Bots can ruin your marketing campaign and make you have an unnatural-looking profile on Instagram thereby messing things up for you. However, there is a fix around it and you can get rid of them. read the article below to find out.
With pictures and videos being some of the best brand communication mediums, businesses have taken to social media platforms like Instagram to connect with their prospects. It's no news that Instagram is one of the major social media platforms with a lot of engagement and interaction. For this reason, many brands have taken to buying followers to stay on the charts. Unfortunately, many of these followers are Instagram bot-generated accounts.
Even though Instagram takes user security very seriously, bots are still essentially an inevitability in the app. These bots are basically fake Instagram accounts that aim to boost the following of a certain account or a brand. As revealed by Italian security researchers in 2015, about 8% of Instagram accounts appeared to be run by computer-generated bots. This number grew to about 9.5% in 2019. Based on the new Instagram algorithms, these bots are counterproductive. They are capable of seriously harming your account's statistics. As such, if you want to know how to get rid of bots and clean up your Instagram account, then I suggest you read on.
What is an Instagram Bot?
There are several different ways to approach the idea of Instagram bots. But in simple terms, an Instagram bot is a piece of software designed to assist creators with their daily Instagram tasks like commenting on posts, following accounts, and liking posts. The purpose of these bots is to assist you in expanding the audience, fan base, and engagement of your business on the platform.
However, despite how important and efficient Instagram bots are, scammers can abuse them. They could use the bots in the form of fake Instagram accounts that they can use to send spam messages or leave spam comments on your posts. As a result, the activities of these bots could be detrimental to the overall success of your brand.
How Do Instagram Bots Work?
Instagram bots work similarly to any average social media bot. It means that you give it some target audience guidelines and custom filters. Based on these, the bot can then go into the act of following, liking, and commenting on these targeted accounts on a large scale.
Consequently, the Instagram bot should be able to drive a lot of traffic based on the accuracy of the target audience and the instructions you provide. Gaining more followers and increasing brand recognition are the obvious outcomes of the bot's action. On the contrary, if a scammer is taking advantage of these bots, the opposite would be the case. Your engagement would drop, and your conversion would be very low.
Effect of Instagram Bots on Your Account
When running any form of an ad campaign on Instagram, it is important for you as a person or company to be constantly conscious of your objectives. As such, the fact that these bot accounts improve your follower numbers does not ensure actual engagements. Instead, they might harm your brand. With that in mind, the following are some detrimental effects of Instagram bots on your account:
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Inability to reach your target audience
Instagram bots cannot possibly replace human engagement. However, fake, automated Instagram followers could comment on or like a handful of your posts right away after following you. However, this rarely continues. The fact that the comments weren't made by actual individuals is generally understood by many people. This explains why many brands experience low engagement.
Hence, if you are a brand that has a high number of bot accounts that are following you, there is a very slim possibility that your ad will be noticed by real people. In other words, every fake Instagram follower that doesn't engage lowers your rates, which further reduces the visibility of your profile as a whole.
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They can ruin your brand's reputation
While Instagram bots can help you in a number of ways, the social media network itself advises users against relying entirely on them because they might negatively impact the reputation of your brand. Some individuals might be impressed by your raw followers, likes, and comments, but more experienced Instagram users won't be.
Fake social proof will have the opposite effect of what real social proof can do, which is to increase reach and sales. When they contrast the abnormal follower numbers with the matching post comments, many individuals may even stop following or trusting in your brand.
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They can affect your Ad campaign budget
This point applies to both your account and Instagram “influencer” accounts. Desperate brands and influencers engage in funny growth hacks like using fake followers to boost their perceived status. On average, paying to have an influencer market your products or brand can be very effective.
It has the potential to generate average returns of $5 or more on every dollar invested. But unfortunately, many of the followers that influencers buy for these desperate brands are fake, which means there are very low chances of getting the proposed returns. This ends up burning your ad budget.
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They can get you into trouble with Instagram’s Terms of Use
Bots are a no-no for the social media platform. And while it’s basically impossible for them to stop fake Instagram accounts from being created, they do moderate them aggressively, removing them as they find them. If it is perceived that you have purchased fake bot followers or some spiked bot activity has been detected on your account, you stand a chance of being limited, suspended, or even banned. This is a more tangible reason you should get rid of these Instagram bots for good.
How to Spot Instagram Bots
For someone who is aware of what bots are and the reasons why they are a problem. Most likely, you would want to get rid of them right away. However, you should first understand what qualifies an Instagram account to be a bot before taking action against it. As a result, we've listed a few tips below to make it easier for you to identify Instagram bots.
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No content posted
You can be dealing with a bot account if you have a new follower who has a lot of followers but no posts. As a platform for sharing photos and videos, it is typical for some accounts to have little content, but if the account belongs to a real person, at least two photos or videos should be there. Far more reason to investigate that account should be the fact that it has a large number of followers despite not publishing a single post.
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An account with abnormal numbers
By examining the follower-to-following ratio, you can spot a fake Instagram account quite easily. Due to the automated nature of these accounts, a lot of people are becoming suspicious about their numbers of followers. Fake accounts don't engage, as we have mentioned. Therefore, if you find a profile with a lot of followers—say, 1,000—but fewer than five likes on each post, it can be a fake account. At the very least, it reveals the illegitimacy of that account's followers.
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An account with a shabby or empty bio
The bios of your followers are yet another important consideration when on the lookout for Instagram bots. Influencers under pressure to provide results may use these techniques to acquire a large following for their clients without being concerned about the consequences. The standard Instagram bio is communicative and provides information about the product or service being offered.
On the other hand, a fake Instagram follower account would either have no bio or a really basic one. It doesn't at all correspond to the content of their posts. What would you expect if an influencer offered to sell you 1,000 fake Instagram followers for just $12.99? They wouldn't have enough time to set up accounts with authentic images, interesting bios, and original postings.
As such, another thing to keep in mind concerning these fake Instagram accounts with funny bios is that they typically lack a profile picture. They use a generic stock photo or feature a picture of something other than a person, such as a picture of a beach or a structure.
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Profile usernames with numbers:
Although this is frequently disregarded, it is a huge warning sign. If a user attempts to register a username that is already in use for Instagram, they will see suggestions for similar names that have a number attached. The average person isn't too excited about the idea of being @jesse567890, especially if the username is hard to remember. Hence, if you come across accounts with usernames similar to these that appear to be random or spammy, they are probably not legitimate Instagram accounts.
How to Get Rid of Instagram Bots
It is now obvious that Instagram bots are annoying and cause more harm than good. Your temporary high following count on Instagram is never worth the issues that bots cause. However, it is a threat that Instagram creators must manage until Instagram introduces an anti-bot mechanism that will permanently resolve this issue. In order to help you get rid of these terrible programs from your social media account, we've put together a few methods.
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Run Audit on your account followers
For businesses or individuals who must have paid for followers but have very low corresponding engagement, running a regular audit on your account is one good way to remove bot accounts from your list and prevent them from interfering with your engagements. This would help you target real individuals for better reach.
Thankfully, Instagram has a lot of auditing tools out there you can leverage to get this done quickly. One of the most popular and free ones you can find is HypeAuditor.
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Manually remove fake and dead followers
After auditing, one good step to take to stop Instagram bots is to manually delete them. As soon as you notice a follower account that meets all the parameters for a bot, do well to remove it. One of the advantages of doing this is that it increases your chances for more engagement and allows your ad campaigns to be seen by real people, ultimately resulting in more conversions.
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Use an ad fraud solution
While manually removing bot accounts is great, it can be very cumbersome for someone who has thousands of accounts to go through. This is where an ad fraud solution finds expression. This doesn’t just stop Instagram bots; it also protects your ad campaigns from being tampered with. There are numerous good, reasonably priced options available for you to choose from.
FAQs
Q. Are Instagram Bots Legal and Safe?
Instagram officially strongly disapproves of bot activity on the social media platform. For one thing, Instagram's bot violates a number of the “Terms of Use” for the platform. As a result, you run the risk of being restricted, banned, or completely blocked if you are found using any bot-generated procedure on the platform. Regarding the safety of Instagram bots, it's not a major concern if your only purpose is to amass fake followers for fun, but if your company wants to drive significant conversion, Instagram bots are absolutely not safe for you.
Q. What Do Instagram Bots Do?
Basically, the purpose of these bots is to increase a user's reach and engagement on social media by liking, following, and commenting on posts. While that is one side of the story, if these bots are in the hands of malicious fraudsters, they can accomplish the exact opposite. They can be used to mislead businesses by providing them with fake followers and ineffective engagements.
Q. Is there a way to avoid bots on Instagram?
Yes, it is very possible to avoid the interference of bots on Instagram. However, they are an inevitable aspect of the platform. Therefore, if you are working on something tangible on the platform, the struggle to avoid them is never-ending. We have also given a few steps in this article to help get rid of those bots for good. Check them out.
Conclusion
Any connections with bot accounts should be avoided at all costs, whether they follow your account or you follow them. The extent to which bots and other Instagram fake followers can skew statistics and keep your account from becoming popular cannot be overemphasized.
It is important to constantly monitor your account to remove these useless Instagram bot-generated followers. As we mentioned in the article, you can do this either manually or with the help of an ad fraud solution. In the long run, organic promotion and an account without fake followers are the best bet.
