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Fake followers can damage your reputation, skew your metrics, and attract Instagram penalties.
A mass follower remover for Instagram will help you solve this problem.
But there are also better solutions.
This article discusses:
- What fake followers are and why you should remove them
- How to spot fake accounts in your follower list
- How to remove bot followers
- How to prevent fake followers in the future
Let’s dive in.
TL;DR - Mass Follower Remover for Instagram
- Purpose of Removing Fake Followers: Eliminating fake followers on Instagram is crucial for enhancing engagement, maintaining credibility, and avoiding Instagram penalties.
- Identifying Fake Accounts: Signs of fake accounts include no profile icon, minimal generic posts, and use of stolen images or names. These are often created en masse and can be bots or ghost accounts.
Benefits of Removing Fake Followers:
- Enhances Engagement and Authenticity: Reduces skewed metrics for better audience interaction.
- Maintains Credibility: Important for influencers and businesses to attract genuine brand collaborations.
- Avoids Instagram Penalties: Staying compliant with Instagram's guidelines by not engaging with fake accounts.
- Reduces Security Risks: Fake accounts can be sources of spam and malicious activities.
Tools for Spotting Fake Followers:
- inBeat’s Fake Follower Checker: A tool to analyze follower authenticity without needing an Instagram password.
- Manual Identification: Checking profiles for signs of inactivity or spammy behavior.
Removing Fake Followers:
- Manual Removal: Safest way by individually blocking suspected fake accounts.
- Automatic Removal Tools: Various third-party apps exist but can risk Instagram penalties and accidental removal of genuine followers.
Preventing Future Fake Followers:
- Regular Profile Reviews: Manually checking for signs of fake accounts.
- Regular Use of inBeat’s Checker: To maintain a genuine follower base.
- Avoid Buying Followers: Focus on organic growth instead.
- Use Trustworthy Influencer Marketing Platforms: For collaborations with authentic creators.
- inBeat: A recommended tool for both spotting fake followers and influencer marketing, offering a free and safe solution.
What are Fake Instagram Accounts (and Why Should You Care)?
Fake Instagram accounts, commonly known as bots or ghost accounts, are automated profiles created for various purposes.
And genuine social interaction is not one of them.
These fake accounts have tell-tale signs such as:
- No profile icon
- Very few generic posts lacking personalization
- Stolen images or names to appear legitimate
These fake accounts are typically created en masse by automated software or individuals seeking to inflate follower numbers artificially.
Should I Remove Fake Followers on Instagram?
The short answer is yes; removing fake followers from your list of followers increases your engagement, reduces security risks, and helps you follow Instagram guidelines and nail more brand collaborations.
Pro tip: Don’t remove hundreds of ghost followers at once, or your activity will look suspicious to Instagram. Instead, monitor your social media platforms and deal with inactive users as soon as they look suspicious.
1. Enhancing Engagement and Authenticity
Fake followers can significantly skew your Instagram engagement metrics.
An artificially bloated follower count does little to enhance authentic engagement.
However, removing these fake or inactive followers improves your engagement metrics, ensuring a higher quality of audience interaction.
2. Maintaining Credibility with Your Audience and Brands
For influencers or businesses, credibility is key. Brands looking to partner with influencers often scrutinize follower authenticity.
As your fake follower list doesn’t actively interact with your content meaningfully, it can harm your profile’s credibility and authenticity.
And potential collaborators will notice.
A high number of fake followers can be a red flag, suggesting inauthentic growth.
This can lead to missed partnership opportunities and a tarnished reputation.
However, removing fake followers helps you maintain a credible, authentic profile that is more attractive to both real followers and potential brand partners.
3. Avoiding Instagram’s Penalties
Engaging with or having a high number of fake follower accounts can put your account at risk of violating Instagram’s terms of service.
Remember: Instagram periodically purges fake accounts.
If many of your followers are fake, you might see a sudden drop in your follower count.
This drop may raise questions about your account’s legitimacy.
So, you should proactively remove these accounts as soon as they appear to stay within Instagram’s guidelines.
4. Security Concerns
Fake accounts are often sources of spam and potentially malicious activities. They can send unwanted messages, leave spam comments, or lead you to unsafe websites.
Removing these accounts from your followers’ list reduces the risk of exposure to such security threats.
How to Spot Fake Followers
Now that you realize why it’s important to only have real followers, let’s see how to spot fake followers. There are two great solutions:
1. Use a Trustworthy Fake Follower Checker
A fake follower checker like the one we developed at inBeat will help you get started. Unlike other such tools on the market, you don’t have to introduce your Instagram password, so you’re perfectly safe.
Side note: We also use this tool extensively when vetting influencers.
Plus, it’s free.
Here’s how you can use it to get a follower overview:
- Enter your Instagram handle.
- The tool will analyze your followers and give you a report on the percentage of suspected fake or inactive accounts.
- A higher percentage indicates a significant presence of fake followers.
Let’s say you want to partner with the trial lawyer and mega-influencer Jefferson Fisher. This influencer has 3.21 million followers, so it’s virtually impossible to check all of them manually.
But inBeat’s fake follower checker gives you a reliable audience score in seconds:
2. Identifying Problem Bots Manually
While inBeat’s tool provides an overall assessment, manually spotting fake followers can also be helpful, especially for a more detailed clean-up.
Here’s what to look for:
- Profile characteristics: Check for profiles with no profile picture, no or very few posts, and a generic or incomplete bio. These are common indicators of fake accounts.
- Follower-to-following ratio: Accounts following a large number of profiles but having very few followers themselves can often be bots.
- Spammy comments: Look out for repetitive, generic comments that seem out of context. These are typically left by bot accounts.
- Account activity: Accounts that have been inactive for a long time or show no real human interaction also raise a huge red flag.
- Irrelevant followers: If your content is niche-specific, followers with no apparent interest or connection to your niche might be fake.
How to Get Rid of Bots on Instagram?
Let’s say you realize you have many spam accounts plaguing your Instagram profile. Here’s how you can get rid of them:
Manual Removal
The manual method is the safest way to eliminate fake current followers and bots without risking Instagram’s penalties.
So, use the methods above to identify the fake accounts or bots. Then:
- Go to the profile of the suspected phony account.
- Tap the three dots at the top right.
- Select ’Block’.
This method removes the follower from your list of people and prevents them from re-following or viewing your content.
Continue this process for each identified fake account. Although time-consuming, it ensures compliance with Instagram’s policies.
Automatic Removal Using Third-Party Tools
There are several third-party apps to mass-delete followers.
But there are two problems:
- You may be penalized: Instagram has a policy against using follower and engagement growth services. This policy may also extend to these mass removal tools because they use similar technology. So, using such management tools can result in warnings or even a ban from Instagram.
- You may remove some genuine followers by mistake: These tools may remove inactive accounts that aren’t necessarily fake bots. And getting rid of real people is never a good solution.
That said, here are some of the available tools to remove followers in bulk but use them with caution:
- My Ghost Followers: Provides insights into which followers have never liked or commented on your posts, allowing you to target inactive or non-engaging followers.
- FollowCop: Primarily designed for Android devices, this tool helps manage your followers and identifies users who do not follow you back. It also includes tools for account analysis, such as seeing mutual followers and recent unfollows.
- GramBoard: This tool automates various tasks for managing Instagram followers. For example, it includes features for auto-following/unfollowing, liking posts, and commenting, in addition to follower management.
- Mass Delete for Instagram: This software allows users to delete posts and unfollow users in bulk. Therefore, it can help you overhaul your Instagram account quickly.
- AirGrow: This software efficiently removes unwanted followers. And it also boasts features to automate some aspects of follower management.
- Spam Guard for Instagram: Specifically designed to detect and remove spam, ghost followers, and bots, this tool safeguards your account from spam and malicious activities.
- inBeat fake follower checker: This isn’t technically a mass removal tool, but you need it to keep your profile pristine.
How to Avoid Fake Followers in the Future
Maintaining an authentic Instagram follower base requires ongoing vigilance and proactive strategies. Here are four steps you can take to minimize the risk of getting inauthentic followers:
- Manually review your new followers’ profiles: Look for the typical signs of fake accounts we discussed above, such as the absence of a profile picture, minimal posts, and generic comments. If you encounter accounts that raise suspicions, block them to prevent them from inflating your follower count.
- Use inBeat’s fake follower checker regularly: This tool assesses the authenticity of your follower base and provides accurate profile scores. Regular checks allow you to take immediate action against any fake followers.
- Avoid the temptation of buying followers: While this might offer a quick increase in follower numbers, it damages your account’s credibility. And it can attract Instagram penalties. Instead, focus on organic growth strategies such as creating relevant content and actively interacting with your target audience.
- If you’re a marketer, use a trustworthy influencer marketing platform: inBeat’s influencer search engine helps you find and collaborate with authentic creators with good profile scores. Plus, this influencer discovery tool enables you to compare engagement rates and profile scores for various influencers.
Building partnerships with real creators helps you target an audience of qualified leads interested in buying your products rather than an audience of bots.
So, try inBeat now – it’s free.