One of the key factors for success in influencer marketing is authenticity. According to Nielsen’s Consumer Trust Index, 92% of consumers trust influencer endorsements more than traditional advertising. But what happens when you partner with influencers whose follower counts are inflated by fake followers and bot accounts?
The rise of fake followers distorts key performance metrics, misleading brands about the actual effectiveness of their campaigns. While these fraudulent accounts may boost follower numbers, they don't provide real engagement or drive meaningful return on investment (ROI), undermining the potential of influencer partnerships.
In this article, we’ll explore how fake followers impact ROI, the tools available to identify them, and actionable steps brands can take to safeguard their influencer marketing efforts against this rising threat.
Fake followers are social media accounts that are either created by bots (automated programs) or inactive/abandoned accounts used to artificially inflate an influencer's follower count. These accounts do not belong to real, active users and do not engage with content in a meaningful way.
The purpose of fake followers is to make an influencer appear more popular or influential than they truly are, often to attract brands or businesses for partnerships.
What are the risks of fake followers for influencer ROI? Fake followers can lead to wasted marketing spend and poor campaign performance. Fake followers don’t engage with content, which means lower engagement rates, reduced reach, and ultimately fewer conversions.
When evaluating the success of an influencer marketing campaign, Return on Investment (ROI) is one of the key indicators you should look at. ROI goes beyond simply measuring the cost of campaigns versus the revenue generated - it includes audience, engagement, reach, and long-term brand perception.
To measure ROI in your influencer marketing campaigns, you need to figure out how much you invested and how much revenue your campaign has generated. You can do so by using the following formula:
ROI Formula: (Revenue / Cost) x 100
According to our internal research , credibility is a key factor that directly impacts ROI in influencer marketing. Credibility is primarily determined by the percentage of real followers an influencer has. While it's common for celebrities or influencers with large followings to have some bots or fake followers, problems arise when the proportion of fake followers becomes too high, leading to a negative correlation with conversion performance.
Low credibility and fake followers result in lower engagement rates, diminishing the campaign's reach and effectiveness. Our data shows that influencers with an audience credibility score above the median of 73.17% achieved significantly higher conversion rates, highlighting the importance of partnering with authentic influencers to maximize ROI.
When fake followers are involved, ROI calculations can be misleading if you only look at vanity metrics like follower count or impressions.
Instead, you should prioritize engagement metrics to determine whether an influencer’s audience is actively interested and participating in the content. Influencers with a high engagement rate but fewer followers often outperform those with a large follower count but low engagement—especially if that large audience is built from fake followers.
For example, an influencer with 10,000 engaged followers may deliver a higher ROI than one with 100,000 followers, which includes a significant portion of bots or inactive accounts.
The real value lies in the connection between the influencer and their audience, not just the raw number of followers. To measure true success, brands need to focus on engagement-driven metrics like:
Focusing on these metrics helps brands understand the real impact of their campaigns, especially when fake followers can skew vanity metrics like follower count and artificially inflate perceived success.
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If you’re starting out with influencer marketing, you’ll see that one of the main aspects that impact influencer pricing is the follower count. Macro influencers will charge significantly more than micro influencers because they have more followers and, therefore, more visibility.
In the table below, you can see the average pricing depending on the influencer’s audience size:
However, when a portion of an influencer’s following is fake, the prices do not reflect the actual value delivered. Brands could be paying top-tier prices for an audience for an audience that doesn’t exist, resulting in wasted budget and poor campaign performance.
Fake followers inflate an influencer’s perceived reach but offer no real impact on key performance indicators like engagement rate (ER), click-through rates (CTR), or conversions.
Let’s compare two influencers - one with real, engaged followers and one with a significant number of fake followers - to illustrate how fake followers can distort campaign outcomes:
In this scenario, even though Influencer A has double the followers, Influencer B delivers more than four times the engagement.
If a brand selects Influencer A based on follower count alone, they’re likely to see poor ROI. Meanwhile, working with Influencer B would have resulted in much higher engagement and brand visibility for a lower price.
Now, let’s break down the ROI (Return on Investment) for both influencers, assuming that each interaction (like, comment, share, etc.) generates a value of $0.50 for the brand (this can represent direct sales, brand visibility, or other forms of return).
Influencer A:
For every $1 the brand spends on Influencer A, they are losing $0.70, leading to a negative ROI due to the inflated follower count and low engagement.
Influencer B:
In contrast, Influencer B delivers a 150% ROI. For every $1 spent, the brand earns $1.50 in return, making this a highly successful investment.
Why do fake followers reduce the effectiveness of influencer campaigns? In the comparison above, Influencer A's 40% fake followers drastically reduce the effectiveness of their campaign with a low engagement rate of 1%. This results in just 600 interactions, which translates into a negative ROI.
Fake followers inflate the audience size, misleading brands into thinking they’ll reach more potential customers when in reality, the engagement is minimal. By contrast, Influencer B, with a smaller but entirely authentic following, generates over four times the engagement with a much higher ROI. This shows how fake followers distort campaign outcomes by inflating reach but failing to deliver meaningful interactions, ultimately reducing campaign effectiveness.
When evaluating influencers for your campaigns, it’s essential to analyze more than just follower count. Two key metrics that reveal the value of an influencer are Engagement Rate (ER) and Growth Rate.
Measures the level of interaction (likes, comments, shares) relative to the influencer's follower count. Influencers with fake followers typically have lower ERs because bots and inactive accounts don’t engage with content.
The average ER depends on the influencer’s size:
For example, a healthy engagement rate for a micro influencer ranges between 0.69 and 1.08%. If an influencer of this category has a much lower ER, that can suggest that a significant portion of their followers may be bots.
To calculate the ER, you can use Influencer Hero’s Free Engagement Rate Calculator, which provides access to a detailed report that includes engagement, rate, and demographics.
An unnatural spike in followers can be a red flag for purchased followers. Organic growth tends to be steady and aligned with content quality and audience engagement. While in some cases, an elevated growth can be the case of a viral video, usually, it’s best to analyze the overall growth through time to ensure it’s natural.
For example, when reviewing Ahnesti Monet's analytics through Influencer Hero, you can see her follower growth maintaining a steady pace of 5.61%. With strong engagement rates and high audience credibility, her metrics indicate authentic performance, providing real, not inflated, numbers.
By closely monitoring these metrics, brands can identify discrepancies between an influencer’s pricing and their actual value, ensuring they aren’t overpaying for fake followers.
Other signs of fake followers include:
The best strategy to avoid fake followers and improve ROI in influencer marketing is to thoroughly vet influencers before partnering. By using influencer auditing tools, you can assess follower authenticity, engagement rates, audience demographics and more. These are some of the best tools to detect fake followers.
Influencer Hero is an all-in-one influencer marketing platform that allows you to manage your influencer campaigns successfully.
It has a Free Fake Follower Scanner that allows you to check any account’s followers, providing interesting details like the number of fake followers, growth rate, engagement rate, and audience demographics. You can also add this feature as a Chrome extension that allows you to do quick checkups.
InstantIQ is an AI-powered tool focused on uncovering fake followers and providing transparent insights into an influencer’s audience quality. With features like engagement rate analysis and audience verification, InstantIQ enables brands to identify influencers with high percentages of bot or inactive followers.
Modash provides in-depth audience analytics, including insights into engagement rates, audience demographics and follower quality. It uses advanced algorithms to detect unusual follower patterns, such as rapid follower spikes or low engagement, which are often indicators of fake followers.
Fake followers present a significant challenge in influencer marketing, skewing key metrics like follower count and artificially inflating influencer pricing. As we've seen, these fraudulent accounts can drastically reduce a campaign's return on investment (ROI) by diminishing genuine engagement and misrepresenting an influencer's true reach. Relying solely on vanity metrics, such as follower count, can lead to poor decisions and wasted marketing budgets.
To protect ROI and maximize campaign performance, brands must focus on deeper metrics like engagement rates, growth patterns, and audience authenticity. Tools like Influencer Hero and InstantIQ are invaluable in identifying influencers with fake followers, allowing brands to make smarter investments. By prioritizing quality over quantity, brands can ensure they are paying for true influence, not an illusion.
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