How to purge instagram followers

How and Why to Remove Followers

Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links. I earn a small commission of product sales to keep this website going.

Updated Dec 28, 2020 – Instagram will now prohibit you from seeing your followers if it detects suspicious activity, like you removing followers via the app or using another app to identify inactive accounts. This is to “fight the bots” and will lock you out for a day or so.

Before you continue reading, let me pose a question for you to think about. What’s more important to you: having a large Instagram following, or having a more engaged but smaller following?

TLDR: You do have fake & inactive accounts following you that are hurting you.

Table of Contents

Keeping up with changes in Instagram

Instagram has undergone quite the metamorphosis in the past few years. They’re doing their best to keep up with the evolving user base and tactics, and it ultimately affects everyone.

If you take audience engagement seriously – after all, it is a social network – you need to keep up with the changes also.

Also Read: Instagram is Ruining Everything

Audience size – bigger is better?

In the “old days,” the mark of success on Instagram was a huge base of followers. Oh wow, that person has 250,000 followers! So, of course, many people gamed the system.

There were a number of ways in which people gained a large following:

Paying people to follow them
Subscribing to automation to “interact” with people for them
Hiring virtual assistants to interact with people for them
“Comment pods”
Following thousands of people, hoping they follow back, and then unfollowing them

In just about every case, there was one common theme: low engagement rates due to the low quality of followers. But no one cared, because, large following.

Instagram engagement rates

The metric of “engagement rates” has recently become more and more important.

It’s estimated that 95 million photos and videos are posted to Instagram every day in 2018, and growing. Instagram needs to find a way to figure out which photos to put in front of an audience. It’s physically impossible to show all of them.

The engagement rate – the ratio of how many people like or comment on your photo to how many followers you have – is one way Instagram determines which photos to show people.

Math example: a person with 10,000 followers posts a photo that gets 50 likes & comments in the first hour. That’s an engagement rate of 0.5% in that hour.
If someone with only 1,000 followers has the same engagement, their rate is 5%.

Instagram wants people to stay on their app because it’s good for their business (ads). You’re the product. So they’re going to keep you there by showing the photos with the highest engagement rate first. Instagram users feed on eye candy, and higher engagement rates typically equate to more delicious eye candy.

And no, you can’t buy engagement anymore. Instagram has been actively identifying and penalizing this.

Why Instagram engagement rates matter

Maybe you just want to post photos. And that’s cool, more power to you if you don’t care about statistics.

But if you’re trying to take advantage of the power of Instagram and build a community, engagement matters.

This isn’t just something I made up. I’ve spoken to a number of editors and world-famous photographers lately who echo the same sentiments.

Follower quantity doesn’t mean nearly as much as the quality of interaction between you and your followers.

There are two main reasons why Instagram engagement rates matter:

It matters to real human beings, editors and marketers, evaluating if they could leverage your Instagram audience to get their message out. And it should matter to you because this should be fun. Do you have a close community?
Instagram uses the number to figure out how often your photos are shown.

A good Instagram engagement rate is around 4%. You’re on fire if it’s near 10%.

Your numbers will be on the lower end the larger your audience is; that’s just the nature of it and people understand that.

A person with millions of followers, like the Chris Burkards and Jimmy Chins, are expected to have rates around 2%. The rest of us should be shooting higher.

So if your account has accumulated thousands of disengaged followers over the years, these followers – fake accounts, inactive users, ghost followers – are lowering your engagement rate significantly.

You can use a tool like HypeAuditor to determine the makeup of your audience.

What can we do? Clean our Instagram followers!

Related: Do you even need Instagram to be a successful photographer?

Which followers should you clean from your Instagram account?

Fake accounts

These fake accounts are fairly obvious, and you should remove all fake Instagram followers.

Improve your photography with more tips like this delivered to your inbox monthly - click here (opens new window).

They’re the accounts with no profile photo or profile, no posts, a couple dozen followers, and following thousands and thousands of accounts.

They were most likely paid by someone else to follow you, even if you didn’t pay them.

Something fishy about these accounts…

Mass followers

Instagram has imposed a “following” limit of 7,500. Who honestly wants to follow 7,500 accounts? How many of them do you actually see on a daily basis, or even really care about?

The people who do follow 7,500 accounts are only doing so to gain followers. The “I’ll follow them in hopes they follow me back” play. We’ve all done it, but hopefully not to this extent.

They will never see your posts, and you can verify this by checking “ghost followers”, explained later.

These are just two of the hundreds and hundreds of followers who will never see my posts.

Inactive followers

Some people have taken a break from Instagram or have stopped using it altogether.

The “dormancy” period is up to your discretion, but I’m comfortable with 180 days. If they’ve been out for more than six months, they’re most likely not just “off the grid” on vacation.

Chances are high they’ll never be back, and you can remove these Instagram followers if you wish.

“Ghost” followers

Accounts that are following you but haven’t interacted with you for some time, if ever. I use the Unfollow app and set it to tell me who hasn’t interacted with my last 100 posts.

The list of “ghost followers” most often includes “mass followers,” people following more than a couple thousand accounts. They never see your posts among the thousands of others. It will also include inactive followers.

It will also identify business accounts that obviously followed you in the hopes you’ll follow them back and/or give them business. Like the advertising agency in Sicily – I’m sure you do great work, but seriously?

Thanks for the follow, but why is an ad agency in Sicily really following me and 7,495 other accounts?

How to clean Instagram followers

Manual removal

Identifying bad accounts can be extremely tedious, especially if you have a large following.

You can remove Instagram followers by going to their profile.

Go to your “followers” list to see all accounts following you.
Tap on the profile you want to remove.
Tap on the three dots on the upper right in that profile.
Select “Remove Follower” from the menu that pops up, and confirm the removal.

These Instagram followers will be removed from your account. They will no longer be following you, and they won’t be notified you did this.

Using automation to clean Instagram followers

There are a few apps that can clean Instagram followers for you automatically, or at least aid you. They’re finicky and not without their problems (mostly due to Instagram limiting third-party apps), but they’re better than nothing.

The app I use is Unfollow (available for iOS). It’s free. Some people also use Cleaner (iOS | Android). No doubt others have come out after this was published. Instagram is constantly changing third-party app access, and these apps are also always changing. Look on the app store and find one with the highest, most-recent reviews.

I hate full automation. I don’t trust it, so I use this as a tool to help me identify accounts I may want to remove. I have it tell me who hasn’t been active for 180 days, and who hasn’t interacted with my last 100 posts.

Then I assess the account and manually remove them on the Instagram app. Remember that if someone hasn’t interacted with your last 100 posts, maybe it’s just because Instagram chose to not show them your posts. If it’s an honest account, active, with similar interests, not following thousands of people, I’ll leave them be. I don’t want to alienate a potential sincere audience.

But if they haven’t interacted with my last 100 posts because they’re following 6,000 people, they add no value to my community.

The other thing I don’t like about the full automation is that it can’t “Remove” Instagram followers from your account. It can only “Block” them, and I don’t want it to block thousands of people without my input.

Cleaning your Instagram followers manually is tedious and time-consuming. But I think it’s the most effective middle-ground to maintaining your audience.

Some final thoughts on cleaning Instagram followers

Community. I’d rather have a close-knit group of folks gathered in a small room. Having an arena full of countless zombies doesn’t seem fun.

I was shocked to learn how much of my audience was either fake, dormant for a year or more, or hasn’t interacted with my photos for over a year. But it made sense looking at my engagement rates. It hurt, but call it necessary housecleaning.

I’ve been at it for a week and have removed over 33% of my followers, with much more to go.

Stay on top of it by removing or blocking obviously fake or dishonest Instagram followers as they follow you.

Now, this doesn’t mean you should go deleting all but your most loyal ten followers to get an engagement rate of 100%. That’s not the goal. Audience size is still a factor – you still want to maximize your reach – but you should also be looking at your engagement rate as a more important metric. Clean the spam.

Objectively ask the question: Will this person add value to my community, or will they detract from it? This makes it easier to determine which Instagram followers to remove.

Please leave your thoughts or questions about cleaning Instagram followers in the comments below!

How to remove real and fake followers on Instagram

Nothing lasts forever — especially when it comes to Instagram followers. But, thankfully, you don’t have to wait for someone to unfollow you or delete their account to remove them. With Instagram, you have the ability to manually remove anyone you wish from your list of followers. All it takes is a few taps to get the job done.

Whether you’re deleting inactive accounts or severing a virtual relationship, this guide will cover everything you need to know about how to delete followers on Instagram.

How to delete followers on Instagram

It will come as a relief to learn that removing followers on Instagram is a simple, straightforward process. However, there are a couple of things to keep in mind before you start pressing Delete.

Removing vs. restricting vs. blocking followers on Instagram

There are three ways you can go about getting rid of specific accounts that follow your Instagram profile: removing, restricting, and blocking.

Restricting an account is basically one step above removing and one step below blocking. When you restrict an account, all of their comments and likes (as well as their direct messages) are hidden. They can still interact with your profile, but you will no longer see those interactions.

Here’s how to find your restricted accounts:

Open your Instagram app.
Press the icon of your profile picture at the bottom-right of your screen.
Press the three horizontal lines at the top-right of the screen.
Navigate to Settings > Privacy > Restricted Accounts.

From there, you can unrestrict accounts and use the search bar to find accounts to restrict.

Blocking, on the other hand, restricts a person’s profile to an even greater degree. When you block an account, that person won’t be able to comment, like, or direct message you. In fact, blocked accounts cannot find or view your profile at all. The only things that blocked accounts can see are your likes and comments on public posts.

Here’s how to find your blocked accounts:

Open your Instagram app.
Press the icon of your profile picture at the bottom-right of your screen.
Press the three horizontal lines at the top-right of the screen.
Navigate to Settings > Privacy > Blocked Accounts.

If you no longer want someone’s account to be blocked, you have the option to unblock them. And if you suspect that someone has blocked you, here’s how to find out who blocked you on Instagram.

Removing an Instagram follower is a much less restrictive approach. Removed followers will potentially still be able to access and interact with your account — unless you take some precautions, which we’ll go over in a later section.

How to remove a follower on Instagram

Removing a follower on Instagram is just as simple as blocking or restricting an account. Here’s how to do it:

Open the Instagram app.
Press the icon of your profile picture at the bottom-right of your screen.
Press Followers.
Scroll or use the search bar to find the account you wish to remove.
Press Remove next to the account.
Press Remove.

Following these instructions will remove an account from your list of followers.

Is there a way to mass-delete your followers?

The previously mentioned steps are fine and dandy for removing a follower or two. But what do you do if you want to rid your account of multiple followers — or all of them?

Well, you won’t find the solution through Instagram. At the time of this writing, you can’t bulk-remove followers within the app itself. Instead, you’ll have to enlist the help of a third-party tool. For the purposes of this guide, we’ll be using the free app InstaClean – Cleaner for IG.

Here’s how to use it to mass-delete followers:

Download and open InstaClean – Cleaner for IG.
Log in with your Instagram account information.
Press Authorize.
Select Followers.
Scroll through and select all of the followers you wish to remove.
Press the three horizontal buttons at the top-right of the screen.
Select Remove.

With this app, you can also mass-block followers or mass-delete posts from your own Instagram profile.

What happens when you remove a follower on Instagram?

Now that you’re armed with all this knowledge, it’s time to go over some frequently asked questions about removing Instagram followers.

Do your followers get notified when you remove them?

No. When you remove a follower from your Instagram account, the person isn’t notified. The only way they would find out is if they went to view your profile and noticed the active Follow button. Also, if your profile is set to private, they will be unable to see your posts or Stories.

Will you know if someone removes you as a follower?

Again, no. When someone removes you as a follower from their account, you won’t be notified. The only way you would be able to tell is if their profile was set to private, which would mean you could no longer see their content.

When you remove a follower on Instagram, can they still see your posts?

It depends on your account’s privacy settings. If you’re a public account, removing someone doesn’t prevent them from seeing your profile, posts, or Stories. They can still view everything — and even send you messages. Your content just won’t show up on their feed anymore. They can also refollow you at any time unless you block their account. On the other hand, if your profile is set to private, removing a follower will prevent them from seeing your content. They may request to refollow you, but you will have to approve them in order for them to see your posts and Stories again.

When you remove someone on Instagram, do their likes disappear?

No. When you remove someone from your followers’ list, their likes and comments will still remain on your posts.

How to remove fake or inactive followers on Instagram

Every now and then, it’s good to do a big sweep of your Instagram followers and see which accounts are inactive or possibly fake. Social media experts refer to these accounts as “ghost followers.”

Usually, ghost accounts will have a low number of followers but a high list of accounts they’re following, and low-quality content or no content at all. And while there are third-party apps that claim to be able to detect such accounts, they aren’t very reliable. The only way you can cleanse your account of ghost followers with confidence is by manually going through your list of followers and removing ghost accounts one by one.

Here are some other red flags to look for when checking your followers list for fake accounts:

They leave nonspecific comments under other accounts’ posts, such as “cool” or “nice pic.”
They have tons of followers but not that many posts (or no posts at all).
They have a generic bio that doesn’t reveal very much information about who they are.
Some of their posts seem to promote a product or business.
The account seems to have been created recently.

It’s a tedious task, but this process will help keep your account secure and safe from being flagged by Instagram.

Does Instagram delete fake followers?

While it’s not a guarantee, Instagram has made announcements regarding its intent to remove fake accounts from the app. The only way to make sure you have no fake accounts following you is to go through and manually check your list of followers.

As the owner of your Instagram account, you have the right to remove, restrict, or block followers as you wish. We hope this guide has shown you how to remove followers on Instagram and has made managing your audience a bit easier.

This was about:

Instagram

Emily Blackwood

Writer and editor, driven by curiosity and black coffee.

How to remove followers on Instagram: we clean the account from bots and inactive ones

Now on Instagram it is not the number of followers that is more important, but their quality. Social media algorithms take into account engagement when promoting an account, and advertisers have learned to choose bloggers by ER, not by the number of subscribers. Better to have 1,000 active living people involved than 20,000 dead souls. A logical question arises - how to remove followers on Instagram?

It should be said right away that the thoughtless removal of everyone you consider "garbage" can lead to negative consequences. In the article we will tell you how to remove followers on Instagram, and also give advice on how to do it without harm to your account.

Reduce the budget of targeted and contextual advertising with click.ru

Click.ru will return up to 15% of advertising costs.

Transfer your advertising accounts to click.ru.
The more you spend on advertising, the more percentage of the expenses we will return.
This is real money. And click.ru will pay them to the card, to electronic wallets, or you can reinvest them in advertising.

Cut the budget >> Advertising

Read also : The best Instagram promotion courses

Why and who should be deleted on Instagram

The answer is obvious - profiles that are not active and do not perform targeted actions (for example, do not buy anything). But here you need to be careful - if a person silently watches posts and is not your client, this does not mean that he will not buy anything in the future.

It is worth deleting bots, commercial accounts (there are exceptions), mass followers, abandoned accounts and inactive foreigners (if you have a local business). It costs no more than 30-50 people per day to delete inactive subscribers. Such a limit will not harm the account in any way and will not attract attention from Instagram.

Example - an empty account, only 3 publications, no profile picture and description, a large number of outgoing subscriptions.

But it may be different, for example, you are a manufacturer of cosmetics for beauty salons and then it is not surprising that you will have commercial accounts in your subscribers (the same beauty salons and private masters). In this case, you do not need to delete them, because they are your potential customers.

Important: when deleting followers, you must also remember about Instagram limits so as not to get an account ban or restrictions. The social network sums up subscriptions and unsubscribes, that is, with a limit of 2,000 subscriptions per month, if you make 1,500 subscriptions and 1,500 unsubscribes, this will be a violation of the limit. The number of allowed actions depends on the newness of the account. You can find the current limits in numbers in the article “Instagram Limits 2021”.

Why delete followers - an inactive audience spoils Instagram statistics. When promoting an account, the ER level, that is, the ratio of the number of impressions to the number of reactions, affects the position in the issue. While it's far from the only ranking factor on Instagram, don't underestimate it.

Another reason is that experienced advertisers look at engagement levels when choosing a blogger to promote. If, with a large number of subscribers, a blogger has a low percentage of engagement, then something is wrong with his content or the quality of the audience. Such a blogger should not hope for profitable long-term cooperation, except for one-time orders from inexperienced advertisers.

The third reason is that a personal recommendation feed shows your content only to those subscribers who are interested in it - who visits your profile, likes, comments, reposts, watches stories, writes in Direct. Inactive profiles that do not visit your page and do not react to the content in any way will simply not see your post in the feed, no matter how sensational it may be. So, the whole point of having such subscribers is lost.

Of course, if you have a personal account, you do not advertise, you are not interested in the level of involvement, and you do not strive for popularity, but just want to clean up your profile, then the main thing for you is to comply with the limits.

Interesting: 31 ways to increase the reach and impressions of posts on Instagram

How to remove followers on Instagram: an overview of all methods

How to get rid of unnecessary followers.

Manually

Instagram has simplified the way to delete followers. Previously, you had to look for an account, go to it and click on the "Unsubscribe" button - now everything is much easier.

We go to our page. Click on the "Subscribers" section. Click "Delete" next to the desired account. Here you can also subscribe, if necessary (blue button "Subscribe").

Using services

Manual removal will take a lot of time, especially if you have thousands of unnecessary subscribers, so you can use the services.

Services for deleting followers on Instagram:

Instahero - there are three ways to delete bots: automatic, manual with settings, for selected categories, for example, in a couple of clicks you can delete all inactive or mass followers subscribed to you. In addition Follower Removal Service offers analytics tools that will help identify all bots in an account in categories such as inactive, commercial, mass followers, and foreign. And also with the help of the monitoring service, you can track all changes in the profile statistics.
Instaplus - blocking according to a given list or automatic removal of inactive subscribers when the limit is reached. But the main direction of the service is mass activities and mailings to Direct.
Spamguard is a cloud service designed specifically for removing subscribers. Here you can choose who exactly to delete, as well as set up a White list of the desired profiles.

P.S. It is better to choose services where there is manual deletion with the maximum number of parameters, as well as the ability to set a time period and limits for actions. Fully automated services can make mistakes in identifying low-quality audiences and remove the wrong ones. In addition, you can get banned from Instagram for dubious services and scripts.

How to delete followers on Instagram CORRECTLY

That is, so that your engagement does not drop sharply or your account is not banned. And also not to remove potential customers.

Tips:

Get the right idea of inactivity. Just because a person doesn't like or comment on your posts doesn't mean they won't buy anything from you. But if he hasn’t logged into his account for a long time and hasn’t posted anything, most likely his account is abandoned and then it makes sense to delete such a profile from subscribers. Before creating a deletion list, we advise you to go to the account page and see when the last post was posted and if there is a story. If there are no publications for several months or years, you can delete it. True, there are exceptions here too - there are people who register on Instagram only to follow the publications of friends and relatives. But by removing such profiles, the risk of deleting a potential client is still much lower than when deleting those who are not active on your page, but in general, are active on Instagram. Important: you must have a good understanding of who your target audience is. If the account is not active on your page, but in all respects fits the target audience, it is better not to delete it.
As for commercial accounts, there are also live people behind them, and sometimes they are still active. Here it is worth looking to see if the account is your direct competitor, and if it spams advertising under the posts. Is he trying to lure subscribers. It may be worth creating a collaboration with someone from commercial accounts instead of deleting it.
Foreigners are often removed from subscribers. But here you also need to look at specific people. For example, Arabs and Indians are often active in the comments, that is, they positively influence the level of engagement.
You can not delete subscribers abruptly and immediately. For example, 5,000 per day. Ideally, removing old subscribers should go hand in hand with adding new ones. For example, 100 new subscribers signed up for you per day, so you need to delete no more than 100. This is not an ironclad rule, but it will help to avoid a sharp drop in engagement.
Work comprehensively on your account. The most common misconception about removing followers on Instagram is that cleaning accounts will help increase engagement. But the reason may not be bad subscribers at all - in order to increase the level of engagement, in addition to cleaning the account, you need to develop it and constantly work on the quality of content.
Respect limits. We already wrote about the limits above.
Do not use gray promotion methods. This does not mean that you need to completely abandon the services - you just need to do everything carefully. If you clearly understand who your target audience is, understand how the limits work, and why Instagram can ban you, and the service meets security requirements, you can speed up the process of recruiting subscribers.

When you can delete all followers on Instagram

In some cases, you can not waste time analyzing the audience, but simply delete everyone from the list (but do not forget about the limits).

For example :

When collecting the target audience, mistakes were made, and as a result, strangers turned out to be subscribers, and not your target audience (not if the purpose of maintaining an account is sales. At the same time, such an audience can still be active).

The account has changed subject — for example, you have decided to start another business. Let's say you were selling auto parts, and then you decided to do women's training - it's obvious that you need a new audience of subscribers.

Zero activity on the account and complete removal will not greatly affect the level of engagement. That is, it is faster to delete everyone than to figure out who is a bot and who is not.

There are too many unnecessary profiles in relation to the active audience, so it's easiest to delete and re-create the audience.

P.S. Deleting all subscribers is more expedient than deleting an account and registering a new one, because fresh accounts have different limits and, in general, they are more attentive to algorithms. The account will have to be “warmed up”, and this is time and resources.

An alternative to deleting followers on Instagram

If a person is active, but behaves inappropriately, for example, often writes irrelevant, you can restrict his access to your account, for example, hide his comments from other users. To enable the "Restricted Access" function, you need to go to the account page, click on the 3 dots in the upper right corner and select the "Restrict Access" item.

You can also block specific users. This makes sense if you deleted the account, and he signed up again. Such a user will not be able to find your profile, stories and posts and will not know that he has been blocked. Blocking is located in the same menu as access restriction, the section is called "Lock".

Conclusion

When deleting followers on Instagram, always remember the rules and expediency of these actions - follow the limits, do not delete too many at once, do not delete everyone in a row. Also, keep in mind that purging followers alone is rarely enough to increase engagement rates — it takes a set of actions to achieve this.

Useful links:

How to get into Instagram recommendations
Why are you being unfollowed on Instagram
10 services for analyzing Instagram statistics

Comparison of online courses

Before you buy any course, compare conditions from different schools - tuition fees, discounts, duration, whether there is an employment program. Find an online course >>

Advertising

More related articles:

NEWS

REVIEWS

ARTICLES

Advertising

How to quickly remove followers on Instagram: inactive or cheated

But such an automated method has a drawback: the social network can block the page, details are below in the article.

Content

How to remove inactive followers on Instagram
- Through online services
- through the phone
Determine the wound subscribers on Instagram
- Delete wound subscribers

Li-9000 9000.

Instagram customization and new features expert.

Ask a question

Inactive - these are those subscribers who do not leave likes and comments, abandoned their accounts a long time ago or made their profile private. The disadvantage is that even such fans are included in the list of potential audience and will affect the engagement rate in the statistics.

To remove a person from Instagram followers, you need:

Go to your profile - select from the top: "Subscribers".
Opposite the nickname, click: "Delete".

Or the second option is to block. This method is no longer relevant, as it affects page limits. But we still use it if we need to remove the list of bots and fakes.

The profile owner has several options to clear their profile:

independently by making a table;
through online services;
using mobile applications.

In the latter case, applications do not analyze activity on someone else's account. Therefore, it is worth pointing out that this concerns the complete cleaning of subscribers or the gradual removal of 10-20 people from the list.

Through online services

Using the online service, you can delete a follower without being blocked on Instagram. Such a user will be able to re-subscribe if his page was mistakenly perceived as "inactive".

Zengram	Removes only users from subscriptions, but you can clear the list of those who have not posted for a long time, did not share Stories.
SpamGuard	Analyzes the page and shows how many followers are inactive.
InstaHero	You can remove subscribers through the By Parameters tab. Specify the number of publications in the profile, the presence of an avatar.
trendhero	Performs full blog analytics showing how many of the fans are bots.
Instaplus.pro	The service shows inactive and non-target subscribers, gradually removing them from the profile.

From the computer version, it is easier to use the InstaHero service, which shows full information about the account:

Enter the service - create an account.
Connect your Instagram account.
Select: "Analysis" - wait until the service collects complete information.
View the number of inactive audience.
Cleaning - According to the parameters.
Specify basic settings and start.

Information about the progress of the deletion appears in the History section. Between each operation there is a small gap that is needed to comply with the limits.

Via phone

Using the InstaPlus service, which is available on mobile devices, you can delete the list of subscribers. It can be installed using the APK file, which is available on the official website.

How to use:

Follow the link to the site.
Select: "Download to phone" (using a QR code or receive a file on a computer).
Install and open - select the analysis method: "To clean bots".
Wait for the service to analyze - start deletion.

Next, the page owner can specify which category of users to remove from the page. This method has an advantage over the computer version: you do not need to connect your account, you can check competitors.

Determine the followers on Instagram

It is possible to determine which of the followers are cheated by competitors through the section: “Followers”, where the entire list of fans is shown. Or through the InstaHero service, which shows information about mass following.

How to determine cheating on your own:

Go to your profile or competitor's account.
Press: "Subscribers" - see how many fans are bots and fakes.
Go to comments - view the type of comments.

If a competitor has cheated fans on the page, they leave the same comments, put emoticons instead of text. Therefore, this is one of the ways to determine cheating.

It is even easier to audit and analyze your profile: if you constantly receive subscription notifications from pages where there are no photos, publications and many subscriptions, this is an established cheat. It can be used not only by blog owners, but also by their competitors.

Remove cheated followers

You can delete subscribers who have been cheated either manually or use online services. These are settings that are aimed at cleaning up bots, because there is no separate item for cheated subscribers.

To remove using InstaHero:

Go to the service - register.
Connect your Instagram account - select: "Clean".
Automatic - confirm start.

All accounts that meet the criteria: "Fakes" and "Bots" will be removed from the page. If you use the option: "Delete by parameters", then you need to select a list of those subscribers that will remain undeleted.

The advantage of automatic and manual unsubscribing is that the other user does not know that they have been removed from the fan list. But if you use the option: "Block", the owner of the second page will be able to find out if he goes to the blog where he was sent to the ban.