For many years, to do well on Instagram and have the platform promote your account and content, it was crucial to have a large number of followers.
Nowadays, due to algorithm changes, followers aren’t the most important thing. However, people still care a lot about them and most try to get them at all costs. And because building a large community of followers is challenging, some choose to take the fastest road and acquire fake followers.
So, if you are looking for influencers for your campaign, make sure you check their followers' quality before committing as an inflated number can lead to wasted efforts and budgets. If you don’t know how to do this, then you came to the right place!
Fake followers are often considered to be any type of ghost and/or bots accounts that are created for mass following and interactions. Due to their high volume, it is inevitable to have some in your followers list, so there’s a certain number that is acceptable.
But there are platforms and apps where one can deliberately purchase a specific amount of followers to inflate an account’s numbers, in the hopes of increasing exposure.
However, with the right tools, these accounts can be easily identified, potentially damaging the influencer’s reputation as they can spark doubts on their credibility and even fail to deliver genuine results for brand partnerships.
If fake followers can do more harm than good, why do influencers purchase them?
To understand why people are interested in building a large following at all costs, we must first analyze the content creator market, which has experienced a rapid growth in the last few years, reaching an outstanding worth of 21 billion dollars in 2023 (Statista, Influencer Adversiting - Worldwide, 2023).
This way, more and more people want to become a full time content creator, which drives more competition on social media and its harder to actually become one. Plus, after TikTok’s boom, all social media platforms are now switching to an algorithm that prioritizes interests over people you follow, which also makes it more difficult to grow a loyal following.
So even though engagement is currently more important than followers to do well on most platforms, people still see followers as status and authority. Influencers want a large following to be considered as trustworthy for both their audience and brands, and therefore land more partnership deals.
This is where purchasing followers becomes an option: aspiring creators want a larger audience (even if fake) to be taken into account for opportunities, but building this in an honest way takes a lot of effort and time. So, they choose to artificially increase their numbers by buying packages of ghost accounts.
But before thinking of taking the same road in the hopes of getting more exposure yourself, please consider that this method has a lot of negative effects. You can read all about this on our 7 Tools to Spot & Remove Fake Followers guide!
First it’s important to note that there are two types of fake accounts:
Now to spot these fake followers, make sure to look for the following factors:
These usernames are very generic or contain a lot of numbers and/or letters.
If there’s no profile picture, incomplete or no bio and no content, then the chances this is a fake account are very high!
Usually, these accounts follow a lot of people but are followed by only a very few similar accounts, if not none.
For imitations, you’ll see that the username is slightly different than the original, and the content they share is reposted in a lower quality and without that personal touch genuine users give to their posts.
In an influencer marketing campaign, you want to have influencers who have a loyal community that will engage with their content and ultimately take their advice in order to purchase your product.
Therefore, it is crucial that an influencer doesn’t have a very inflated following because their engagement rate will be affected, and you could waste your budget and efforts on someone who won’t be able to deliver real results.
So, now that you know what a fake account looks like, you can move on to identifying them with these next signs:
A very clear sign of fake followers is the discrepancy between follower count and engagement rate, as the engagement rate is calculated based on the amount of followers and the total amount of interactions.
If an influencer has a large following, but no comments, very few likes and views on their reels, then it is very likely that they have bot accounts.
And, even if that’s not the case and they have a normal amount of fake followers, a low engagement rate isn’t ideal for brand partnerships as the chances of that influencer driving real performance for the brand are very low.
The company you keep says a lot about you, and this applies to every life aspect. Especially when it comes to the audience an influencer has gathered: do they get actual value out of the influencer’s post and therefore are loyal to them? Did they just follow the influencer when they went viral and never cared to check their profiles again? Or, is that audience not real at all?
Another clear sign of purchasing fake followers is a sudden spike in follower growth.
Unless a user wins the social media lottery and goes viral overnight, follower growth tends to be very steady. According to our Influencer Marketing ROI 2023 study, the average growth rates on Instagram are as follows:
Similar to the engagement rate point since they are related, comments are an indicator of fake followers.
This is because if a bot comments, you’ll immediately notice it as their comments usually have little to no relevance: they either are emojis, self-promotion or any other kind of meaningless interaction.
To have a successful Instagram account, there are two key content aspects to keep in mind: frequency and quality.
For Instagram to understand an account is actively pursuing growth and wants to have an impact, it's necessary to post frequently. Otherwise, accounts that post every now and then get lost in the millions of users active on the platform nowadays.
So, if an influencer rarely shares a post, but still has a large following, there’s definitely room for doubt on the accuracy of their audience. Unless they are a celebrity or a public figure, posting often is a good way to grow organically.
Then, there’s the quality aspect. Looks have always mattered, but with social media, looks are everything. This doesn’t only mean promoting a lavish lifestyle, but it’s also about the edit: photo or video quality, color adjustment, the right pose, and everything related to aesthetics.
Therefore, it is very unlikely that a creator who doesn’t take good pictures of products or over-edits their videos will appeal to a real large audience.
Most of the signs mentioned above require constant monitoring of influencers accounts, but there is a faster and more efficient way to check every analytics:
Influencer Hero provides in-depth analysis of an influencer’s following within their Influencer Finder tool, which is now also available as a Chrome Extension so you can quickly analyze someone’s profile directly from their Instagram page!
It not only has a Fake Follower scanner, but it also gives you the engagement rate (which also suggests a large fake following if the rate is too low compared to the amount of followers), follower growth, audience demographics, earned media value and other KPIs to analyze an influencer profile before inviting them to join a campaign.
Let’s look at the numbers with this anonymous example and analyze all the ways you can tell when a user has a high amount of fake followers:
You can already begin by focusing on the FF Scanner, which will tell you the percentage of mischievous accounts and what that means based on our data: good or bad.
As discussed, most times a sudden spike in followers is also an indicator of purchasing fake followers. Unless someone goes through the very unusual case of going so viral they earn a lot of followers in a few days, follower growth is usually a more stable line.
In this case, increasing the number of followers by 192.93% in just one month suggests suspicious behavior.
Since the Engagement Rate is calculated based on the total number of interactions (likes, comments and shares) and the total number of followers, having a relatively low ER with a big following can definitely suggest fake followers.
This influencer has 300k followers, so any ER below 1% is too low. This can also imply that his followers are inactive, so even if they are real people, is not an ideal scenario for brand partnerships as it’s not very likely that the influencer will perform well.
Engagement rates will always depend on the amount of followers and ideally, the higher the better. However, engagement rates are already considered to be good if they are between 2%-5%.
First, the Audience Type indicator is pretty straightforward as it breaks down the types of followers. In this example, the influencer has 41% of mass followers and 34% of suspicious accounts, which in total account for more than half of the followers, lowering his credibility.
Second, the Audience Reachability indicator doesn’t specify anything directly related to fake accounts, but it does provide an important insight: the chances of your post being shown.
This is because when the influencer’s audience follows more than one thousand accounts, that usually means that they are less loyal to this creator and the chances of seeing their post in particular are lower.
Influencer Hero offers multiple tools to analyze an influencer profile and their audience quality, it’s just a matter of finding the right one for you! The Chrome Extension allows for quick analysis directly on IG, while the Influencer Finder Report is more extensive and having access to it means you can already manage your entire campaign within Influencer Hero’s CRM!
Yes, there are real consequences to buying fake followers. First, and related to influencer marketing, an influencer’s value lies in their genuine connection with their audience. Therefore, a fake audience can lead to reputation damage and wasted resources, even losing business opportunities.
Second, Instagram actively works to identify and remove fake accounts. Influencers found to be buying followers can face penalties, including shadowbanning (where their posts are less visible) or even account suspension.
Meta explicitly mentions this in their Transparency Center:
“We aim to protect users and businesses from being deceived out of their money, property or personal information. We achieve this by removing content and combatting behavior that purposefully employs deceptive means - such as wilful misrepresentation, stolen information and exaggerated claims - to either scam or defraud users and businesses, or to drive engagement.” - Transparency Center, Meta
They also list everything that is considered a scam and/or fraud for them in red, meaning it has no room in Meta apps at all (Instagram and Facebook). This includes trying to trick or deceive users by pretending to be someone else or lying about the purpose of a request: charity, romance nor business fraud and scams are allowed.
They also mention other fraudulent behavior in yellow, with a medium risk of having consequences. However, they can remove accounts in the following cases:
While it is not illegal to purchase fake followers on Instagram, it’s definitely not recommended to do so due to the reasons mentioned above.
Due to the high amount of active users nowadays, it is crucial to deliver actual value with your content. This will give people a reason to follow you and stay on the lookout for your new posts.
The first steps are to think about what your brand is and what you want to communicate: what do you want to post about? Who would your target audience be?
Now that you know what you want to communicate, you must understand how your target audience consumes social media, in order to create appealing content for them.
Social listening is key to keep up with trends, topics being discussed, hashtags used, etc. If your content matches your audience's interests, then the platform will promote it to others with similar interests.
Studying your competitors and/or aspirational accounts will help you understand what works for them, and how you can replicate that success with your own branding.
Look for inspiration in their engaging content: how they write their captions, their video introductions, when they post, the content that does well for them.
It's important to check in on your analytics regularly, including your post and audience analytics.
This way, you can study what did well and how you can continue to explore that in order to grow. The ideal scenario is to catch the trends in your performance and how to keep them steady, if not growing.
You can also analyze what failed and why, to try and redo it or avoid it in the future. For example, with videos, here's what can go wrong and how to fix it:
While it is inevitable to have a percentage of followers that are either ghost accounts or bots, it is highly recommended to not take the fast way to growth that is buying followers.
Schedule a Demo with one of our media experts below.
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