Quality, not quantity: Why bloggers should worry, who subscribes to them

Who is to blame? Each Instagram user was provided with an unlimited number of opportunities to buy likes and subscribers to themselves - various “vending machines” of cheat likes actively subscribe to Instagram, write private messages online and to e-mail, offering their services. Someone is tempted by their suggestions, someone ignores, forgetting to remove from subscribers. Both of them behave differently, but equally risk – the engagement rate of accounts with bots ruthlessly falls. The current Instagram is flooded with bots: nails from Cesvaine, burgers from Siauliai, Louis Vuitton handbags from Pärnu, cheat subscriber providers. They subscribe to all indiscriminately, including you. Some profiles do this themselves, some are scammed by "cheaters" if the user is tempted by their services. How the bots appear in the profile is not so important, it is important what consequences this entails. Bots (handbags, burgers and users under logins like av195639) are not active - they do not like and do not comment. Exception - when they subscribe to you, they can like couple of posts for decency in automatic mode, that's all. Then they will hang in the user's profile dead weight. And, although the number of followers looks decent, the main problem does not go anywhere - these are Instagram algorithms. When you post a new post, it will be shown initially to a limited number of your subscribers. And if this small sample took your post well, then it will be shown to the maximum number of remaining subscribers. And if not, only a small part of them will see your post and, accordingly, you will get fewer likes and comments. One would think, what does this have to do with bots? Let's imagine that we have an account with 1000 subscribers. We made a new post and it was shown to start with to 100 of our subscribers, 80 accounts of which are bots that do not watch the tape, because they do not need it at all, and they will not react to the post at all. Of the remaining 20 accounts, only one third one will like the post. As a result, we get 7 likes from 100 possible ones. This leads to the fact that the post will not be shown to the rest of your audience. And what if there are no bots in our account and a sample of 100 subscribers are completely alive accounts with real people behind them? If, also, as in the first case, every third one likes our post, and we will get 33 likes after the initial demonstration of the post, which is much more convincing than 7, then the Instagram algorithmic tape will show this post to more subscribers. And this means that the number of likes will grow actively. And what should I do? To get rid of bots, you need to take the following steps (no matter how painful it is to get rid of a third of your subscribers (or even more): Method 1: It is both the simplest and the most tedious. It is necessary to open the list of subscribers and, methodically scanning the accounts of each of them, to block the bots. The first time it will take a very long time, but later it will be possible to block the signed bots as soon as they appear, which will take only a couple of minutes. Method 2: For those who do not like to mess around for a long time, first of all you need to do is to link your account to the dashboard of Livedune.com or Livedune.ru (depending on the language in which you are easier to work - English or Russian) using the button "Add your account." After some time, the "Audience Analysis" will be available. For example, we tie an ordinary user account which has 252 subscribers and 129 posts. Open the "Audience Analysis" and look at the graph "Reach." If it looks like in the screenshot below (pay attention to the graph "Low"), then we need to fix the situation:















Next to this chart you can see who your subscribers are:

















And where they live:











Below on the same page, there is an additional schedule “Subscribers’ Subscriptions.“ We are interested in graphs from 1000 and more – these are mostly bots. Even if it's a real person, just signed up for many accounts, then the probability that he/she sees your post, while he/she is signed for 1000 or 2000 people, is quite low - the post will be simply lost in the tape. In the best case, you should remove all subscribers who have more than 500 subscriptions.















If you have a lot of subscribers, then you can use the services that allow you to automate the blocking (for example, 1mlnlks.com, instaplus.me, socialkit.ru, etc.), but be careful, you will have to enter your account password to these services, and this increases the chances of blocking your account in turn. Many services have a trial period, which is quite enough to block bots for free. Unfortunately, such services are now experiencing difficulties and blocked by Instagram, so it is likely that you will have to use the first option of cleaning your profile. In order to get the list of accounts that you need to block, you need to download the list of all subscribers by clicking the following button:







As the output, we get approximately this file:











First of all, delete the extra columns, leaving only the Login, ID and Subscriptions. Then go to the "Data" tab and click on the "Filter" button. In the appeared window enter "1000" and as a result we will get a list of all whom we need to block.



















The list of these users can be downloaded into almost any automated actions service and blocked. However, this process would not be so interesting if it were too simple. Error 1: Bots are blocked too fast. With rapid blocking (500+ subscribers per day) of bots, Instagram "turns on" a restriction on the display of posts to subscribers, as a result, the post is demonstrated to approximately 10% of subscribers, not reaching more. The number of "bans" per day should be less than the number of new subscribers. This will protect the profile from the possible filtering by Instagram algorithms. Error 2: Blocking those who do not have a profile photo or have few posts. In social networks there is such a "rare beast" as a user inactive in his/her own communication. However, the lack of an avatar or a small (sometimes even zero) number of posts does not mean that the user is a bot. He/she can turn out to be very active and solvent, albeit a modest introvert. Off-topic: Events proved that the bots are attracted to your profile mainly by popular hashtags. Thus, by posting popular hashtags, we get not so much quality followers, but a dead audience. In addition, the top hashtags accumulate new photos every minute (or even every second), and only the stars and million follower bloggers can get the likes and new followers from there. The article is prepared with the support of Livedune.com - a service for analytics and account search in social media. Additional source: Aleksey Tkachuk, dnative.ru