How to Get Rid of Likes on Instagram
Instagram has become one of the most popular and influential social media platforms. People from different walks of life use it for varying purposes. Some use Instagram as a personal account where they can post photos and videos of their adventures, special events, or even simple daily moments. Some users also make use of the platform to run small businesses and even multi-billion-dollar businesses. It provides a perfect avenue for businesses to advertise their products and services to more than a billion Instagram users.
Since its launch in 2010, Instagram has grown massively from a photo-posting app into a dynamic social media network and a sales channel for many businesses. Indeed, it has changed many lives. No wonder, 'likes' on Instagram posts are very much valued by its users.
Likes are crucial in boosting one's popularity and credibility on Instagram. The more likes your posts garner, the more you can gain avid followers. In fact, "likes" have become so important to the Instagram economy that some users even pay third-party services to produce astroturfed "like" campaigns and give them some (fake) popularity.
However, not every opinion stays the same over time, and there are reasons that an Instagram user might decide that liking a particular post or snap was an error. Both regular users and the powerful "influencers" might find themselves needing to remove their likes once in a while.
Unfortunately, if a user wants to remove ALL of their likes (or even just a lot of them), it's not so easy to accomplish. Unliking is usually a tedious process of going through posts one by one, but there are some apps that can speed it up. This article will give you a walkthrough on how to speed up the unliking process.
How to Delete and Remove All Likes on Instagram
Let's review how you can remove likes:
How to remove likes manually on the Instagram app
For the purposes of this tutorial, we've used the iOS version of the Instagram app. The steps are pretty much similar on Android, so you shouldn't have any problems navigating the app.
- Launch the Instagram App
Tap on the app to open and hit your profile photo at the bottom right of the screen.
- Select the "Hamburger" Icon
Open the menu by tapping on the "hamburger" icon or the three-line icon at the top right of your screen.
- Access Settings
Select the Settings button at the bottom of the menu. This would take you to a whole set of options.
- Tap on "Account"
The Account menu features all of your recent activities and some account settings. Select Posts You've Liked to preview all your likes.
- Select the posts to unlike
Swipe through the liked posts and unlike each one by tapping on the "heart" icon under the post. This process can be quite time-consuming. Like all other social media apps, Instagram does not have a native provision for unliking in bulk.
Tip: Select to preview all the liked posts one by one, instead of in a row of three. This might speed up the process a little.
What Can You Do on Desktop Instagram?
Instagram is a smartphone app-driven social media so there are some limitations on what you can do on a desktop. There is no option to preview posts that you've liked and you cannot upload pictures. However, what you can do is remove posts from your Saved list.
Saving a post is not exactly the same as liking it, but it wouldn't hurt to know how to unsave Instagram posts on a desktop.
- Go to Instagram
Access Instagram in your browser and log in.
- Select the Profile Icon
Go to your Instagram profile page by clicking on the profile icon at the top right corner
- Click on the "Saved" tab
The Saved tap gives you an option to preview and un-save the posts on your profile. If you've also liked the post, you can click on the "heart" icon to unlike it.
- Unsave the Posts
Browse the saved posts and click on the ribbon under the comments to un-save it. Again, you need to repeat the process for each individual post you wish to remove.
The limitations on third-party apps
Before we get into a full-on discussion of the third-party apps, let's answer a question. Since Instagram publishes an application programming interface (API), meaning that people can write applications that interface directly with the Instagram service, how come there isn't an instantaneous method to just wipe out all your likes in one swoop?
The answer is that there could be, but nobody could run it. The problem is that Instagram doesn't mind if you use a third-party app that uses its API to make some things more efficient, but it frowns on users automating their accounts entirely.
They want human users to do human things, not bots running programs, and an app that just cleans out your likes (or anything else in your account) might rub them the wrong way. Running an app that will wipe out your likes all at once is an excellent way to accidentally get yourself banned from the platform altogether.
So the apps we're going to discuss will let you get rid of your likes but will require you to do it fairly slowly (albeit automatically) so that Instagram won't flip its wig and ban you for using automation tools. The general consensus in the user community is that you can do about 300 unlikes a day without triggering the algorithms.
Third-Party Apps to Remove Likes on Instagram
The only way to efficiently delete all your likes (or do a number of other tasks on Instagram) is to use a third-party app to manage your account. Besides removing all the likes in one go, these apps also offer other features that might be worth your attention. They are essentially designed as social media management tools so feel free to check them out.
FollowingLike
FollowingLike is a social media management tool that lets you administer literally thousands of social media accounts. It's a must-have for a serious Instagram influencer or anyone running multiple accounts. FollowingLike is a paid app; the one-account version is $97 and runs on both Windows (XP or higher) and Mac OS. FollowingLike has a huge array of features; unliking posts is just one of the many things it can do.
Although the app will allow you to wipe out all your likes at once, this is a really terrible idea. Doing so will get your Instagram account immediately banned. Instead, you can create a custom unliking schedule that lets you unlike a few posts at a time over a longer period of time, which will get past the Instagram behavior-monitoring algorithms by making it look like you're really sitting at your computer for 12 hours hitting "unlike" one post at a time. You can let your schedule run on autopilot and take care of all your unliking needs in just a few days.
Cleaner for IG
Unlike FollowingLike, Cleaner for IG (iOS only) is free in the basic package, and you can get an upgraded professional version for a small fee; there is also a cloud upgrade as well. The app has a really nice user interface which makes it easy to use and navigate.
It allows you to unlike Instagram posts in bulk in a few taps. In addition, you can also block and unfollow users in bulk – very handy Instagram account management features. One caveat – users have reported that Cleaner for IG doesn't scale well, and if you have an account with tens of thousands of followers, it will become very sluggish and difficult to use.
How to Get Rid of Likes on Instagram
Source: https://www.alphr.com/delete-all-likes-instagram/