one factor in your story engagement rate on insta is the amount of followers you have.

your reach here is based on your total follower count (regardless of when they were last active in the app), and the percentage of that number who engage with your stories.

(even just continuing to watch them without Xing out or swiping to the next person counts btw)

having a lot of followers who are no longer active, or who never engage with your content, does not help you.

consider removing:

• anyone who is following you just because they know you from school, work, family, etc. often our friends IRL follow us because they mean well and want to support us, but if our content isn’t in line with how they use the app, they are not seeing it.
• related to the above, anyone who you know has passed, as this truly is… a ghost follower, yeah?
• accounts without a user photo are an easy way to scroll thru for inactive accounts. sometimes they are an active user wishing to retain anonymity, but unless they regularly engage with my content, i remove them.
• anyone who hasn’t posted anything to their page in the last year.
• pet accounts. people often start these thinking they’ll go viral with their cat/dog and most of the time they are abandoned, or, they use them as troll accounts because the internet is a nightmare. check in on these and see if they’re still active.
• accounts following 5000+ other people if you don't know them/they never interact with your content. if you regularly struggle with being shadowbanned, the chances of these folks actually seeing your content are slim to none.

i regularly go through my followers and look for people to remove on a case by case basis. not all of these are singular reasons for removing followers; sometimes it’s a combo. it’s your page, it’s your call. obviously, if they regularly engage with your content in any way, don’t remove them. someone who watches all your stories, even if they never engage otherwise, is still better than the person not seeing your stories at all.

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advice in the apocalypse