Why ghost followers could be the source of your drop in engagement on Instagram and how to safely remove them

Ghost accounts on Instagram. What they are, why they are a problem, and how to safely get rid of them…

Ghost followers include spam and bot accounts as well as old followers who no longer use their account. We refer to them as ghost followers as while they add to your follower count, they never actually engage with any of your content. It can be a bit of a mystery why bot followers target certain accounts, but having a lot of bot followers could be a result of buying followers or using certain hashtags that bots target. 

If you’ve been noticing a drop in your engagement, your first thought might be that your followers aren’t enjoying what you’re posting anymore, but it could actually be because of ghost followers. Having a high number of ghost followers is going to mean that less of your real followers will get to see your content. When you create a post, Instagram pushes it out to a few of your followers to gauge whether or not the content is interesting. If a lot of these followers are ghost followers, they’re obviously not going to be engaging with it, resulting in Instagram thinking your content isn’t interesting and therefore pushing it to less of your genuine followers. 

Removing ghost followers will result in an increase in your post engagement and story views, but there’s no quick fix and doing it safely is key to avoiding the dreaded shadow ban.

Getting just a fraction of your followers engaging on your posts is perfectly normal, and typically the larger your following, the lower your engagement rate. Your engagement rate is a percentage worked out by calculating the average engagement of all your instagram posts and comparing it to your number of followers. The general target for brands is between 1% and 5% and you can use this handy tool to work our yours.

But how do you know if you have ghost followers?

Take a look through your follower list within the Instagram app to try and find any suspicious looking accounts. Start by tapping on your followers who have no or odd looking profile photos and odd handle names - if they’re following a lot of accounts, it’s likely it’s a bot. Here’s some examples of obvious bot accounts:

Identifying old inactive followers is trickier, and if you have a lot of followers it may be best to opt for paying for a service that can identify your ghost followers for you. There are many people on Fiverr who offer ghost follower analysis, but we’d recommend Tom who we’ve worked with before for one of our clients.

So now you know how to identify ghost followers yourself or you’ve paid for a handy spreadsheet analysis, how do you safely get rid of them?

Unfortunately, there is no quick fix for removing ghost followers and it must be done manually within the Instagram app by tapping the remove button next to the identified ghost in your follower list. It’s important to do this sparingly, as doing too much of any repetitive action on Instagram can get you shadow banned. The safest method is to remove a maximum of 30 ghost accounts per hour, with a maximum of 200 removed a day.

If you’ve decided to purchase the follower analysis, a handy trick if you have an iPhone and MacBook is to have the spreadsheet up on your MacBook, copy one of the handles on the list and then hit paste on your iPhone in the Instagram search bar to get to their profile. From their profile you can then tap the three dots in the top right then tap ‘Remove Follower’.

It’s important to steer clear of any app that promises to remove the ghost accounts for you. Instagram doesn’t like unverified third party apps, and using one of any kind could also result in being shadow banned. 

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