Reasons for the appearance

There are three most common reasons for the appearance of advertising accounts among the followers of a commercial account or blog on Instagram*:

• self-subscription;
• promotion;
• resale page.

Let's talk about each of them in more detail.

Self-Subscription

Often the algorithm of bots that are responsible for spamming ads is designed in such a way that they follow other accounts on their own. Performing this action may imply a following all profiles in a row or the selection of pages according to predefined criteria (gender, age, owner's place of residence, and so on).

Bots often sign themselves

As soon as the bot becomes a subscriber, it begins its subversive activities.

Promotion

Promotion of a commercial Instagram * account or blog is impossible without advertising. One of its elements is mass following. It implies a mass following of the accounts of other users. Usually, they sign in response. Often, advertising bots are among the mass followers.

Bots may appear due to mass following

Some owners of promoted accounts acquire followers. This is another source of spammers. After all, no one guarantees that there are no bots among the purchased profiles.

Resale Page

Accounts that do not show any activity for a long time are often hacked and then resold. They may well place a script that will conduct advertising mailings. At the same time, hacked and resold accounts may already be among someone's followers. Therefore, after such actions, there is a possibility of sending spam by some of them.

Inactive accounts can turn into bots

How dangerous is the situation?

Bots among followers affect:

• the total amount of followers;
• ranking of publications in the news feed.

Also, bots significantly increase the risk of a ban.

Let's talk about this in more detail.

Amount of followers

Everything is simple here. When a follower sees the dominance of advertising bots on the account, he loses confidence in it. The first suspicion falls on the owner of the profile. In addition, constant messages and comments of an advertising nature are simply annoying. They interfere with receiving the necessary information and communicating with other followers. As a result, the audience begins to gradually leave the account.

Because of the bots, real followers leave

Rank degradation

The fewer followers an account has, the worse it ranks and the less often its posts appear in recommendations from other users. Since bots cause an unfollowing, the result of their appearance is quite predictable - the results of the promotion will gradually come to naught.

Bots worsen the position of posts in the feed

Blocking

Instagram algorithms* monitor automatic actions on the account. If it happens too often, then the page may be blocked. Promotion services take this into account, but bots do not. They can send messages in Direct and leave comments with an interval of one or two seconds. There can be several such bots at once. As a result of their activity, the risk of account blocking increases significantly.

Bots can lead to a ban

What to do

The only way out of this situation is to remove bots from the number of followers. It's almost impossible to do it by yourself. Firstly, there can be a lot of bots (if an account has several thousand followers, then there can be about a hundred of them in total). Secondly, the bots must first be found. And with some it can be difficult - they disguise themselves as "live" users and are active intermittently.

Specialized online services come to the rescue, which analyze the account, find bots among followers and delete them. Spam Guard is one of them. It is a multifunctional tool that helps to remove unwanted followers, as well as protect your account from them in the future.

Main page of the service

To clean up your Instagram* page with Spam Guard, follow these steps:

• register on the website of the service;
• run a profile check;
• get acquainted with its results and add accounts that do not need to be deleted to the list of exclusions;
• start the cleaning process.

Registration menu

To prevent bots from appearing among followers again, Spam Guard has a protection function. It allows you to protect your profile from all categories of unwanted audience, including:

Bots;

Foreigners;

Inactive followers;

Commercial pages.

Security settings

Spam Guard supports connecting an unlimited number of accounts. The algorithms of the service work in such a way that the risk of a ban when using it is reduced to zero. The cost of using the service is determined individually and depends on the audience of the account and the number of unwanted followers.

The service has a whitelist function

Conclusion

Bots can appear among the followers of an Instagram* account in different ways. However, in any case, they are harmful, as they cause mass unfollowing, which leads to a decrease in the ranking of publications. You can completely clear your account of unwanted followers using the Spam Guard online service. It not only removes bots, but also prevents them from reappearing.