You may not believe this but it’s true. EVERYONE has ghost followers on Instagram.
Ghost followers are basically fake or inactive accounts that do not engage with your content.
Why should you care? Organic reach is nearly dead on platforms like Instagram and having a ton of ghost followers will further damage your reach and engagement.
The good news is, the ghost followers are not your fault. Well, if you bought followers then yes it is your fault. But, it’s actually a phenomena that happens naturally.
Wherever there is a lot of attention, there will always be shady and unethical people and businesses who try to exploit and abuse it. And with over 1 billion monthly active users, Instagram has a lot of attention. It’s like spam for social media.
The bigger the account, the higher the chance you have more ghost followers. Here is a quick audit of Nike from igaudit.io.
Of course the numbers are not 100% accurate and it will fluctuate a few percentage points but out of Nike’s 93.2 million followers, only 30% of them are real! Yikes!
That means they really only have 27.9 million followers. That’s still a lot but, it’s less than a third of the 93.2 million.
Now what? Are you to just accept this nuisance that are ghost followers?
Of course not! Here are 3 ways you can combat ghost followers.
1. MANUAL REMOVAL
As the word says, the first way to fight ghost followers is to get into your IG account and delete ghost followers from your account, one by one.
This is NOT recommended. First, you have to figure out whether or not the follower is real or fake. It’s nearly impossible to do that. You definitely don’t want to accidentally delete a real follower. And with potentially thousands, tens of thousands or even millions of ghost followers, you may want to blow your head off. SO let’s not do that.
2. USE A THIRD PARTY SOFTWARE OR COMPANY
There are a bunch of third party apps, software and companies that will remove ghost followers for you. How do they do it? They actually use algorithms that rate and score your followers based on their engagement and activity. They then remove all of the low scoring followers from you account.
There is always a small chance it may remove few real followers, but if their score is low then they are not really engaging with your content so it probably will not matter.
This is a great way to purge your ghosts in one fell swoop. The only problem is, are you willing to lose a big number of followers even if they are fake?
Do you feel better with 1 million followers than 500K, even if half of your followers are fake? Ultimately, its up to you but if you want better reach and engagement then it may be worth it to clean up your account a bit.
3. CREATE BETTER CONTENT
This is something you should try to do in general, but the only way to increase your engagement and reach is to create better content.
It’s not the most glamorous answer but it’s true. If you can better relate, connect and add value to your audience via your content, then you will have more likes, views, shares, comments, etc.
Now that you know this, what will you do? Tell us in the comments!
