Battling Instagram Bots

Updated March 4, 2025

Reading Time: 2 minutes

You’ve Got New Followers!

If you’ve used Instagram for a serious length of time you will have seen bots making comments or following your account. For a casual user, this is nothing more than an annoyance, or quirk, of the social media platform. But if you’re using Instagram to promote your business, or sell your products, bots can be more harmful.

Attack of the Clones

Instagram has been fighting a war against the bots for many years. Every so often you might notice a sudden drop of followers from accounts with a large number of fans. This is usually because Instagram has identified and removed a large number of bots.

Bots on Instagram will post comments and automatically follow accounts that use the keywords that they are tracking. This can give some accounts an inflated impression. My own personal account has around 150 followers. Looking through the list of them, it looks like around 30% are bots. These accounts have made no posts and usually, have some generic image as a profile photo. So are they just there to boost my ego?

In a way, the answer is “yes”. The main purpose of Instagram bots is to make pages look more popular, and active than they really are. They are the ‘filler’ guests at a party that is invited to make up the numbers. Another use is that the accounts will follow you and comment on your posts in the hope you follow them back. Then, once they have a certain number of followers the account will be sold and the name changed. So XXX-Free-Followers becomes My_Little_Bakery, and instead of having 16 followers, they can start their Instagram life with 1000.

Comments & Suggestions

Another use for bots is for them to automatically comment. So, the account may be ‘real’ but it automatically comments on any account that uses a certain hashtag. Again, in an attempt to get more followers.
This can be dangerous for brands as the bots typically don’t have much understanding of what they’re commenting on. This article from Venture Beat tells a heartbreaking story of how a woman posted about her miscarriage and then got a bunch of totally out of context comments from bots. Would you like your account to be posting “Great photos :)” under a post describing a traumatic experience like a miscarriage? I think not.

Shortcuts

We all like the idea of taking a shortcut, a get rich quick scheme or a 7-minute workout. But in reality, if you want something valuable, it’s going to take time to build it. So bear that in mind when you receive a spammy email from someone telling you that they can “grow your Instagram account in weeks” because they’ll be using bots to make up the numbers. And bots aren’t going to be buying your products.