There are a few good reasons you might consider filtering your followers.

If you’re a business, filtering followers allows you to have greater control over your audience. You can preemptively remove bots when they follow you. This is a great idea because:

• Some bots are designed to scrape the list of people who follow you or who engage with you, and attempt to poach them or simply spam them.
• Bots in general will show up on various bot scan apps, and can make your account and your audience look less authentic.
• Bots don’t add anything to your audience; they don’t engage, or if they do, it’s clearly fake engagement, and they’ll never make a purchase or encourage others to do so.

Not all of you are businesses, of course. Many people can find themselves in situations where they may want to filter out bots and bad followers.

• If you’re in a controversial position – or even just happen to be female on the internet – you might catch the attention of a shitty group of people who want to dox and discredit, harass, or otherwise damage you and your web presence. This can even potentially lead to much worse issues, like swatting.
• If you’re simply running a private account to keep friends and family appraised of your life, you might not want random followers.
• If you’re only running Instagram as a way to enter contests and post the occasional lunch picture, you may not care to add new followers.
• You may simply want to maintain some sort of specific ratio of followers to people you follow.

There are a few techniques you can use for filtering your followers on Instagram, so let’s talk about them for a moment.