This could be helpful. Instagram is now displaying how many inactive profiles are among your followers, so that you can remove them from your audience if you prefer.

As you can see in this example, posted by app researcher Hammod Oh, now, when you tap through on your “Followers” listing from your IG profile, you’ll see a new category above the main list that shows “Deactivated accounts”, along with profiles that have been flagged for review, creator accounts, etc.

Why remove these inactive accounts?

Well, they’re messing up your stats for one, as all of your average performance figures are divided by the total number of followers you have. So your engagement rates and reach data could be impacted, depending on how you measure them (Note: Instagram’s pushing users towards “views” as the main metric and this won’t be impacted by inactive profiles following your account).

They could also be messing up your ad targeting sets if you’re aiming to reach people similar to the audience that you have. It’s the same with asking family members to follow your brand account, at some stage, you may be better off removing them, because all of your insights into your audience’s interests could be impacted by having people outside your target audience included in this segment.

Inactive followers may well be the same, with accounts that are not active still being included in your datasets.

But now, you can easily remove them, by simply going to this listing and tapping “Remove” on each account.

Of course, you may also want to keep them, because maybe having a higher follower count is important to you. But depending on how you’re looking to grow your profile, and reach the right audience in the app, having the capacity to remove inactive profiles could be a valuable addition to your process.

The new option is now active in the latest version of Instagram.