Everyone talks about followers, but does everyone consider QUALITY?

Gaining more followers can actually hurt your account if they are of low quality. A low quality follower does not engage with your post, which can lead to poor engagement on your account which will lead to reduced organic reach.

It’s important to consider the quality of the followers you are getting if you are looking to increase your organic reach so that growth on IG becomes a simple matter of posting quality content and IG will do the rest for you (work with the platform and it will reward you).

A strategy that I will be testing is the following. I want to see if I can build a follower base of as close to 100% of followers being Quality followers (i.e. they engage on almost every post). If you have a follower base such that every single one of them likes your post, it is my theory that this will massively help IG recognize your post as quality content which will lead to large organic reach.

What’s my strategy to find those followers?

  1. Find a source account that is similar to the content on the page you are trying to grow
  2. Scrape the likes and comments on something like the past 10-20 posts or so.
  3. Take each list of usernames that liked and commented from each post and combine them into a single table in Excel.
  4. Use Excel formulas to count how many times each user in the list engaged in the 10-20 posts you scraped.
  5. A “perfect score” quality follower would be one that liked and commented on all of the posts you scraped.
  6. Create a list of the high quality followers of the source account and these will become the accounts that you target as new followers for your own page.

If done successfully you could build an extremely engaged group of followers on your own instagram which will help the algorithm begin to work in your favor and get that organic reach.

This could be further enhanced by creating a Follower Quality Score that considers other variables like the number of followers the account has (for example, getting a like from 100k account is higher quality than one with only 50 followers).

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That’s a good view! I will try that on the weekend and create a good list to follow!

awesome, let me know how it goes!

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The one counter-argument have to this theory is as follows:

I do not know how the algorithm calculates the “value” of a like given by a particular instagram account. But I would hypothesize that an account that likes literally every post on their feed is “not worth much” in terms of it creating much of a boost for your post.

I would think that IG calculates the % of posts that each particular account likes on their feed. All else being equal, a like from an account that engages in 100% of their post would not mean as much as a like that that came from an account that is more selective and only engages in say 30% of posts on their feed.

Therefore, scraping a list of followers that likes every post of the source account would mean you end up with a lot of those “I like everything” accounts, which when IG sees that your engagement is coming from those types of accounts they say “so what… you’re getting likes from accounts that like everything… who cares”.

It is quite challenging to game the algorithm.

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The counter-argument to your counter-argument is that in terms of value added to your Instagram account, I bet…

A follow from an account that likes 100% of their feed (including your posts) > a follow from an account that never likes your posts

Yes this I completely agree with! I was not trying to say the opposite of what you stated!

Thanks for share, but kinda easy. Atm working on mass scale analysis of targeting and getting 50-80% followbacks. Currently on between 50-60 follow back percentage with testing second strategy and four strategies to test more. Soon I will share a thread of it. But probably will be moved to lvl 2 tho.

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How many they Follow – niche and activity of the account matters not so much amount of likes

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High follow back percentage is very different that getting followers that are quality. Are the 50-80% quality followers:?

But if they are not liking your posts then what is the point of having the follower?

You are right. I found out that targeted username followings - Followers/following counts matter the most.

I found few concepts and cases in which for example:

A user which has his followings structured like that:

30% of his followings have from 0-250 followers, 40% 250-800 followers, 24% of 800-5000 followers and 6% of 5k+ followers - IS MORE LIKELY to follow you back if your account is 5000+ Followers.

I’ve tested many groups, but are needed further testing.It doesn’t matter if they are opposite niche or same, I have seen numbers are correlated with peoples psychology.

Im currently doing data and tests with over 500K users that all have their followings analysed so to full count is 1,6Mio user data. But it takes kinda slowly. More will definetely come. But soon.

Sorry for grammar. It’s even hard to explain in native language…

@Alex408 also they are quality followers ofcourse, If i wanted number I would buy them.

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This is only semi-related, but I’ve noticed that brands will pay a lot more for sponsored posts if your followers are high-quality - not just higher engagement, but across all metrics.

My accounts with 90-95% “real” followers (according to IGAudit.io) get between $0.25-$0.40 per like for a sponsored post, while those with 50-80% real followers get $0.05-$0.10 per like. For the high-quality accounts, I link to IGAudit in my proposal, which prompts brands to compare my score with those of their other influencer options - since I started doing this, almost all of my 90%+ proposals have been accepted/countered.

Yes, I know sponsored posts aren’t the most popular around here (more money in client services, creating/selling accounts, etc.).

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Simple… Follower dynamics

  1. Suggested users to follow are often followed by a non liking account
  2. If the Rock was following me it increases value many times over even if he don’t like my stuff.
  3. The followers of an account often tells IG the main niche
    -’ all from an account that does not like
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Very useful information, thanks so much!

I have been using a feature page (150k) to offer shoutouts and features to bigger photographers and models with 200k+. They are willing to follow my personal page (only 2k follower currently) for me collabing and helping them.

Are you saying I should continue to do this because it will improve the quality of my personal page account by having these large influencer accounts follow it? What are the actual benefits from this… increased reach or?

that makes you a mover and shaker in the minds of potential new followers/clients.

power follows/powerlikes Image

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Epic advice bro, thanks again!

What exactly is a “power follow”. I searched the forums but I cannot find this term used.

a term by much bigger accounts follow much smaller ones. one like can give much exposure and more effective.

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How do you distinguish high quality real comments from repetitive comments coming from engagement pods/groups ? These people even if they follow you and like you they will do it only in exchange to your engagement with them. This would only have effect if the commenters are at a high percentage different in the last 20 posts.

That’s what I do except it’s fully automated. The scraping part of my bot goes through similar accounts’ last 30 day’s posts and save every like/comment in my database. The F/UF part of my bot makes a query to the database to get the above engagers (ordering from ones who commented/liked most to least number of times on similar accounts) and follow them.

Yes, I am automating this also. It requires a bit of back and forth but it comes very handy