Were you prepared for the Instagram Rapture of 2014? As they say, we wouldn’t know the day or hour & then boom on December 18th Instagram put a shock to your system!
Last week Instagram announced that it was going to crack down hard on spammers and fake accounts. One social-media marketer said that it would be “chaos” and speculated that over 10 million accounts could be deleted. The crackdown kicked off this week, and people are freaking out.
When from go from 20k to 200 Real Quick!
Like its parent company Facebook, Instagram routinely removes accounts to limit spam and prevent users buying followers to appear more popular.
“When we remove accounts from Instagram that don’t follow our Community Guidelines, you may see a decrease in your follower count,” the company wrote in a blog post last Wednesday. “This shouldn’t affect engagement from authentic accounts that like and comment on your posts.”
Celebrities also saw millions of followers vanish. The singer Justin Bieber lost 3.5 million fans, or 15 percent of his total, according to developer Zach Allia’s calculations. Kim Kardashian lost 1.3 million followers, or 5.5 percent , Selena Gomez lost 1.1 million followers, & Beyonce lost 900k of her fan base on the service. Hip hop Artist Mase went from 1.6 million IG followers to 272K in one fell swoop, prompting him to delete his account all together after being accused of purchasing the bulk.
One account, chiragchirag78, lost 99% of his followers – 3,660,460 – before he himself was deleted.
Instagram’s own account on the site lost 18,880,211 followers overnight. XEX made it through only losing about 300. (Make Sure You Follow @XEXMAG)
I am sure we will see an abundance of #SFS posts and salacious thrist traps on our timeline in the upcoming weeks from those that lost the most!