Why do people unfollow you on Instagram?

Anush Sahakyan
4 min readNov 15, 2020

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Photo by Erik Lucatero on Unsplash

When people unfollow your Instagram account, it creates a certain impact on the owner. It is true that you cannot please everyone, and that’s okay. When, however, the number of your followers drop significantly, you should be alarmed.

These are some of the reasons why people unfollow your Instagram account. Most of the ones enumerated are reasons which are within your control. Having a systematic way of managing your engagements, period of posting, and of course, the content itself will make things easier for you in the long run.

Here are some of the main reasons why people unfollow your Instagram account.

It can help you not only understand why you have lost followers but will also help you maintain and even gain more followers in the future. You can learn from your mistakes, and from the pitfalls of other users.

Follow then unfollow

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Follow unfollow Instagram method is when people follow lots of accounts only looking for a follow in return. If they don’t receive a follow back in a certain amount of time, they’ll unfollow you. Even if you do follow them back, the majority of the time, they’ll still unfollow you.

Follow-for-Follows are Generally Not Supportive

Performing this activity is extremely time-consuming but the return on time invested is worth it because the more subscribers you follow and engage, the more likely they will return the favor of following your IG page and engaging with your content.

Selling and advertising

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Instagram uses the same powerful advertising tools like Facebook. That way, you can set up, run, and track campaigns the same way you do with Facebook ads. Select your ad objective, target audience, and ad format within Ads Manager. Or select a post you’ve already shared on Instagram and tap Promote.

But people agreed that posting too many advertisements for their business was a reason they unfollowed. Other people disliked too many sponsored posts. You might like to keep your number of calls to action to a minimum.

Quality Content

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Quality content is a successful content. Quality content achieves a goal (e.g., it drives traffic, likes, engagement, follows, or conversions). All that matters is what you get out of your content, not how much time or money you spend creating it.

Visual content gives you the unique opportunity to decide how you want to show your brand. A huge advantage of sharing images on Instagram is the wide range of filters. Use different filters to give a different look or emotions through your images, using them to attract new followers and customers.

Sometimes a regular phone does not provide quality. To have high-quality photos you can use professional cameras or have high-quality live videos going live on Instagram from your PC or Mac

Lack of Engagement

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Minimal to lack of engagement with your followers is a reason why people unfollow your Instagram account.

There are several ways for you to engage to avoid people unfollowing your Instagram account. You can respond to their comments on your post, even a simple acknowledgment whenever they compliment will do. You can also like, comment on, and share posts of those you follow. Should you find interesting posts, you can tag them in those as well.

Posting frequency

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People decided to unfollow accounts if the owner posted more than three times a day, or if they posted a few times straight after each other. This might be a sign that the user is brand new to the platform and still working out the rules. It’s generally recommended to post at least once per day, and no more than 3 times per day, on Instagram

If you want to gain followers you’re going to need to post everyday. Posting regularly means people see your content more often and are therefore more likely to remember you.

You also give yourself more chances to appear in all the “top” and “trending” places such as the explore feed, hashtag top posts, and your followers’ home feed.

In sum, people unfollow your Instagram account for various reasons. Once you have identified one or more which may be the cause in your case, you are now empowered to productively act on it. There may be other reasons you can identify, which is good because you are able to acknowledge where you need to improve on.

Being more aware of yourself and your Instagram habits will help you to prevent people from unfollowing your Instagram account, and even keeping and gaining more followers.

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Anush Sahakyan
Anush Sahakyan

Written by Anush Sahakyan

Digital marketing brand strategist. Allegedly wise to the ways of PR, Digital Marketing and Social Media.