My Instagram Experience

Instagram is an amazing social media  app, established on October 6, 2010. As cool and as popular as the app is, it can be competitive and harsh when used for business and influencing.

I started looking into this after I noticed I was seeing tons of new followers on Instagram, (who I happily followed back) only to see my follower count kept dropping but my following number remained the same. I downloaded the Instagram Followers app to analyze the activity. With the help of the app, I could see the almost instant unfollow after my follow, hence the Follow Unfollow. Game.

As a new blogger I participate in daily engagement forums to grow my following, which is typically FANTASTIC 90% of the time. The forums are advertised as a follow for a follow, but you do have participants who seem to reciprocate, then later they appear as an unfollower on the app. As a rookie blogger, socializing my blog, having a follow unfollow app is important, to make sure the playing field is fair.

The Ratio Indicator

While researching this topic I found ratio indicator that helps account holders with followers between 1,000 and 15,000, understand their Instagram “status”.

To calculate your Follower/Following Ratio*, take your number of  followers, then divide it by your total following.

*For example, an account with 13,152 followers, and 1571 following will have a follower/following ratio of 8.3. That’s simply calculated by 13,152/1,571 = 8.3. Therefore, this account is considered to be a micro-influencer.

<0.5 Spammer: Users that are inexperienced with Instagram automation tools and are spamming followers in hope for follows back.

0.5-1 Suspicious: Users that are likely to be using Instagram automation tools, but are following the wrong people or has poor quality content leading to poor follow back rates.

1-2 Normal: Users that have some success with Instagram automation, but need to focus on other strategies to drive more engagement.

2-10 Micro Influencer: Users that are either master of Instagram automation or has incredible content to grow their account.

10+ Influencer: Likely to be micro-celebrities or rising stars that are popular on other social media channels.

Source: WORKMACRO

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Seeing this ratio indicator and status’ legend helped me better understand why businesses and Influencers do the follow then unfollow, they want to stay comfortably in the micro-influencer category.

I hope this post helped you better understand the social media Follow Unfollow Game. I feel bad when I see someone rant about unfollows, stay positive and level the playing field by getting a followers app. I am having great luck with the free apps I featured below. I check activity on Instagram, Pinterest and Twitter. The biggest piece of advice I can offer is don’t take unfollows personally.