How frustrating is it when you get excited about a new comment or follow and then realize it’s a spam account?! Instagram’s spam profiles and comments are increasing every day and make a big ugly mess on your account by following and commenting on your posts. There are potentially 24 million fake Instagram accounts, also known as spammers or spambots. While you can’t stop spammers from finding your account, you can do some things to help get rid of them.
What’s the purpose of these spammers?
Spammers are just like marketers, they’re trying to get attention. Some spammers are trying to make money by spamming and some other are just regular people trying to get more followers. They will follow you, like a couple of pictures, and maybe write a generic comment such as “nice pic” just to get your attention and hope you’ll follow back.
Spambots on the other hand, usually use software to automatically follow people and like photos based on hashtags, location or username. Their purpose is the same as regular spammers, to get more followers. (If you’ve ever seen sites that advertise “buying followers” these are the bots that get you more followers.) Instagram usually bans these accounts but since everything is automated they just create new ones.
How do I identify spam accounts?
There are some signs that an account could be fake and be only made for spamming. A quick way to spot fake accounts is to check the profile and analyze their engagement on their Instagram profile. The accounts usually:
- Follow a high number of people without many follow backs
- All of the photos have been posted the same day or they have no photos
- The bio reads “Click this link and get more followers”
Why you should get rid of fake followers
You might think it looks impressive to have a high number of followers but the reality is that fake followers are worse than no followers. They damage your credibility as a business or brand and it’s easy to spot the fake followers.
Fake followers won’t interact with your social media posts. For example, if you have one million instagram followers but you only get 50 likes on a post, it shows a bad ratio and will decrease your news feed visibility. Fake profiles won’t belong to your target audience and will lead to lower traffic and revenue.
How to get rid of instagram spammers
Instagram has its own policies to clean up and remove fake accounts but it’s impossible for Instagram to catch them all. The reason is there are tons of spammer accounts and many of them are automatically made by softwares.
Scan your instagram
There are several tools that help you delete a spammer’s activity on your profile. One very helpful tool you can try is Smart Moderation.
Private Profile
Some people are setting their profiles private to avoid spam. This will unfortunately also stop you from gaining more followers and for your photos to show up on hashtags.
Block and Report the spammer
Click on the three dots in the top right of the spammer’s account to report and block. This won’t stop other spammers from hitting your account but it will help instagram identify these fake accounts. You can also moderate the comments by clicking on the wheel in the top right corner of your own account and then go to comments and swipe right to moderate. This will block comments that are often reported as offensive.
Avoid followforfollow hashtags
You should use related hashtags in every posts but you should avoid using certain hashtags such as F4F, follow4follow, followme, like4like and similar hashtags that look desperate and will definitely attract spammers.
Don’t ever buy followers!
When you buy followers you are basically asking for spammers. Purchasing followers to increase your numbers does absolutely nothing good for your brand. As mentioned before, you want to get rid of instagram spammers because they hurt your account by driving the engagement stats down and making your follower list ugly. Your goal is to build a real, engaged and highly targeted follower base.
Get over your numbers obsessions and start focusing on your customers instead!