Top 6 Reasons why you are losing Instagram Followers

Here is a typical scenario, you follow a new meme page, model or travel blog and suddenly you have 5 new accounts similar to the original one following you. These new followers only followed you expecting you to follow them back. This is done by tons of third party services which monitor a brand's competitors and follow any new followers they get in an attempt to steal some of their competitor's audience.

These accounts can unfollow you after a day, a week or even a month. But don't worry! It's a good thing since these accounts were never going to interact with your content anyways.

Pro-tip: When you use a copy and paste selection of hashtags you might have used hashtags such as #follow4follow which will bring a lot of accounts to follow you only expecting a follow back. Which cause also cause a sudden rise and drop in followers.

Second on our list is another reason why your friends or followers might unfollow you very quickly: photo quality. Believe or not there are still people that use "potato" phones to take and upload their pictures. Instagram is a platform dedicated to pictures which means photo quality is very important. Not just in terms of pixels but also right sizing, compression and lighting.

The best photo dimensions for Instagram are 1080px by 1080px. Photo sizing is also another important factor, an image larger than 1.6mb will be automatically compressed, losing quality in the process. Keep this in mind before going out to buy the most expensive DSLR camera you can find.

Here are some quick tips that can save your pictures from becoming blurry artworks:

1. Don't transfer them via Whatsapp, SMS, Telegram, Facebook these services compress the image automatically without you realizing it.
   
2. Use Google Drive or Dropbox in order to move your photos around without losing quality.
   
3. Don't use online tools to edit or resize the picture, use something like Adobe Lightroom (a free version exists!) to edit your pictures safely.
   

Posting schedule is a tightrope that needs to be carefully walked. Post too much and people will be annoyed, post too little and people will unfollow you for being inactive. If you have been losing followers on Instagram lately, this might be one of the main reasons. So what is the "sweet spot" when it comes to posting frequency?

Unlike other similar articles that recommend 1-2 post per day, our answer is: every account is different.

The key is understanding your content, audience, and competitors. For example, a meme page can post 5 times a day without losing followers or getting hateful comments, because people love memes. However, if you have an account for a business that sells shoes and you are posting shoes 5 times a day there is a much higher probability that you are spamming your audience and overselling, which leads us to the next reason why you might be losing followers.

There is a common mistake that many, many companies are guilty of on Instagram. Treating it like a catalog for their products. Thankfully for all of our feeds, companies are slowly starting to change their strategy and understand that Instagram needs to be entertaining, not promotional.

If you are unsure if you are guilty, or even what overselling to your audience on Instagram is, take a look at the following statements and if any more than two apply, you are overselling!

1. 75% or more of my posts are product related images.
   
2. None of your posts in the last week have been unrelated to your brand.
   
3. None of your posts in the last 3 days add value to my followers that is not brand related.
   

If you are guilty, take the necessary steps to change your strategy with haste so you can save your existing audience.

Last but not least, the fifth reason why you might be losing Instagram followers is changing content. This is important because when a person follows your profile it is because they expect to see more content similar to the image that initially lead them to discover your brand and hit that follow button.

Here is a practical example: If you followed a meme page today and in the next week that meme page starts posting political content how would you react? Most likely by unfollowing since that was not what you signed up for.

Same thing can happen to you if you post about dogs and suddenly start posting content related to cats. You will drive away an audience that followed you for a certain type of content.

When a trend begins to happen there are thousands of Instagram pages that quickly jump on the trend, however when the trend dies out you are left with a profile that is going to have a hard time transitioning those followers into anything useful outside the trend they originally followed you for.

If you jump on a trend too hard, you will lose followers after the trend passes and the content you were posting is no longer relevant to the Instagram crowds. Which is why it is recommended to always try to use original content in order to avoid the tides of trends.

For example this colored silverware trend saw thousands of silverware related accounts pop up, but once the trend passed these accounts lost all relevance.

Sometimes it's easy to think of your audience as just a number in your follower count, but remember, your followers are people that will not hesitate to unfollow you in a second if you stop being relevant to them. Need help growing your instagram profile? Make sure to check out our Instagram page for all of our Instagram marketing services.