Instagram bots and when you have to get rid of them |
Why getting rid of bots is necessary
Bots can be useful: they allow you to gain a large number of subscribers without really trying. But there are dangerous consequences: they vary from decreasing audience activity to blocking of your account. There are certain signs that let you know that your profile needs to be cleaned from bots. Let’s look at them closer.
1. Mass following
Although Instagram does not specifically prohibit this method of finding new audience, but the method itself is not longer efficient. It allows to increase the number of followers, but the quality of new subscribers will be low. If you used to mass follow thousands of accounts monthly, the you really should undergo preventive cleanings.
2. Activating of once an abandoned account
Before restarting your old Instagram account, it is important to make it look good. It must undergo preliminary diagnostics in order to find inactive or dead subscribers. Only after that the profile can be used as s platform for promotion.
3. Checkup
All Instagram accounts tend to attract junk subscriptions and are cluttered over time. Don’t’t take it personally: theme of your account and size of your real audience does not matter. Bots need to imitate activity, therefore they subscribe to other accounts. But you have to be mindful of statistics for your account: having too many bots or dubious subscribers in your following is not good for you. Therefore it is recommended to conduct periodic analysis of the audience. Keeping your account clean will make it easier for the owner to respond to real subscribers.
How to identify low-quality audience
Before launching an Instagram project, the user must learn how to distinguish between an active audience and dead one. The main rule of Instagram is that quantity does not determine quality. When working with a large number of accounts, you need to separate the wheat from the chaff. Low-quality audience has the following characteristics:
- lack of activity;
- commercial orientation of the account;
- inadequately large number of subscriptions (several thousands per month);
- a small number of posts (or their absence);
- few likes and comments.
Zombie followers are useless for both business accounts and ordinary users. The make your profile look bad.
Who needs bot cleaning
Fighting bots is not required for all accounts. Commercial and dead profiles harm those users who use Instagram to promote a brand or service. For these individuals, timely removal of bots is the key to the success. Among users interested in cleaning up dead profiles are:
- business accounts. Bots will not purchase goods, and that is why they don’t bring any benefit commercial accounts. Moreover, these bots clog statistics and prevent your account from reaching potential customers;
- SMM specialists. Specialists who are responsible for the social networks of their customers are interested in quality service. Therefore, services that reduce unwanted activity are always popular among these workers;
- bloggers. Bloggers monetize their creativity through interaction with advertisers. Advertisers are interested in profiles with active audiences. Such Instagram profiles can give advertisers increase of subscribers. Bloggers with audience of dead accounts can not count on scoring contracts wit major brands.
SpamGuard: convenient bot removal service
Since deleting bots manually is not practical, it is better to do it faster and easier. There are several services for combating dead accounts. One of the best is SpamGuard. It performs comprehensive profile analysis and gives the results to its owner.
How to use SpamGuard
The functionality of the service is simple and accessible to both experienced Instagram users and beginners. To start working with it, you need to take several steps:
- registration on the website and adding an account;
- account verification: selection the type of analysis that is needed (test or full);
- work with the results. After verification, the service displays number of inactive subscriptions. They can be sorted by several criteria (commercial, non-reciprocal, foreigners, etc.), and then selectively removed;
- service setup. For automatic operation, SpamGuard is configured for certain categories of accounts that are subject to deletion.
Filter settings
In automatic mode, the SpamGuard service independently determines number of subscriptions for daily deletion. But this parameter can be changed manually. The “Manual cleaning” section includes three working options:
- default. The option is suitable for new users of social networks who do not want to spend a lot of time analyzing their audiences. Full automation is also convenient for accounts with huge following whose owners can’t cope with the influx of subscriptions;
- deleting a fixed number of accounts. The service offers to user to manually enter the number of followers that he can afford to get rid of every day. Algorithms will be limited to this figure;
- percentage removal. The profile owner enters the percentage of users that SpamGuard will periodically clean. The program translates percent into a specific number of subscribers and gets rid of them.
Different methods of cleaning subscriptions are suitable for accounts with the different audiences. Spamgard’s flexible filter adapts to the needs of each Instagram user.