Say Goodbye to Frozen Followers on Instagram With These Proven Strategies

Last Updated on May 29, 2023 by Diana

You know the power of Instagram when marketing a business or planning to promote your brand. To successfully achieve your marketing goal, there is no alternative to active Instagram followers.

But frozen followers work as roadblocks that instantly hamper your engagement and ranking too. These followers are counted as bots or ghost ones. If you’re in that situation, don’t panic.

In this article, we’ve shared and revealed all hacks that help you to fix frozen followers and rebuild the relationship with your active followers.

Understanding Frozen Followers on Instagram

Instagram freeze or bots followers are those who haven’t performed any activity on your account, such as likes, comments, etc. On the other hand, the followers who block you can also be known as frozen followers.

However, this type of follower badly impacts your IG engagement rate and account growth such as –

• Active followers lose their interest and raise a question of trust in your product/service.
• You will face banned from Instagram if bot apps are detected by them.
• The ranking algorithm will fall instantly.
• New followers will switch to other accounts, and so on.

Do you want to experience how the Instagram algorithm affects on your follower activity? Below we’ve described all factors in detail.

• Creator and follower interactions – Instagram algorithm counts every action taken by followers on your IG account. If any follower won’t comment or like your posts it count as bots.
• Frequency of using or visiting your profile – If a user won’t visit your profile for a longer time, the IG algorithm counts it as a ghost follower and your rank will drop instantly.
• Session time – IG algorithm counts follower activity and how much they spend on your page.

However, after acknowledging Instagram’s frozen followers and Instagram algorithm effects, it’s time to solve this issue. Before that, let’s take a look at key reasons why it happens in the next section!

Common Reasons for Frozen Instagram Followers

Are your Instagram followers stuck? Your activities may discourage new followers or break IG guidelines. If so, then let’s check out the key reasons why your Instagram follower growth is frozen.

Inconsistent posting schedule

As per statistics, 40% of Instagram marketers state that irregular posting is the main thing to stuck followers. If your followers can’t find your content timely, they may lose interest. Also, it creates a difficult situation for you to build trust and loyalty over time.

If you wait weeks for posts, the Instagram algorithm won’t show them your content which establishes a thought that you’re not active anymore. On the other hand, posting too much content creates annoying situations for your audiences.

Low-quality content

Irrelevant, off-target, and low-quality content risks your IG account being banned along with followers stuck. Is your uploading video or photo in high-resolution? Will your posts help in educating or solving your audience’s pain points?

Instagram is full of millions of amazing and high-quality images. If your isn’t convincing enough, your audiences will switch to others. Also, some posts are strictly prohibited by Instagram, such as –

• Too much promotional content – Promotions, offers, and brand collaborations are great to encourage audiences. But oversharing and “sales” content can result in losing IG followers.
• Adultery or offensive posts – Instagram restricts posts of this type of content. If you do so, your account will be banned.
• Religious or Political – These topics won’t encourage followers but offend individual viewpoints. Also, your IG account will be unfollowed instantly.
• Viral posts – Sometimes, you’re short on new ideas and may choose viral posts to fulfill your IG feed. It is considered as reposting that will dissatisfy your active followers.

Lack of engagement with followers

Low engagement happens if you don’t support the same niche influencers, uninspiring IG captions, misusing hashtags, and so on. Also, it indicates that you’re not helping your community through your posts. Apart from this, there are some reasons that freeze followers due to low engagement rates, like –

• Many accounts on social media – If you manage different social media accounts at a time, you will not be able to provide better resources and high-quality content that help your audiences.
• DMs or comments – Your engagement will suffer when you are not active to address your potential followers’ issues or delay responding.
• Consistency – Your IG feed, bio, profile, and images disclose your brand uniqueness and educate your audiences about your services. But when you don’t maintain consistency, new followers or active ones lose interest instantly.

High percentage of ghost or fake followers

Do your posts’ captions lifeless or robotic? Or, is your following made up of bot accounts? If the answer is “yes”, then your followers are stuck because of fake or ghost followers. Instagram’s account removal policy makes it clear that bots or fake followers are not welcome on this platform.

However, tech-savvy users can easily spot the difference between real and fake follower accounts. If they notice, they will unfollow you and you lose active followers. Also, your account risk of hacking.

Losing and freezing Instagram followers is the unfortunate part of your business growth. But to fix these issues we’ve enlisted expert suggested tactics in the next section.

How to Fix Frozen Instagram Followers

Growing your IG community is key to boosting traffic and increasing sales. In the hope of helping you with your Instagram business growth, here’s a step-by-step guide to fix frozen followers.

Without further ado, let’s get started!

A. Reassess your content strategy

Having a clear idea about your niche market boosts your sales and builds trust. With content, you can make fulfill your goal and make your account/brand more accessible and popular to your potential followers.

But how do you create an Instagram content strategy?

1. Analyze your existing content

Take advantage of Instagram Insights to discover your target audience engagement with your existing content. Analyze different factors, including:

• Follower demographics – What qualities or topics do your followers share/love most? Your targeted audiences’ age, gender, and locations help you to get an idea about the post type they prefer most.
• Content type – If you identify that your targeted IG users prioritize videos/Reels compared to stories, you can switch to attract them.
• Discovery – Inside post insights, the discovery tab discloses people’s interests in your content. Try to increase the engagement rate by delivering high-quality posts.
• Competitor analysis – Pay attention to your niche-relevant competitors to research their popular content.

2. Identify areas for improvement

If you want to build a strong Instagram community, prioritize accessibility in your social media strategy. Also, pay attention to details, like captions, CTAs, post times, or filters – which factors hamper your content strategy.

To achieve accessibility and improve your content strategy, you can –

• Add brilliant and compelling captions by researching online or investigating competitors.
• Research competitors’ post timing and use scheduling tools, i.e., Hootsuite or others that suggest the best time to post on Instagram.
• Analyze branded hashtags that you used in past posts and track IG user engagement.

3. Experiment with new content formats

Do you ever try to create shareworthy content? Inspirational quotes, informative carousel posts, trendy memes, or a combination of text and imagery help you to gain new followers.

Whatever you try, ensure that these tactics maintain your actual niche marketing goal. However, after trying some content formats, you can analyze by yourself which one works best than others.

B. Engage with your Instagram followers

As a creator or a brand the most effective and easiest way to grow your business is to connect with your followers. For this, you can follow different tactics, including:

1. Respond to comments and messages

How often do you respond to your users’ comments and messages? Do you set any schedule to engage with your followers via Instagram stories or live? All these factors need to consider to build your own Instagram community and fan followers.

Beyond comments and DMs, you can host giveaways, polls, interactive stickers, or Q&As to connect with your followers on a deeper level. Also, you can build trust in your business/product and convince them to rely on you.

2. Encourage user-generated content

ser-generated (UGC) content types are videos, photos, reviews, audio, and others that engage fans or followers with your posts. If you want to create UGC content for your online business/store, you can ask customers to share their likings, experiences, and desires of your products by:

• Adding a CTAs (Call-to-action) in your Instagram bio.
• Running a contest and reaching out to similar niche-based influencers.
• Create your own branded hashtag feed and allow customers to post images.

3. Collaborate with other users in your niche

By partnering with influencers, brands, and creators, you can enhance your followers’ growth. That’s why influencer marketing gains more popularity on Instagram. If you have budget limitations, you can work with brand ambassadors, nano influencers, or micro ones.

However, you can try Instagram takeovers or paid partnerships for promoting your brand/products on those influencers’ profiles. By doing this, you earn their fan followers’ attention to your business.

C. Utilize Instagram features effectively

Instagram is a platform with different features and content formats. Curious to explore which one suits you? Let’s take a closer look below:

1. Make use of Instagram Stories, Reels, and IGTV

Do you want to highlight behind-the-scenes of your business and new launching products via Instagram stories? Instagram stories explain every detail via videos and pictures. Though stories have a limited lifespan (24 hours), highlights give them a second life.

On the contrary, Reels allow you to create high-interest content with trending sound effects that work as an attention-grabbing entertainment medium for users. Also, Reels has auto-play features.

However, IGTV allows you to keep your followers engaged for longer by providing 1-60min videos. You can upload a cover image, tour-related information, local’s perspective through interviews, and so on.

2. Participate in trends and challenges

Instagram is the most popular social media platform with lots of trends and challenges. Do you want to participate in trendy IG trends? Let’s glimpse at some below:

• Auto-generated captions for video posts – Instagram releases this update so that IG users can automatically generate captions in almost 17 languages and turn them off when they want.
• Scheduling Instagram Live – You can combine lives with stories and can schedule them. As a creator, you gain a badge that allows your followers to subscribe as reminders.
• Subscriptions – Are you an influencer or a brand? Using this trend, you can make more money.

For Instagram challenges, here we’ve disclosed some examples so that you can create your own.

• Makeup transition – One of the most trendy transition challenges for beauty or fashion brands. You can ask your customers to showcase your product from barefaced to a makeup look or others.
• Monday Funday – You can throw challenges that inspire others to make Monday mood  It inspires others to start a new week with great fun and energy.
• 30-day fashion challenge – This challenge encourages others to show off their everyday guidelines, attire, makeup, and lifestyles.

Apart from this, you can plan your creative challenge topic to build a strong connection with your followers.

3. Use relevant hashtags and location tags

Hashtags and geotags both have the potential to drive new followers and enhance active ones to follow your every post. Popular hashtags help you to appear in the search results and main feed of users and local tags boost your local discovery.

But before adding one, evaluate your existing hashtags to understand your customers’ interests. Also, pay attention to your competitor’s posts which gain more engagement.

D. Identify and remove ghost or fake followers

Ghost or bots followers are the reason for damaging your brand or service’s popularity and freezing follower growth. Want to solve this issue? All you need to do –

1. Analyze the follower list for suspicious accounts

• Most bots or fake follower accounts use suspicious profile names, descriptions, and blank/avatar profile pictures.
• Look at the “Followers and following” chart. If you notice an imbalance ratio, the account might buy fake followers.
• Check the percentage of likes and comments, you will identify whether the account is real or fake.
• Take a look at the “Audience Type” chart to identify suspicious accounts.

2. Use third-party tools to detect fake followers

For detecting fake followers, you can try 3-rd party tools, such as InsTrack Analyzer. Why do you use this iOS app?

• This app is secure and no password is required for sign-in.
• No privacy leak and bots-free.
• 24/7 customer support.
• Fast and instant service.
• Provides easier and faster solutions to maintain Instagram your account.

3. Implement a strategy for removing and blocking fake followers

• Sign in to your profile page,
• Click on your followers’ number,
• Click the “Following” button (right of the IG nickname) and “Remove”.

Second manual way:

• You can go to the follower’s profile that you want to block.
• Click three dots in just the upper right corner and “Block”.

However, an automatic cleaning method is also helpful to remove bots followers from your account. For this, you try any tools, like Followers Tracker, or Instaplus. pro, etc.

E. Find more tips in the below video

Finally, you can also find some unique tips to fix frozen followers in the below video from YouTube.

Preventing Frozen Followers in the Future

No marketers and creators want to lose their Instagram popularity. There are so many ways to overcome this unplanned situation and increase the engagement rate, including:

1. Consistently post high-quality content

Pure and creative content is the key to earning more traffic and building a strong Instagram community. Just like hashtags, pay attention to content formats that engage your followers most. Also, you can combine posts with videos and images.

2. Maintain an active presence on Instagram

Partnering with other influencers or taking advantage of Reels, Stories, Guides, and other Instagram features ensures your active presence on Instagram. Also, you can try story mentions to trigger to give an immediate response from anyone when you promote something.

3. Foster genuine connections with your audience

Polls, Q&A, live streams, DMs, stickers, sharing experiences, and other posting types you can follow to build genuine connections with your potential audiences. Also, pay attention to their desires and try to fulfill them.

4. Regularly monitor and analyze your account performance

Instagram accounts and business success is not a one-night thing. It requires lots of dedication to achieve your desired goal. To track your growth rate you need to monitor and analyze your account performance, followers interactions, etc.

Conclusion

If your Instagram growth is stuck because of frozen followers, use these tips to break the blockings and re-engage your followers again. But be concise on identifying bots or ghost followers and implement hacks to fix your Instagram engagement rate and boost your account performance.

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