Firs of all I would love to thank everyone for the great, especially free content.
I have been reading non stop the past days but haven’t found a clear answer to the following question.
Do I get more or better engaging followers when following private accounts (using F/U)?
My personal IG is private as well and so are the ones of most of my friends. I have not had the time to test this myself and would love to hear results / ideas from people that have tested or read something about the topic.
Private accounts usually have a lower followback ratio compared to the public ones. Moreover, by following those accounts you also have to wait for them to accept your request, which is not the best in terms of f/u management
I guess for private accounts, naturally the fbr is lower as thy have to go through another step and they do not know what are the rest of the content as well.
The quality should be higher then, right? Because they go through all of the extra steps?
And if your request remains pending you slowly get hundreds if not thousands of pending follow requests.
It’s not about the quality. The quality of an account is given by its likelihood of engaging with its feed, and that highly depends on the single user, not on the public or private thing.
There are private accounts which engage a lot and others which don’t. Moreover, private accounts are private for a reason: they don’t want to be followed by people they don’t know/trust.
You can try and test yourself what works better and calculate the follow back ratio for public and private accounts in your niche.
From my experience, public ones are more likely to follow back and avoid the annoying pending follow-request that comes with private accounts. Moreover, among the public ones you should filter to follow only active users…
But again, best would be to try yourself 
Ok thanks for you two cents. I have had some pretty bad followbackratio without proper filtering. I am currently testing really specific setting and if the FBR is good I will just keep following public accounts.
This is what I have not thought about 
before.
Personally i don’t follow private accts, mainly due to lower follow back rate / potentially having follow blocks in the future.
i wouldnt advice to follow private accounts, they are private for a reason and dont give you more quality followers.
I don’t know how many percents of Private accounts on IG but when I setting I always avoid them.
I had a situation in the past that I followed 1 Private user and then I unfollowed that user.
And then she tried to report me and sent some complaint message. lol
So I think Private users, they are really strict enough to make you confuse :))
For me privates have a higher Follow back because other botters avoid them. Higher ER will depend where you get them from. Follow the followers of account or likers/commenters of target account.
I only use likers/commenters of target accounts. How much have you tested it and how big is the difference for you?
Didn’t test I simply saw results .