▫️They bring your engagement down (especially bad for content creators!).
▫️ They don’t interact with your content = a waste + your content will be shown to less people who ACTUALLY want to see your stuff.
▫️ Brands often use softwares that check the % of fake followers in your audience and you will miss out on a lot of opportunities.
Here’s how you can find accounts that are probably fake:
▫️ New accounts with to profile picture and posts.
▫️ When the content is always the same (3 identical videos/ pictures in a row etc.)
▫️ Weird usernames: tom62939942 or sugardaddy6182.
▫️ Accounts with no followers but that follow 7K people.
▫️ Accounts that spam you in your DMs (buy likes pages etc.).
▫️ Accounts that ask for your venmo or other weird things in their bio.
Just be careful when you delete your fake followers. If you delete too many in a short amount of time Instagram may flag your account. This can lead to a 1 week posting ban (which means you can't post anything nor interact with other accounts) and worst case your account can get blocked permanently if it happens too often.
Following and unfollowing is count as the same actions. The daily limit is 200 a day. 10 follows and unfollows per hour would keep your account safe and saves your account from being suspended. To make sure your account is not shadowbanned, keep your unfollow limit to less than 60 per hour with a gap of 25-30 seconds.
I usually delete fake followers once a day. Yes, it is a lot of work but my engagement rate is at 13% (the average is 5%) which shows that my strategy really works. I started a new Instagram account a few months ago and already get paid brand deals with less than 5K followers. Engagement rate > amount of followers.
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