How to Spot Fake Following on Instagram

Avoid wasting your digital marketing dollars on fake leads

Brands, agencies, and influencers alike should be thrilled to know that influencer marketing is now the fastest growing user-acquisition method. Cost-efficient and highly targeted, 59% of marketers are planning to increase their influencer marketing budgets over the next 12 months, for the simple reason that influencer campaigns have the lowest CPM and generate better quality leads as compared to other channels. With better leads comes more conversions. Returning on an average of $6.50 influencers are the channel of choice for increasing ROI (and your annual bonus).

But here’s the catch: Influencer marketing only works if the influencer has real, human followers. Every marketer should be acutely aware of the different ways an influencer can embellish their profile by buying a higher number of followers, and a higher engagement rate — two of the most important metrics used to assess an influencer’s effectiveness. By association, wasting your ad spending on fake influencers negatively impacts brand visibility and your credibility as a marketer. 

It's important to understand the danger of advertising to fake followers; these bots are not real people, and they will not purchase your product. Due diligence in the backend must be done before executing a campaign. Hype Auditor just published a report with research showing that only 39.98% are fraud free (see the percentages of fraud free influencers below). To make sure you only work with these content creators, I have broken down ways to navigate the twisted world of fake Instagram followers.

Part 1: How Content Creators get a Fake Following and Engagement 

If you’re a truth-seeking marketer or an aspiring fake Instagram star, the following tools can make an influencer appear more influential than they actually are. I'll show you a few common ways that Influencers use to fake it, so you can better understand better how to detect it.

Comment groups 

The most popular option to date, comment groups are online clubs of strangers that provide each other a shortcut to Instagram fame. An influencer can join an Instagram direct message group, or Facebook group, and commit to commenting and liking every group member’s posts in a deceptively authentic and high quality manner, with comments that relate to the photo. It’s a straightforward model — like and comment on everyone’s post, and everyone will do the same for you. 

The Instagram algorithm is susceptible to these scams, especially when the post being liked and commented on has just been posted. Generating engagement in a timely manner tricks the Instagram algorithm into thinking the user is famous, increasing their chances of landing on the explore page and equally important: showing up at all or higher in the feed of their following. After the switch from a chronological feed to an algorithm-based feed, many Influencers deal with the problem of not being visible enough to their actual following and make use of these comment groups to work against it. 

Joining a comment group is actually a viable strategy for brands as these groups usually have real users with similar feed themes and interests, and can therefore be targeted with brand messages. From our own experience, joining a comment group helped us receive more comments than what we wrote, because of increased exposure through the comments we made.

However, being in a comment group comes with a gruelling workload. Users have to like and comment all the time, which is an arduous undertaking only those truly committed to faking Instagram fame will be able to endure.

It also cut into my lunchtime and snacktime, so I stopped the experiment.

Instagram automation

For a less laborious way of generating engagement, tools such as "Get River" and "Instamacro" automatically generate brand awareness and visibility by directly engaging targeted groups. These tools use crawlers and bots to select an abundance of posts based on a certain hashtag, location, influencer follower and gender. They then like and comment on these posts, as well as follow the users who posted them. The bots can even be programmed to automatically unfollow a followed account if the account does not follow back within a certain amount of time. 

Usually, when you get a new follower, you will tap on the profile to check it out and see who exactly is looking at your profile. Brands leverage this behavioral instinct to follow users in their target demographic — even without a follow back, the user is likely to check out the brand’s page. This results in more visibility of the brand’s profile. If a user is interested in the brand, it will spark more engagement and help the brand build an organic following. 

Instagram automation helps a user like, follow and comment on their behalf, hoping that targeted accounts will return the favor. When it comes to posting comments, bots use generic lines and phrases that will seem appropriate for almost all kinds of images to avoid people noticing they’re fake. Examples include “Nice One”, “Damn”, “Love your feed” and “Great shot!”, which all sound like authentic comments. 

Instagram automation is not necessarily a bad thing for brands, in fact, it is a useful tool to heighten awareness. If you come across an Instagram account that pretty much only receives generic comments, it is a telltale sign that the user has bought automated engagement from bots. Real followers are likely not engaged. At a relatively low cost of $30 to $100 per month, it has more of an interesting use for brands trying to get a head-start on exposure. Influencers who use automated bots lose credibility and will not be effective in converting their audience. In the event of bots being detected, there are ramifications ranging from having the bots removed from your following, to being banned from Instagram. From our own experience, it works best when you have already posted a lot of content on your feed, otherwise a small number of posts with an unnaturally high engagement will let the cat out of the bag, or the bots, in this case. Instagram automation helped us grow our account and gain a good amount of organic followers, which is a win.

Like-for-like apps 

A classic quid pro quo model, apps like these allow you to like others’ pictures and/ or follow them in exchange for getting likes and followers back. If you do not like a picture you can skip it. As a use case for brands, it might seem like an easy way to reach real people. However, brands do not get material results with like for like apps. Users on these apps usually like and follow everything and everyone for their own benefits, and glance over the pictures. They are not actually interested in the content and are therefore blind to brand messages.

Buying followers, likes and comments

This option is very easy and works well on first sight. There are different price points. Cheap options sell 100% bots, which are not actual followers. These bots will only follow you for a stated duration of time, depending on which tier-pricing was accorded. Bought followers will fade over time. These fake follower bots do not engage with the user, and from a brand perspective, do not engage with a brand when it is being promoted. 

Part 2: How to Detect Fake-Following and Fake-Engagement?

A smart fake influencer would use all of the above to create a natural looking profile! However, you can still spot these phonies and this is how: 

Social Blade and Google Trends 

Social Blade is an amazing tool that charts follower growth over time, and can therefore be used to detect how steady the growth of an influencer is. A normal account growth is more or less steady over time but increases exponentially in correlation to the size of the account An account with 1. million+ Followers will therefore grow quicker than an account with 100k+. If an influencer buys followers it is visible in two ways. First of all, it will be shown as an anomaly in the total follower chart, such as the straight-line upward spike highlighted below. A sudden increase in 8k to 14k followers can signal that the user has bought fake follower bots. 

However, we need to double-check on the influencer’s content posted sometime in Sepember. Often, giveaways, promotions, and other Instagram contests usually ask for people to follow the influencer to stand a chance to win a prize. These one-off contests may also lead to a sharp spike in followers. Google Trends can indicate whether the influencer has been in mentioned more than usual the press during that time, another factor that can lead to spikes in followers.

To further corroborate if the influencer has bought fake follower bots or not, fake bots will fade over time. This is shown by irregularities in the daily increase of followers. If there are extreme discrepancies between gaining and losing followers every few days over time, it strongly indicates that the Influencer has bought fake followers over a longer period of time and is therefore constantly losing followers which he tries to cover by buying even more. Watch out for bulk additions and subtractions to an influencer’s followers on the same day. Their following is likely fake — Collaborating with influencers like these will definitely throw your ad spend down the drain. 

When using Social Blade to analyze an influencer, avoid jumping to conclusions and be aware that Instagram constantly deletes fake accounts as well as inactive users. A follower drop every now and then does not immediately mean that a specific influencer bought followers. Fluctuations are a strong indication of fake followers, but must be cross-examined with other factors.

Quality of Followers

Another way to accurately assess the quality of an influencer is to look at their followers. This is unfortunately a labour-intensive task, but is very useful to avoid wasting your marketing budget. 

Fake followers are easy to spot — one surefire sign are profiles that are not followed by others, but follow a large number of people. These can often be inactive accounts that have been taken over by bots, and are categorized as zombie accounts. On average, an Instagram user will follow 400 people.

On Instagram, every open account has a small percentage of fake followers, even if the account owner has never bought any. But if you click around on the profile and the majority of followers seem to have unnatural-looking names and are not followed by anyone, it strongly indicates that they are fake and that the influencer has a low quality of followers. Engaging them to promote a product is a waste of resources as their posts will not reach any real human audiences.

Low Engagement 

A telltale sign of fake following is low engagement. Engagement on Instagram is calculated by aggregating the average number of likes and comments a user gets on his posts. A high engagement rate signals that the user’s audience are engaged enough to take the extra step to interact with the user. Engagement rates should be measured in tandem with the target group of the influencer — The younger the audience of an influencer is, the higher the engagement. An influencer with an older audience typically has a lower engagement, and it is not necessarily an indication of a low quality of followers. 

The engagement can easily be calculated with the following formula:

Average Engagement Rate (%) Per Post = Total Engagement / Follower Counts / Number of Posts x 100 

Or by using tools available on Phlanx and Influencer Marketing Hub.

Comment Analysis

Buying followers and likes is a lot easier than comments, therefore, when analyzing a profile it might be wise to look at the comments first. Comment groups are characteristically difficult to identify with the untrained eye, so exercise prudence. You will know for yourself if an influencer’s profile is interesting, curated, and beautiful, or not. If you come across a boring profile with an unusually high number of comments per post, the followers and comments are likely fake. Comments that are very brand-related, e.g. “Love Adidas!” And “Nice Adidas!" sound too good to be true and are likely fake. They are personalized by the brand of product featured in the post, but not about the actual influencer. Thus, watch out if sponsored posts have a lot more, brand-. related comments as compared to similar posts you might find on a non-influencer’s profile. Scrutinize perfect comments and use your artistic judgement to decide if an Instagram user’s profile is truly follow-worthy.

Often, people who aspire to become Instagram famous buy followers and join comment groups as a shortcut to fame. The example below shows someone with run-of-the-mill posts, and only 9 posts in total. However, he has amassed 25.1k followers and gets an unusual number of likes and comments on photos that are not special or interesting. By our verdict, his following and engagement is bought.

Feed Content and Story Impressions

Last but not least an easy and quick rule to work by. Feed content should have at least 30% impressions in comparison to the overall following, Story content at least 10%. It is best to have the content creator send you a couple of recent screenshots. Lower percentages isn't bulletproof evidence that the content creator used suspicious techniques to grow their number of followers, might also be that their followers just aren't engaged. Well, both resons not to work with them.

Summary

To recap, knowing how to spot fake influencers is a lifesaving, or let's say jobsaving, skill. You protect your business from wasting marketing dollars on fake influencers, and a negative ROI. The first step to a successful influencer campaign is the proper curation of real influencers. 

Start your investigative research with Social Blade, which will provide charts and graphs to track if an influencer’s growth and engagement has a realistic, steady growth for the timespan. Natural, cumulative growth will rarely show abrupt spikes. Authentic influencers know that followers come with great content and hard work.

Accounts that seem suspicious should be met with more scrutiny. Ask yourself why someone would follow the influencer, and if their followers are carried-over from other platforms, such as tiktok.com. Carry-over audiences expand the possibility for multiplatform campaigns that might bring in better results.

Social media users in a younger demographic tend to be more interactive, so a user with a younger following will generate a higher engagement. If the number of comments and/ or content of comments seem suspect, it is likely too good to be true.

Don’t fall prey to these tactics. Better yet, get the world’s best influencer marketing agency to bring your campaign to the next level. Here at Pulse, the globally leading influencer marketing agency, we keep it real. That means picking real influencers to deliver real, tangible results. We work with brands and influencers to create high-performing campaigns every day. To start transforming your business with influencer marketing, send me an email or InMail me here.