Earlier today all major media outlets published shocking news — Instagram is not only going to remove followers of the platform users gained inauthentically, but also likes, which happens for the first time. It’s been reported that Instagram has built a machine learning-enhanced moderation tools for identification of fake activity and removing follows and likes that were left automatically, through third-party services.

Instagram users’ reactions and opinions regarding the upcoming fakes hunt divided. Regular Instagram users greeted the news with fervour, being tired of receiving likes and follows from suspicious accounts each time they perform any activity within the platform. Marketers, on the other hand, started to worry about the future of their account management and growth in the future.

It’s erratic on Instagram’s part to firstly turn the classic photo-sharing application we all initially knew and loved it for, into a platform for influencers and brands, which favors those who is already big or pays more for ads. The active daily and monthly Instagram users numbers are rapidly growing, making the competition for recognition even stronger, while the algorithm prioritizing some posts over the others, makes it even harder to get noticed.

Small business owners and individuals naturally turn to the third-party applications for help, as it’s almost impossible to produce unique, high quality content, search for new audience with no help from the platform and be consistently active, while maintaining the actual business and personal life. Many start their own small business and hope to reach audience on Instagram, while still working 9 to 5.

What’s also important to note is that not all growth services are the same. We all know about bots that artificially drive up the number of followers and likes, ignoring Instagram activity limits and leading to inevitable account ban as a result. But it’s not all there is!

There are also services providing help of one or a team of professional marketers that take over the account, coming up with and practicing individual strategy, and tools like Combin — processing liking, commenting, and following actions in strong accordance with individual activity limits, working directly from user computer instead of company servers, not using chains of bots to boost the account popularity.

Should users of such services panic because of Instagram’s plans to remove fake follows and likes? No! Instagram has intimidated the public with news of this kind numerous times over the last couple of years, but has taken real, substantive action only once. If you use growth services that were initially created for safe and organic growth and you follow their recommendations for account safety maintenance, there is nothing to worry about. At the very least we can say that about Combin.

Combin doesn’t use official API for connection, doesn’t perform unsolicited actions on users behalf and works directly from user IP address. It was built to be a helping hand for small brands and individuals, providing convenient options for targeted search, safe mass actions processing, account and audience management, instead of another bot or followers/likes seller.

In case you receive a notification about inauthentic likes and followers from Instagram, don’t panic. It won’t even temporarily ban your account, instead you are asked to change the password for protection. As soon as you do so, please let us know about the incident at support@combin.com.

Remember, here in Combin we take account safety very seriously and we will do everything it takes to protect our users and ensure the way our application works can’t compromise user accounts. If the latest Instagram changes affect Combin in any way, we will adapt the application or find another way to keep our service available and safe!

Learn more about Combin safety maitanence, privacy policy, and download the latest application version for your mac OS, Windows or Linux at combin.com