How to get rid of ghost followers on Instagram (2020)?
We talk about how to increase your Instagram engagement rate by removing ghost followers and inactive accounts (2020 update).
Hi, I found your insta while I was looking into the content of the account of @marinadegiovanni on Instagram and how to grow it. I got your email from your contact section, you have it public, I really hope this doesn't bother you, if so please feel free to unsuscribe from this mailing list and receive an honest apology.
I work for a better insta, where we help people grow their Instagram accounts. The biggest issue people ask us to help them with is ghost followers and improving their engagement rate. So I wanted to explain a bit, let’s start with what is a ghost follower? A ghost follower is any kind of account that is not being used by someone. Whether it is a bot that unfortunately started to follow you, an old account that hasn’t posted in over a year, or accounts that were created and never used anymore.
There are some characteristics that define a ghost follower. Such as:
Username contains many numbers. So, try not to use many numbers yourself.
High following. If an account has more than 1000 following, it’s considered a mass follower and probably won’t interact with your content or is a bot created to increase followers for another account.
Has 0 posts.
Has no profile picture.
Hasn’t posted in over a year.
Many people wonder whether they should remove ghost followers from their entire following: the correct answer is yes. Ghost followers make your engagement rate drop.
The engagement rate is a percentage of followers or viewers that engage with your posts. Ghost followers affect you because you are not getting seen on Instagram and Instagram’s algorithm rates your content as bad or not important/relevant. Put it this way, out of all of your followers there are some that are not interacting with your content because they are not seeing your posts because they aren’t even seeing Instagram! or worse, they don’t even exist.
Now, what can you do? It’s easy to remove them from your following, in the app go to your followers and voila, hit the remove button. The tricky part is to know which of them are ghost followers, this is a tedious and time-consuming activity that has to be done.
You can do it in 3 easy steps:
Remember the 5 characteristics mentioned above? assign 20 points for each one a follower has.
Count the total points. For example if one of your followers has 0 posts, is following more than, lets say, 3k and has random numbers on their username, this follower got a total of 60 points.
If a follower has more that 60 and up to 80 points it’s most definitely a ghost follower (but there’s a slight chance it’s a normal account) and if they score 100 points it’s definitely a ghost follower and you should remove them from your following.
Since this task takes so much time (really, sooo much!), at a better insta we have this tool that gets all the info about your followers and helps you analyse and understand your audience. We obtain their username, name, bio, email (so you can start your mailing list right away), number of followers, number of accounts following, if it’s verified, if it’s private, has a profile pic, has numbers on username, has posts, the last post date, and if it’s a ghost follower. We use the technique I just mentioned in this email to analyse whether a follower is real or is a ghost. Just remember that the removal of your ghost followers must be manual or else Instagram will flag your account and you will probably get banned or even worse lose your account. We advise you do it manually so you won’t put in jeopardy all your hard work so far.
If you’d like to give us a try just click the button down below and let us help you have a better insta.
Cheers,
Danielle from a better insta!