Instagram’s dishonest followers – when people follow you only for you to follow them back

I installed a great app on my computer Followers Insight which I use to track my Instagram account (thoroughly recommended). It tells me who is following me and also who has stopped following me. And I’ve noticed a sneaky little thing that a lot of accounts do in order to gain more followers for themselves.

I’m getting lots of new followers every day, awesome right? So my numbers must be going up all the time? Soon I’m going to have a million followers! Yeah nah!

I’ve discovered that people will follow you (and sometimes like a whole bunch of your posts) and a few days later, or even that day sometimes, they will quietly unfollow you. I assume the idea is that once you’ve seen that someone is following you, you’ll be all excited, check out their account and start following them back in return. Yay for them, they get a new follower but…nothing for you.

I do admit to being quite shocked at this, it honestly never occurred to me to follow people for the insincere reason to get them to follow you back without you having to bother to continue to follow them. I was just following people I admired, could learn from, was inspired by. I would follow people, sometimes unfollow them if I didn’t really gel with their style. But it was always an honest, thoughtful reason for both, not just mass following and then mass unfollowing and then on to the next batch. This is naive of me I know and I would often look at peoples profiles and see they followed 2000+ accounts and wonder how on earth they managed that many. But when you follow that many you’re really not following anyone. Who has time to scroll through that many posts every day and be engaged and excited by content that probably isn’t that interesting to you.

So you know what! I’m going to continue to only follow people I genuinely like, whose content I want to see and not just because I think it’ll get me a follow in return. We all have to do what is right for our souls and being one of the people who follows just to get followers is not something that sits right with me.

I do feel I need to make some kind of disclaimer before any of my peers reads this and thinks I’m awful because my art account isn’t following them back.

I have a couple of Instagram accounts, my art account and a more personal account. And because I check both accounts daily I don’t follow people on both accounts. It keeps repeat posts down. I try and follow everyone I know who has an Instagram account on one of my accounts but I try to keep more art focused accounts on my art account.

There was a time I considered following masses of people in the hopes of them following me back but it just felt so dishonest. I want genuine followers, people who follow me because they like what I do, not just because I’m following them first. So if you are following me on Instagram or Facebook, then thank you, from the bottom of my heart. I really truly appreciate it.

And thanks for reading my blog posts too. I don’t know who that handful of people are but I am freaking thrilled you do read this. Please, stick around.