Creating and maintaining a successful brand presence on Instagram means sharing high-quality content and attracting meaningful interactions from the audience. The comment section plays a crucial part in this.
This is where your followers share their views, participate in healthy discussions and interact with your brand content. To achieve this, you must allow users a comfortable and safe space to interact.
Unfortunately, Instagram spam comments ruin this purpose by cluttering your comment section with irrelevant, offensive and nonsensical profanity.
In this CommentGuard article, we’ll discuss how to outsmart and overcome Instagram spam comments.
Understanding Instagram spam comments
If you click on the comment section of a post from a brand on Instagram, you’ll notice random comments, irrelevant to the content of the post. These are Instagram spam comments generated by bot activity which clutter the comment section. While mostly promotional in nature, the spam comments also include emojis, commercial/promotional offers and links to external websites.
Motivation behind Instagram spam comments
Instagram spam comments on your posts increase engagement by contributing to the comment section.
Isn’t that a win?
Well, not necessarily. While such comments add interactions to your posts, they can serve an entirely distinct purpose.
Promotion
A majority of Instagram spam comments promote products, services, and other Instagram accounts on your posts. This is to get the attention of your followers to click on links that redirect traffic to their websites, in hope of generating sales or gaining followers.
Data mining
Instagram spam comments also serve as a medium to collect personal information of your followers. This includes fake offers with links, clicking on which automatically breaches data stored on your device or downloads malicious software.
Engagement disruption
Instagram algorithm considers the engagement on your posts such as likes, comments, shares to display it to a wider audience. If somebody disrupts the interactions from your followers, the overall engagement on your post decreases and hence fails to reach other users on the platform. Competitors and spammers use this tactic by introducing spam comments, encountering which stops genuine followers from interacting.
Account suspension
Instagram strictly advises against using bots to increase engagement on your posts or acquiring more followers. Not only do they constantly monitor the platform for bot activity but also punish the involved accounts with suspension. Since, Instagram spam comments result from bot activity, your posts with such comments might attract Instagram’s attention and lead to a suspension.
Follower growth scams
Certain Instagram spam comments drive follower scams. Such comments make fake promises to users of helping them get more real followers or other metrics in exchange for money. But in reality, scam them with bot followers after exchanging money. While avoiding such scams is solely the responsibility of users, your comment section being the source can create a negative impression of your brand and hinder future engagement.
Impact of Instagram spam comments
Understanding how Instagram spam comments affect your account and content helps you deal with them effectively. If unattended, these comments can significantly reduce engagement on your posts, pose security risks, damage your credibility and more.
Reduced engagement
The comment section of your posts is a space for your followers to offer views on the posted content, brand or simply interact with others. The cleaner this space is, the more participation it attracts.
Unfortunately, Instagram spam comments clutter this space with irrelevant profanity making it uncomfortable for your followers to participate actively.
Imagine encountering tons of links that redirect to adult or fraudulent websites. Not only does this damage your brand reputation but also forces your followers to engage less. This results in fewer likes. comments and shares, leading to reduced engagement.
Loss of credibility
Your brand’s credibility is everything on the internet. It assures your followers, customers and leads, they can trust you to offer unbiased and quality services. This helps you build brand advocates and retain loyal customers. But when you lose your credibility, you lose the trust and hence customers.
Instagram spam comments play a massive role in this. When users encounter spam comments creating an unsafe environment for participation, they associate it with your brand’s lack of moderation and quality control. The next time users come across your posts, they mightn’t take your account seriously.
Security risks
Instagram spam comments have evolved over the years. Anonymous sources leverage bot activity to comment links. These links are a serious security risk for your followers. Clicking on such links takes users to external websites or promotes dubious services, including automatically downloading malware on their devices.
Imagine users losing their personal information through a link in your comment section. Not only does this ruin their entire user experience but also forces them to reconsider your brand.
Algorithmic consequences
Instagram’s algorithm easily differentiates between genuine and spam engagement. Having a plethora of spam comments on your posts can land you in trouble. Instagram might conclude you are leveraging automation bots to increase interactions on your content and punish you with a shadow ban or suspension.
Wasted time
Instagram spam comments are created with the help of bots, with the capability of producing 1000s of comments in a second. Imagine removing all these comments one-by-one. This would take an awful amount of time and effort which you could spend engaging with your followers, creating high-quality content, or strategizing your instagram presence.
How to outsmart and overcome Instagram spam comments?
Maintaining a clean comment section goes beyond removing spam comments. You need to apply strict moderation and quality control by outsmarting the spammers & bots. There are several methods you can use to achieve this.
Let’s discuss all the effective ways.
Instagram filters
Instagram offers you some in-built settings using which you can automatically filter and restrict comments on your posts. You can add a list of specific keywords, and the filter will hide comments containing those terms.
- Navigate to your Instagram profile
- Click on the three horizontal lines in the top right corner
- Select “Settings and Privacy”
- Choose “Hidden Words” and turn on “Advanced comment filtering.”
- Now, click on “Manage custom words and phrases” and add custom words, phrases and emojis which you want to hide.
- Turn on “Hide Comments.”
Now, all the offensive comments and those containing keywords and emojis from your list will be hidden and be only visible to you. But this approach isn’t completely efficient. This is because you must update the list constantly to outsmart the bots.
Moderate the comments
Instagram’s filter to hide comments containing specific keywords helps keep the comment section clean but it isn’t perfect. Spammers are constantly adapting to pass the checks. Hence, every-so-often you might see some offensive comments slip through the filters. This is where you must moderate the comments. Keep an eye on your comment section and remove spam comments before they cause trouble.
Report and block spammers
While there are no definite patterns to spam accounts, if you notice a few particular accounts spreading profanity in your comments section, you can report and block them. This’s a great way to contribute to the Instagram community and prevent specific users from interacting with your content.
Stay informed
As spammers modify their tactics to clutter your comment section, you must keep up with their techniques to always stay a step ahead of them. You can achieve this by following blogs, forums, and news related to such activities on social media and instagram. Networking with other users and sharing insights and experiences also helps.
CommentGuard
Another simple method of moderating and removing Instagram spam comments is using third-party tools.
These tools offer a plethora of features and customization to manage the comment section the way you wish. One such tool is our software CommentGuard.
CommentGuard is the ultimate tool to keep your comment section organized, save time, collaborate and enable moderation.
Advanced moderation
CommentGuard leverages machine learning algorithms to hide offensive and irrelevant comments on your posts. You can create automation to filter URLs, emails, phone numbers, emojis, keywords, and images. What’s best is you can auto-hide all the new comments on a post and manually review them. This helps to showcase only those comments which add value to your brand.
Stay organized
While managing your brand’s interaction, you must stay organized to deal with issues quickly and efficiently. This is where CommentGuard is a life saver. You get an easy-to-use dashboard displaying all the comments from various pages, including your ads. There’s also the feature to delete, like, hide, block or reply privately. Another great feature you get is to save replies for future use or use ChatGPT replies on the go.
Collaborate like a pro
With CommentGuard you can collaborate with your team members by inviting them to reply to comments, without sharing Instagram access. If you have a large team, you can assign roles to members to manage specific accounts/pages.
There are many other prominent features of CommentGuard which save time and let you create a streamline workflow to manage your comment section smoothly.
Conclusion
Now you know how to outsmart and overcome Instagram spam comments.
These comments clutter the comment section, damage your brand reputation and reduce engagement on your posts. Hence, it’s critical to understand and deal with them. While you can use Instagram’s native settings to filter and hide comments, CommentGuard offers superb features to organize, collaborate and moderate your comments with ease.
Get started with a risk-free 7-day free trial.