Why fake followers could be killing your Instagram

So you're reading this because you have an Instagram account and possibly you've been considering acquiring some fake followers or some people have followed you and don't quite engage with you. If you are trying to gain new followers, whether it’s due to promotion, or simply to form new friendships, over the next few paragraphs, I'm going to explain to you why fake followers are going to damage your Instagram reputation and what you should do to stop it.

You're bound to have experienced this, if you are on Instagram, someone out of the blue follows you and they don't like your posts at that moment in time. Over the following days you might have made a few posts and they've still not liked any of your posts, this is the stereotypical definition of a fake follower. Initially for most people a new follower creates a small sense of elation, but sometimes that elation is very short lived, a fake follower will bring you down. Before you’ve even started. The chances are this follower has followed you in the hope that you will follow them back or like their posts, it might be that they have something to sell, it might be that they're just looking to grow, either way if they're not liking your posts you need to get rid of them.

Instagram as most people know works on a series of algorithms, those algorithms work on the value of you and your posts. If you're someone who has 500 followers and gets an average of 500 likes, then you are considered to be valuable to Instagram. However, the more common thing is that you will have 500 followers and actually only get 50 likes, that's because either part of your audience is not engaged, or you have a selection of these fake followers. Each time you post and you're not getting quite the hit that you need, Instagram will lower your exposure to the wider audience. A fairly standard ration is that 500 followers should create 100 likes on each post, providing your posting with a level of credence, not just posting memes and pointless things.

Once you've had chance to assess whether a follower is genuine or not, it's important if it turns out that they are not a genuine follower that you get them removed from your followers list. The easiest thing to do to remove them is to go to your followers list find the person that's following you and hit the little remove button that's normally on the right-hand side of the screen. Yes I know it seems hash and I know it seems unpleasant removing people who have for whatever reason decided to follow you, if you're just posting photographs for yourself or for a small group of people than that's absolutely fine, but the chances are if you're reading this you're looking to develop a following and if you are trying to develop a following and you have lots of fake followers you'll never going to get the following or exposure that you require so you have to just cut these people off as soon as you possibly can.

The biggest mistake that people commit when joining Instagram and looking to generate the following is to invest in buying followers and as with the above comments this is just going to turnout badly for you, because a follower that you buy is not going to be liking your posts and therefore as a result you will spend your entire life buying likes and buying followers to make your account look genuine. But here is the kicker, Instagram will know and so will the genuine potential followers that you might be trying to gain, before you know it out of the millions of followers that could see your post, become just 50 or 100 even your genuine followers might not see your posts, this is because your following is not genuine and therefore your post is deemed not valuable.. The types of followers that do this whole fake following don't even try to look remotely genuine, they stick out a mile and its quite sad that someone wants a following so much, that they are prepared to invest in generating that following but without really understanding the pitfalls of doing so.

Although it may be tempting and although it's nice to have a high number of followers, you have to assess regularly, do research on the people that are following you and you've got to remove the people that are not liking your posts because ultimately, they're going to bring you down. If you are using Instagram for the business of promotion, you're never going to reach the audience that you need to, some are going to look at you and think “oh he or she has inflated his or her following”, while others simply will never find your posts.

The easiest way to maintain the genuine followers is to carry out due diligence on an almost daily basis, just go through and look at who has started following you and if they've liked any of your posts. Then you need to make a judgement call, these things can soon mount up especially when you do create a post that triggers somewhere with genuine followers or potentially genuine followers. Sometimes you can create a post and suddenly get a lot of new followers, sometimes I make a post and within 25 minutes of me making a post I've suddenly generated 5 new followers, it’s probably best to assess that straight away to see if they've liked any of your posts, obviously give them the benefit of a doubt for 24 to 48 hours and make a note of who they are, but if you get to the end of that time period and they have not engaged with you and they've not liked any of your posts you really do need to delete them, because the chances are they never will and begin your flow of fake followers,