key to success in networks is interaction, why invest your money in profiles that will only be numbers and that can even hinder your growth?
Benefits of removing ghost followers
There are numerous benefits of exterminating these ghosts and we will talk about the three main ones below:
Increase your interactions; Improve your marketing action; Ensuring the strengthening of brand credibility.
1. Increase in Interactions
Having followers that don’t interact lowers your engagement rate. So far so good, you must have read and heard this thousands of times, but why is this important? Engagement rate is important in determining the relevance of any page on social media. All this is because low engagement negatively impacts Instagram advertising actions. Stop and think with me, if all the efforts of the managers of the big social networks are aimed at keeping users inside the platforms as long as possible, why would a page with little engagement be relevant? And even more, why would non-interacting followers be important? Well, with that in mind, we brought a formula to help you understand how to calculate your engagement rate:
Engagement rate: (number of interactions / total number of followers) * 100
That is, the formula totally depends on the number of likes, shares, and comments on your page divided by the number of followers you have. This means you should delete ghost followers on Instagram to improve your engagement! By multiplying this result by 100, you will get your percentage, considering a specific publication or the general monthly count, for example. And now that you know the math, think about how to improve your page posts to increase interactions and make a difference to your audience. Thus, Instagram will understand the importance of your content and will suggest your posts to non-followers.
2. Improvement in your marketing actions
Although we are talking about social networks, we must first consider that these tools are businesses, and businesses need money to survive. Instagram (which is part of Meta, formerly Facebook) makes a lot of money through marketing actions and page ads on its platform. And these ads are more likely to be assertive when they are based on personal interests. That is, your interests are analyzed by the tool considering your interactions in posts, videos, hashtags, etc. Have you noticed that the new changes in the app have suggested posts and pages because of your interactions? Some suggestions are based on pages or content you liked or interacted with, as in the images below.
Now imagine how a ghost follower, who has no interest in anything, can get in the way of monetizing campaigns precisely by never interacting, just staying there as a static number. Their lack of interaction with you, or your brand’s posts, directly impacts your visibility in not only their feeds, but in others’ as well. What’s worse, this also extends to the Explore and Search tabs, where users are recommended engaged posts from people they don’t follow. And you, investing values in the boosts of your posts, but not understanding why you don’t have results. So go ahead and delete ghost followers on Instagram!
3. Strengthening the brand’s credibility
When you are deciding to purchase a product through social networks, what is your search behavior? Did you know that many people look for information on brand profiles to base their decisions on? Imagine if that person starts to notice that your profile has thousands of followers, but almost no interactions or, worse yet, almost no real followers. Would they have confidence in buying your product? The credibility of social media profiles is very important. Having real testimonials and social proof, as well as followers that are not fake, will certainly be a positive point in gaining credibility and demonstrating the quality of your products or services. Without credibility and real interactions, the chance of your company’s sales conversion is much lower. And if what you want is to sell your products and services, better choose other ways to get followers.
How to exterminate ghosts?
Fortunately, there are ways to exorcise those followers and improve your account engagement. However, you should be extremely careful so that your account is not blocked by the platform. Basically, there are 3 ways to delete ghost followers on Instagram: manually, using platform analytics, and using external apps. And, as we mentioned above, there are two types of followers: bots and real people who do not interact. That said, let’s go through the steps to delete followers:
1. Do it yourself
If your account doesn’t have many followers, or you prefer to do it manually, pay attention to some important information to identify fake accounts in order to ghost followers on Instagram:
these accounts usually do not have a profile picture; make little or no posts; have low engagement; are identified with names different from those usual in your country; have been around for a long time and have no activity.
To do this, go to your profile page, click on followers and scroll down the page, identifying the followers that fit the points mentioned above and clicking on “Remove”.
It is worth remembering that there are people who are not consistent in the publications or even do not complete their profiles, but they are real people. To avoid the accidental deletion of these people, it is worth checking each page individually. Click on the follower’s name and you will be directed to the corresponding profile. If it is a fake profile, click on the three dots in the upper right corner of the page and select “Remove follower”.
2. Platform analytics
To improve your performance and the delivery of your content on the platform, there is an option to analyze followers that are real but have not interacted with your profile so you can ghost followers on Instagram more easily. To find them, you can use a feature of Instagram itself that shows you the accounts of users who least interacted with their publications in a given period.
Before doing this analysis, make sure your app is up to date; Now go to your profile and click on “Following”; Right below the option “Who had the least interactions” will appear; Click and do a manual check of who could exclude.
It is also worth using more complex strategies such as creating a spreadsheet or list with the followers who most interacted with your account in the last 60 days and excluding those who do not enter this list. TIP: Do this check and delete calmly so that the algorithm does not block your account. Block a maximum of 30 accounts at a time and pause between this selection.
3. Apps to delete Instagram followers
There are apps for almost everything lately, and of course there are also several apps to help you delete ghost followers on Instagram. But here’s a warning: choose the app you’re going to choose very carefully, as there are reports of users who had their accounts banned for using apps of this type. Another very important issue to consider is the security of your data. As these apps use your Instagram username and password, as soon as you hand them over, they gain access to your data and your account becomes vulnerable. And even if you don’t mind accessing your data on Instagram, stop and think if the password you use for this network is the same one used for some other social network or even emails and applications, which can generate an even greater risk. Finally, it is important to remember that a job well done on the networks is important so that you do not have to constantly delete followers. Create a schedule, plan your content, and have a clear definition of who your persona is and what your audience is really looking for to be assertive in your creations. Investing in assertive and well-crafted content, with a diversity of posts, exploring the various tools that the platform offers such as Stories to strengthen customer relationships, Reels to bring new followers and consistent publications in the feed are fundamental in building an engaging profile.
Do you understand why you should delete ghost followers on Instagram?
