A ghost follower is an Instagram account that follows you but never actively engages with you (i.e. never likes or comments on any of your Instagram content).

For serious marketers, social media and content marketing professionals, high follower numbers alone are not enough. Other metrics take center stage – such as engagement or engagement rate. In these cases, ghost followers are a major obstacle to success.

Ghost followers correspond to the following characteristics:

• 0 followers
• 0 posts
• No profile picture
• High ratio of people they follow-for-follow
• 0 posts in the last 30 days
• Username is filled with random numbers

There are three conventional ways of removing bad quality followers.

Option 1: Manualy Block Them

If you have an Instagram Business Account, the only way is to  block ghost followers manually. To do that, find their profile by tapping the (…) in the top-right corner and hit ‘Block’.

It’s easier to complete this procedure by switching from a Business Account to a Personal one and set it to a Private mode. You are capable to of removing ghost followers instead of blocking them.

It’s possible to do a manual cleanup like this only if ghosts followers’ number doesn’t exceed 10k.

It takes a while to complete this kind of procedure, though in a week or two you will have a completely refreshed and clean account, which elevates its value and makes it appealing to advertisers.

Option 2: Mass Following Services

One doesn’t have to be a sledgehammer in an influencer marketing to crack a nut and be able to describe the essence of mass followers. We are not big fans neither of above-mentioned species nor of the services providing them. The last ones can be useful when it comes to banning your own followers. Don’t be shy to block/filter Instagram users who have more than 1500 followings. You can speed up an Instagram cleaning process by using one of those special apps.

Remember: users with around 10k bot accounts and more have to be aware that the cleaning process can take a while, weeks, or even months.

According to the recent statement of the Unilever‘s CEO – Keith Weed, most of the big
brands decided to step back from working with bloggers who have the inauthentic audience.
Don’t be scared to get rid of the inauthentic audience. You have more value as a blogger with 20K real followers and a good reputation, rather than having an account with some artificially boosted numbers.

Option 3: Gilberti Marketing Tools

We have developed a tool capable to clean your Instagram profile from all the fake and inactive followers automatically and quickly.

Contact us for more information [email protected] .