Why did I lose Instagram followers, you ask?
Whether you’re actively tracking your followers or simply noticed your follower number last time your checked your own Instagram profile, you probably saw a decline in followers.
For the average person or business profile, this was probably a relatively minimal drop compared to some of the larger celebrity influencer profiles gracing our Instagram feeds. According to Forbes, we saw Kylie Jenner lose approximately 2.5 million followers and sports brand Nike decline 1.1 million followers.
Here’s why…
This sudden decline in followers has been confirmed by Instagram to be a glitch. This is nothing to worry about as they’re working on this to be fixed by early on Friday morning, bringing the affected accounts back to normal.
However, there is another rumour circulating as to why this has occurred, and that’s due to Instagram’s plan to clean up fake accounts and bots. Instagram has confirmed that they are working on developing technology to weed-out accounts participating in inauthentic activity. This means that fake accounts are being deleted and any account buying fake followers will be significantly impacted. The clean up will particularly bring influencer accounts into check accounts managed by people who are able to charge brands thousands of dollars for collaborations. With these prices often directly correlated to their follower counts, it’s important for influencers to be transparent about their offering. Any influencers who have bought followers will find their profiles less desirable to businesses once they lose their falsely inflated ability to reach their following. This also goes for businesses that have purchased followers, appearing less popular after Instagram’s big clean up.
Why it’s okay!
For the average Instagram account, whether that’s a personal account or a business account, these will not be affected by the clean up if they haven’t been linked with any inauthentic growth hacking apps. Any account that has dealt with inauthentic following, liking or commenting apps will have been given the option to change their password, and therefore revoke access from these third-party apps.
This is a step in the right direction for Instagram as this will result in a better engagement ratio an important social media insight for businesses trying to gauge the popularity of their content. While we’ll lose the odd contrived comment from bots those comments which always have nothing to do with the content deleting fake account will make the platform much more genuine.
One last thing, Why you don’t need to #savemyaccount2019
You may have also heard of the hashtag #savemyaccount2019. This hashtag was started by a tweet, seemingly from Instagram itself, as pictured below. This tweet explained that they’re cracking down on accounts which don’t show activity, and of course, the only way to save an account was to re-post a screenshot of the message. Not surprisingly, the whole post was fake (who would’ve expected Instagram to make a grammatical error anyway) and it isn’t necessary to re-post the image. Now, with over 41 thousand tags of the phrase, it would seem that quite a few people have fallen for the trick, posting all sorts of pleas to keep their account active.