You check your follower count at one moment, and you’ve got a healthy 2500 followers.
The next thing you know, you’ve lost over 20 followers.
What’s up with that?
You can lose followers at any time on Instagram, with no rhyme or reason.
Why does this happen? And how?
How can you know who stopped following you on Instagram?
Sometimes it’s difficult to tell who is causing your follower count to go down, and it’s even tougher to know why people unfollow you in the first place.
There are many different reasons why this may happen.
Have you ever unfollowed someone on Instagram? If you have, you may be able to gather some insight as to why people unfollow.
If not, we’re going to explain a bit about the motivations between unfollowers on Instagram.
Not only that, we’ll dive into the technical aspect of understanding who your Instagram unfollowers are, how you can unfollow people yourself, and pretty much all things in between.
Let’s go!
How Do You See Who Your Instagram Unfollowers Are?
If you are curious about who your Instagram unfollowers, you have a couple options.
You could do this manually, but as you can imagine this requires a lot of tireless work scrolling through your follower count hoping to discover which profiles aren’t following you anymore.
This may seem like a waste of time and energy, and quite frankly, it is. There are much better ways to spend your time on Instagram.
After all, wouldn’t you rather be taking lofty photos of yourself at the beach?
In all seriousness, don’t waste your time looking through your followers list; it’s possible that your follower count fluctuates all throughout the day.
If you really want to gain insight into who is following and unfollowing you on Instagram, there’s an app for that.
Many apps are limited by the Instagram API to fortify privacy, so you’ll find very specific information based on what these apps can and can’t report.
Some are still effective, and we’ll discuss the best ones in the next section.
What’s the Best Instagram Unfollowers App?
If you search the App Store or Google Play Store for an Instagram unfollowers app, you’ll be drowned in options.
You have literally hundreds of choices to help you see who has given you the boot.
Searching on Google itself will also provide similar results; you’ll have tons of choices that claim to give you deep insights on your Instagram following, helping to see who is legit, who’s not, and who has left you behind.
But, heres the kicker, most of them are absolute scams.
One of the most popular options that people rely on for this type of data is SpamGuard.
They are dedicated to giving you insights about who follows you, unfollows you, and more.
If you want even more still, you can check out an app for iOS called Cleaner for Instagram, which is highly rated on the App Store.
There are plenty of features of the app, including:
- Mass unfollow Instagram users
- Mass delete IG posts
- Mass block IG followers
- Mass unlike IG photos or videos
- Bulk block users
- Bulk unblock users
- And more
This app is available free, but you can add on additional Instagram unfollower options to help you get even more detailed data and access to higher-level features of Cleaner for Instagram.
How Do I Unfollow Everyone on Instagram?
If you have tried to grow your profile and get more followers on Instagram, you may be familiar with the follow/unfollow technique. This entails following users in your target audience and then unfollowing later.
Whether you did this yourself or employed the use of a bot, the unfollow part can be the most complicated. How can you avoid spending hours unfollowing accounts at a later time?
Instagram doesn’t offer any feature to make this easier, and you can’t unfollow everyone at once on Instagram.
Your account can even be flagged for unsavory activity if you try to unfollow too many accounts in a short period of time. How frustrating to get a temporary ban on Instagram actions because of this! No fun.
The only way to effectively clean out unwanted accounts is to download an Instagram cleaner app that will allow you to delete followers that are inactive or spam accounts.
Is There a Limit to How Many People You Can Unfollow in One Day?
We understand that you may have jumped the gun and went crazy following accounts in hopes of getting a return follow, but now your content feed is overwhelmed with junk that you don’t even want to see from users you’ll never recognize.
This isn’t uncommon, and if you’re trying to get more Instagram followers through follow/unfollow, you’ll have to eventually get that cleaned up.
Maybe you set aside some time to do it in one day, but is it even possible?
Each account limit is different, and Instagram doesn’t release these numbers (to maintain the integrity of the limits). Typically, you’ll be able to unfollow (and follow) roughly 20 users per hour with a daily limit ranging from 100-200 users.
This will eventually increase based on your follower count and profile age, and can get bulked up to numbers ranging from 1500-2000.
Even still, Instagram holds tight to their limits and if you are flagged, your actions will be restricted on Instagram.
How Do I See Who’s Not Following Me Back on Instagram?
Perhaps you have followed a bunch of accounts and want to see who is actually following you back. Or, maybe you’ve followed someone for a while and want to see if they’ve returned the favor.
Regardless, you can take a look and find out if you’ve got the level of reciprocity you need from your Instagram following efforts.
It can be a bit disheartening when you see that people aren’t following you back, but it’s important to know, especially with follow/unfollow.
The manual way to find out who isn’t following you on Instagram is to visit their main profile page, click on their “following” number, and type in your name to see if it appears.
If you see that there are no users found, they don’t follow you. Aw, shucks.
This is a viable option if you only want to check out a few users, but as you can see, doing this for a huge quantity of followers will take you all day, maybe longer.
There’s an app for that, too, making it easier for you to see if someone follows you on Instagram. You can search for a few top apps for Instagram, including:
- Instafollow
- InsTrack
- Followers for Instagram
What Happens When You Follow and Unfollow on Instagram?
As this is one of the most popular organic Instagram growth strategies on Instagram, it’s common that people take this action to get more organic Instagram followers.
The idea is that when you follow someone, they get a notification, will check out your account, and will then follow you back. This is one of the accepted methods that works for Instagram growth, but it’s not always consistent.
What’s more, you’ll end up with a ton of followed accounts that you probably will have to remove later. If you follow accounts too fast on Instagram, you may get temporarily banned from taking the action.
You can also only follow up to 7500 users on Instagram, so if you’ve reached that limit, you won’t be able to continue to use the strategy until you delete some accounts.
If Instagram stops you from following users, the ban can last anywhere between 24-72 hours and perhaps even longer depending on how frequently your account gets flagged.
How Do I Unfollow Someone on Instagram?
If you haven’t done it yet, the process is simple.
All you have to do is visit the account you wish to unfollow and tap the following box. When you do this, you will see a variety of options, including notifications, mute, restrict, and unfollow.
Tap unfollow to finish the process.
The page will refresh and you will now see the button as the blue follow button. If the account was private, you’ll no longer see their content.
As you can imagine, doing this for multiple accounts is time consuming and tedious, but if you need to unfollow a few users, it’s no issue.
Can You Unfollow Someone On Instagram Without Blocking Them?
As we can see from other sections, it’s totally possible to unfollow someone on Instagram without blocking them. Follow the steps we’ve outlined above to do exactly that.
If you don’t want to unfollow them but want to see less of their content (looking at you conspiracy theory friend from third grade), simply mute them from the same menu that you’d unfollow from.
Do People Get a Notification When You Unfollow them on Instagram?
The good news is that if you unfollow someone on Instagram, they don’t receive a notification about unfollowers.
This would cause a lot of problems if users were notified when people unfollowed them.
Likewise, if you block someone, they won’t be notified.
The only exception to this would be if the user you unfollowed uses a follower tracking app that alerts them about unfollowers. This is always a third party notification.
How is that possible?
The app stores a list of your followers and unfollowers at a given moment, and at another time they access your current follow list, alerting users of the discrepancies. If anyone has become an unfollower (or followed you as well), the app will notify you.
How Do You Unfollow Someone on Instagram Without Them Knowing?
If you want to unfollow someone on Instagram, they’ll never know, at least not from Instagram directly.
No alerts are sent out when a user unfollows, mutes, or blocks an account (unless they use a third-party tracking app, as mentioned above).
When you want to unfollow a user quickly, you can search the username in your followed accounts list and simply click the following button to the far right.
It will then immediately turn blue and read follow. You’ve effectively unfollowed that user.
This is the easiest way to follow multiple accounts at once without navigating between multiple screens.
What’s the Difference Between Muting Someone on Instagram and Unfollowing Them?
If you’re curious to know about the mute feature, this feature will allow you to remain a follower of an account without seeing much of their content.
You don’t lose access to their profile and can view their content manually at any time by visiting their profile, but it won’t appear in your feed when they post something new on Instagram.
If you follow someone, you may completely lose access to a user’s account if they are private, preventing you from viewing any of their content in the future. They won’t be able to tag you in any content, either.
If you want to mute the account, you can visit the person’s profile and mute from the following button.
Alternatively, you can mute a user directly in your content feed by clicking the three dots at the top right of their content.
How Do I Make Someone Unfollow Me on Instagram?
If you don’t want a user to follow you anymore, you can force them to stop. This is especially useful if a particular user is causing trouble and you want them out.
You can remove followers on Instagram via your own profile page.
Here are the steps:
- Click on your followers (the number)
- Find or search for the user you no longer want to follow you
- To the right side of the screen, you’ll see the remove button
- Click that button, follow the prompts, and they’ll be removed
Voila! The desired user will no longer be a follower of yours.
What Are Ghost Followers on Instagram?
Have you ever noticed someone following you but never seen them engage with your content?
Maybe you’ve seen a username view one of your stories but they don’t have any profile information or posts.
This is what we would call a ghost follower on Instagram— an account that follows users but doesn’t complete their profile or engage in any other way.
It’s simply an account that is meant to either be a filler for follower count or for a user to sleuth and spy on other users.
These types of accounts aren’t a huge issue, but they can present a bit of a red flag if you are looking to have only accounts following you that help create high levels of engagement.
When you want to boost your follower count, ghost followers will certainly do so, since they add a number to your count. This can also make your engagement look low, as your follower to engagement ratio will suffer.
This is a problem especially for users looking for credibility or brand sponsorships on Instagram. Nothing smells fishier than a high follower count with no engagement.
One thing you can do to ensure you get real followers that care about your content is to use hashtags that are specific to your niche. If you want targeted hashtags that help you reach more users in your target audience, check out a hashtag tool like Task Ant.
You can find niche-specific hashtags that are proven to work on Instagram in your industry; you can then categorize them for different content types and easy posting. It’ll ensure you avoid ghost followers and get noticed by more real, active Instagram users.
How Do You Unfollow Ghost Followers On Instagram?
In terms of deleting ghost followers, you have a few options pretty much exactly the same as deleting a normal follower.
Here is what you can do:
- Block the ghost follower
- Remove them by looking at your followers and removing them
- Use a cleanup tool that removes ghost followers from your Instagram
This probably isn’t a big deal if you only have a couple ghost followers; you may as well leave them and remove them if you happen to come across them.
Should You Remove Ghost Followers on Instagram?
Since ghost followers won’t create too much of a problem other than minimizing your engagement a bit, you’ll likely be fine as long as you only have a few of them.
It’s not easy to clean up your Instagram account and remove followers in bulk; plus, you’ll have to keep tabs on which followers are ghosts and which ones aren’t. You wouldn’t want to remove a good follower by mistake.
Unless you’re really struggling for engagement and you have a huge amount of ghost followers, let them be. They’re ghosts, after all!
Wrap Up: Everything You Need to Know about Instagram Unfollowers
It’s important to track your followers and unfollowers for Instagram for analytics purposes; it also helps you to know which content pieces work, and which ones don’t.
These are some of the most common reasons why people become unfollowers on Instagram:
- Too many posts
- Content that doesn’t align with their beliefs
- Annoying content that they don’t enjoy
- Too salesly or spammy
- Very similar to other content that they prefer to view
These are only a few of the reasons, and while we’ll never really know the exact reason for an unfollow, you may be able to track it if you keep an eye on it and notice your Instagram content trends around the time of the unfollow.
In the end, some Instagram unfollowers may simply be implementing the follow/unfollow technique as well, so it may not be something that you did at all.
