How to unfollow people who don't follow you back

Why

Over time most accounts end up following a lot of people who never followed back: old follow campaigns, accounts that went quiet, brands you followed once. A cleanup makes your following list meaningful again and leaves room under Instagram's cap on how many accounts you can follow.

Unfollowing is also where people most often make mistakes they regret, like unfollowing a friend or a client. Growbot has several protections for this, and the settings that matter most are easy to miss. Ten minutes of setup first is the difference between a clean list and a week of awkward re-follows.

How to use it

Step 1: protect the accounts you want to keep

1. Go to your own Instagram profile.
2. Open the Load Accounts menu, uncheck Limit queue to, and click Load Current Page's Following. If Growbot asks where to start, 0 begins with the accounts you followed most recently.
3. Go through the queue. Select the accounts you want to keep no matter what, such as friends, family, clients, and favorite creators, and use Select... → Add selected to whitelist. Then click Save whitelist.
4. If you would rather keep everyone you follow today and only clean up future Growbot follows, use Select All before adding to the whitelist.

Step 2: check your unfollow settings

Open Settings → Unfollowing Options:

• Don't unfollow people who follow me (on by default): this is what makes it a non-follower cleanup. Leave it on.
• Don't unfollow people followed outside of Growbot (on by default): Growbot skips anyone it did not follow itself. If you want to clean up accounts you followed by hand before you started using Growbot, turn this off, but only after your whitelist is saved.
• Don't unfollow people I began following less than 3 days ago (on by default): gives recent follows time to follow you back.
• Unfollow people I began following more than 30 days ago (even if they follow me) (off by default): only turn this on if you really do want to drop old mutual follows.

If you narrowed the Filters tab for a follow campaign, Don't unfollow people who match my filters can cause surprise skips. Click Reset Filters on the Filters tab before an unfollow pass, or uncheck that option.

Step 3: schedule the unfollows

1. With your following list still in the Accounts Queue, open the Process Queue menu and choose Unfollow.
2. Click Process Queue, then Schedule Actions.
3. Unfollows count toward Instagram's limits just like follows, so use the same pace you would for following. At 50 per day, a list of 1,000 takes about three weeks, and that is fine.
4. Confirm. The Actions Queue now shows your unfollows spread across the coming days.

Step 4: read the Log

Skips are expected, and each one says why:

• is one of your followers, skipping: they follow you, so they stay.
• was followed outside of Growbot, skipping: see the second setting in step 2.
• was followed too recently to unfollow: the 3-day protection.
• is whitelisted, skipping: working as intended.

If nothing is being unfollowed at all, see Growbot unfollow not working.

Tips

• After one cleanup you rarely need another. Check Unfollow After in the Process Queue menu whenever you schedule follows, and Growbot unfollows non-followers automatically, one at a time, on the day you choose.
• Scheduled unfollows check your whitelist and Unfollowing Options at the moment they run, so adding someone to the whitelist today protects them from unfollows you scheduled last week.
• Pending follow requests to private accounts count toward your following total. To clear old ones, follow How to cancel pending Instagram follow requests.
• Your following count on Instagram can take a while to update. If the Log says an account was unfollowed, trust the Log.