If you want to have an engaged following you need to remove followers. By that, I mean all of the fake, bot followers and anyone who is unlikely to engage in your content.
Why? Because Instagram (and other platforms like facebook and linkedin) look at what happens when you post something. If you have an engaged audience, people will look at your post, like it, add a comment, share it or tag someone – this shows instagram that you’re posting quality content that people want to see, so it shows your content to more people. If you post and no-one engages then Instagram assumes that your post isn’t that interesting so it doesn’t show it to more people.
I had 1800+ followers and when I went through the list (which took rather a long time), over 500 of them were either fake accounts or they had had no engagement with my account. So I decided to remove followers. I’ve been watching Ginny Fears on Instagram, she’s an Insta expert and she was advising on removing fake followers to increase your reach and impressions. Her advice rang true to me so after a few days of consideration I decided to tackle it head on.
Will people know I removed them?
This is probably one of the biggest things you want to know isn’t it? It’s what my business group wanted to know when I did a live session for them on this subject. Well, luckily when you press the remove follower button it actually tells you that that person/account will not be notified that you have removed them. Phew!
How did I do it (nicely)?
I am nice person and I really didn’t want to upset anyone so I set about my review in an organised fashion. The accounts that were obviously fake, I deleted straight away.
The accounts that were less obvious, I looked at their engagement on my account, and if I was still unsure then I sent them a note saying that I was reviewing my followers and I’d love to know more about them and what they thought of my account. The bot accounts send you an automated response – so you know it’s a bot. Some accounts never read my note, or if they did they didn’t bother to respond so I took the decision to remove them too.
For any account that I was unsure about, I left it alone – but I did drop them another note to start building a real relationship with them.
How do you spot a fake instagram account?
It’s kinda simple when you know how. Generally the account will have just a few posts on the grid and a high level of engagement or it’ll be a locked account so you can’t access any information.
The Outcome – what happened?
Firstly, no-one shouted at me for removing them – not one person. Not one account. No one contacted me to accuse me of throwing them out. Just goes to show how engaged they were (or not)!
Secondly, my stats on follower growth looked awful for a few weeks, I mean I literally couldn’t bear to look at my insights.
BUT, after one week my reach on posts increased by 303%, and because I was getting more engagement on my posts, my post interactions increased by 240%, visits to my profile increased by 91% and eventually I started getting more new (more engaged) followers.
What do you think?
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Why you should remove followers
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