RANT - The GREAT Instagram Purge
A major RANT was in order after the Instagram CULL of Dec 18th 2014. This is not an angry RANT about me losing roughly 1000 followers, it’s a RANT about all the people up in arms about losing so many.
Before I get into more detail, if you were not aware of what was going on, Instagram has started to delete and remove spam bots and fake accounts. This means for anyone who purchased fake users they would see a substantial drop in their following.
I am happy Instagram culled these fake accounts but a lot of people who “had” a large following are complaining strongly to Instagram to add back their lost numbers. Are you kidding me, add back fake numbers, cut the bs and get over the vanity fake numbers.
My issue is with people who have built businesses around fake numbers. They have gained a “large” following and I say large the way I did because they are fake bots and they start to get business based off of those numbers. The problem is advertisers simply look at the number of followers someone has which should not be the only thing you look at. You have to look at interactions. If someone has 500k subs and gets a small number of actual interactions there’s an issue. You may see likes but if you don’t see real comments you know theres an issue.
Like I said above I lost roughly 1000 followers, that doesn’t bother me because I know i’ve never purchased a fake follower across any channel. I rather have less followers who genuinely interact than more followers who do not.
My RANT is also directed at Advertisers. Advertisers are to partly blame for people trying to inflate their numbers. I am sure many of you know that people make a great deal of money online off of advertisers paying them to talk about a product or a movie or anything for that matter. Advertisers base where they spend their money off of how many followers someone has. But the problem is they should be looking at the interactions more than they overall numbers. How many real comments and likes are they getting, is there a lot of interaction or is it flat?
I am a big fan of interaction based deals, like affiliate deals where you only make something if someone takes action. These type of deals mean that advertisers don’t pay anything until until something happens. This means if you have a fake following NOTHING WILL EVER HAPPEN.
Advertisers need to wise up and get with the times. They need to get their heads out of their asses and stop falling for vanity numbers and start looking for quality over quantity. But this has been going on for ever, people bought myspace followers, youtube views, facebook likes and on and on. In fact if my memory serves me correctly, SONY BMG lost 2 Billion with a B views on YouTube because they were fraudulent.
The moral of the story is don’t waste money on vanity numbers, build a real genuine following.
Google “Instagram Rapture” to read all the articles and see who lost the most followers. Also check out the Instagram Purge
