If your profile has already accumulated several thousand followers, you may need to clean up your Instagram from bots. An active page aimed at making money or promotion is constantly open to subscriptions. In 90 percent of cases, these are specific people, while the remaining 10 percent are commercial accounts, mass followers. Ineffective subscriptions can be harmful and need to be stopped in a timely manner. So, how do you effectively clean up your profile from inactive accounts?
What harm do they cause?
Originally, a bot is a computer program that imitates human behavior. Specifically, it is artificially created or borrowed profiles that are used to fill an account. So, how can you distinguish a genuine Instagram user from a bot?
Usually, a bot has an illogical name – a combination of unclear letters and numbers, an uninformative avatar, such as an image from the internet. Additionally, there is very low activity, no publications, or very few (usually less than 15). The followers in this case are usually inactive subscribers.
Where do they come from? There is a trend of inflating followers, where people deliberately buy programs, or someone accidentally acquires unwanted subscriptions through dubious promotion services.
A few years ago, dead subscriptions on Instagram did not harm, they even helped to increase the number of followers. Now, the policy of social media has changed, and the quality of the audience is more important than the quantity. The algorithms embedded in social media will simply lower your publications in the feed due to the large number of inactive subscriptions.
As a result, a lovingly written post will remain unnoticed by the audience. Instagram will lower your engagement rate, which will negatively affect your account. A large number of junk subscribers show your audience that you may also be a bot and entertain yourself with spam mailings. All bloggers earn money from advertising, and how can a non-living program buy something?
It is obvious that your successful profile needs a good cleaning. What are the ways to do it?
Manually removing unnecessary accounts from followers
It is necessary to determine the profiles that can be blocked as bots on Instagram. Pages with a small number of posts are not always junk. Some serious brands have few publications but high purchasing power. Analyze such followers, they may have already purchased or been interested in the cost of your advertising.
Many advanced Instagram users say that the number of deleted posts decreases the reach, supposedly this is how the algorithms of the social network work. We cannot know for sure, but let’s warn ourselves against mindless deletions. Study the number of subscriptions of suspicious profiles, usually there are many, more than 1000. Of course, it is difficult to exclude a large number of pages manually, but a couple of hundred will be quite manageable.
Removing bots using a service
If you are not satisfied with the result of a simple unsubscribe, try using special services. Popular services for blocking bots on Instagram and cleaning out inactive followers include Instaplus, OML, and SpamGuard. However, it is important to remember that by blocking accounts, you may lose your customer base. In the Instaplus service, there is a function for unblocking accounts, so your client who was accidentally removed by you can easily subscribe again without being added to the blacklist.
Configure analysis and run
Almost all unfollow programs work on one simple principle: first, you need to use tools like Epicdetect.com, Fakelikeinfo.ru, Hypeauditor.com to identify lists of potential bots. These features will show how many real likes posts received and how many were artificially inflated. You can find out the level of audience engagement and the number of spam profiles. In addition to the listed programs, there are others with similar functionality.
After conducting the analysis, you can use filters from Instaplus, OML, SpamGuard to clean up your account. All of these programs quickly block unwanted users. The pre-prepared list is uploaded to the system, and everything is ready.
Connect protection
Simply deleting fake accounts is not enough, as they will quickly reappear. Programs are able to protect against inactive subscriptions based on analysis results. The service will identify suspicious profiles and remove them. Just don’t forget to press the magic “Enable Protection” button.
Advantages and disadvantages of manual and automatic methods
Manually deleting unnecessary junk subscriptions is very convenient, as no one knows your target audience better than you do. This way, there is less chance of accidentally unsubscribing clients. However, clearing your page of bots and ubiquitous programs will have to be done very often.
An automatic method is much faster and instantly eliminates unwanted subscriptions, but there is a chance of unsubscribing those who should not be unsubscribed.
The most common mistakes when removing bots
Often, those who start cleaning up their account get carried away and unsubscribe from too many profiles. This can lead to a loss of audience reach. So how do you clean up your Instagram without killing your reach? The answer is to not rush. It’s better to manually remove a certain amount, and then start working with the features. Knowing your audience will also prevent unnecessary unsubscribes. Don’t expect engagement to suddenly increase after deleting soulless profiles, as there are other procedures for promotion.
Now you know how to clean up Instagram from bots and why it’s necessary. Let this be the first step towards unreal promotion of your account. The result won’t appear immediately, as the work on improvement should be constant.