Instagram’s Announcement to Reduce Inauthentic Activity and What it Means for You

Seema Nayak — November 23, 2018

— November 23, 2018

As Instagram continues to rise as a platform of choice for millennials, competition is getting intense whether you’re a brand or an influencer.

As of June 2018, there are over one billion monthly active users on Instagram which positions the platform ahead of most social networks. This intense competition opened up a new business model with a lot of services allowing you to buy fake followers, likes and engagement.

A lot of these services even claim that they provide ‘real’ likes to you which can seem tempting if you’re looking for a quick way to make your brand look popular on the channel.

We’ve written in-depth about why buying likes is a bad idea but if you still haven’t been convinced, (November 26, 2018) Instagram announced that it will start reducing inauthentic activity used by accounts to artificially grow their audience via third-party apps that offered auto-like, follow, or commenting services – which have always been a pretty clear violation of Instagram’s community standards.

Instagram regularly protects the community by deleting fake accounts, and this will take things a step further by removing inauthentic engagement.

Image credit: Instagram

How to protect your account during this change:

If you have previously used any third-party app to gain likes, followers or comments on your account, in the coming weeks you will receive an in-app message from Instagram informing you about this
We suggest moving away from these services as per Instagram’s guidelines and changing your password as suggested
Once you have done that, re-authorize any other apps that you use for managing your Instagram content like Schedugram so that your account continues to share content smoothly

The best way to grow your brand is always going to be via consistent and authentic engagement.

We welcome announcements like this – not only does it help keep bots and inauthentic activity out of the Instagram ecosystem, it gives brands more assurance that the relationships they build are legitimate and valuable.

Bots don’t really help anyone, and we hope this reduces people trying to shortcut their way to vanity metrics rather than measuring and tracking real world return on investment from Instagram.

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