How to Spot Fake Instagram Followers (Fake Follower & Audience Credibility Checker )
As a result of this analysis, you may be able to remove most of your concerns about the credibility of potential influencers. You can enter any influencer’s Instagram handle into the Instagram Bot Analytics Tool [Instagram Audit – Fake Follower & Audience Credibility Checker] and it will give you an excellent guide to the genuineness of the account.
I would like to draw your attention to the fact that this tool is provided by Hypeauditor. For any questions pertaining to a quality score, please contact them directly. Hyperauditor provides this type of data to brands, agencies, publishers, and all other interested parties. Accuracy of results are in no way guaranteed by Influencer Marketing Hub.
It is likely that any real influencer who works hard to make sure their audience is genuine, will achieve scores of 80 or above. A person who does poorly in an interview would be of little value to your business, and a potential waste of your investment if you were to pay them to promote your product or service.
Most People Suffer From Fake Instagram Followers
It was not so long ago that you could say, “It must be true – I read it on the internet.
” Those days are long gone; no longer can you just assume that if somebody claims to have a large number of Instagram followers, the followers will be interested in the person’s account – or in other words, whether the followers are real or not.
Unscrupulous people often increase the number of followers they have by buying them. Sometimes, these are real people looking for extra cash. Sometimes, these are fake accounts set up by bots and are posing as real people. There is no way for the fake followers to engage with the “influencer’s” posts in any way and, as a result, are of absolutely no use to a brand seeking to work with him or her.
There is no way that Instagram (or indeed any of the other social networks for that matter) can eliminate all fake accounts. Regardless of the security mechanisms Instagram brings into play, determined scammers will always find a way to get around them. In other words, it is up to brands (and the genuine influencers) to hunt out and find these fake followers.
It is important to keep in mind that there is more to fake followers than just people trying to inflate their follower lists. Everyone on Instagram has some fake followers. That includes real influencers (and most likely your own account as well). Therefore, our Audience Credibility Checker [Bot Checker] is unlikely to suggest that your account has 100% credible followers as reported by our Audience Credibility Checker.
Although the Influencer Marketing Hub Instagram account can’t quite reach an Audience Credibility Score of 100 (it was 99.21% when we checked last), we ensure only genuine accounts follow us, so even we make scrupulous checks to ensure only genuine accounts follow us.
Why People Buy Followers
The number of followers that someone has is often misunderstood as being the most important factor for success on social media. So, they try to take a shortcut to their success by paying to buy followers in order to succeed. They equate the number of followers you display with your level of popularity.
It is not the case, however, that social media works in this way. Anyone can buy followers on social media. But, you will not be able to become an influencer unless you can influence others. You need to become a thought leader in your niche, and organically build your following.
There is a problem with buying followers because it leaves you with a very unbalanced account. For example, you have many followers, but little engagement. The only person you influence is yourself, and it is not that hard for anyone analyzing your account to spot what you have done.
Signs of a Fake Follower
The easiest way to spot fake followers is by entering their account names into the Audience Credibility Checker / Bot Checker. Despite the fact that most people won’t have perfect scores here, you’re likely to notice the presence of accounts with particularly low credibility scores.
However, what makes someone a fake follower? In what way can you say that someone isn’t a genuine follower? Here are some of the danger signs to look for in an Instagram account.
1. An account has “unusual” numbers.
Real accounts usually follow similar patterns when it comes to the number of followers, people they follow, and how much engagement they receive. Even though everybody operates their accounts in a different way, and some “newbies” are more likely to be unengaged than seasoned Instagrammers, there are still ways to detect the outliers.
It is possible, for example, that they like and follow thousands of people, but they don’t have many of those following them back. Perhaps they don’t create many posts or maybe none at all. This doesn’t necessarily imply that they are a bot, but it does suggest that they will be of little usage as a follower. In fact, they don’t influence anyone at all.
Genuine influencers usually have a larger following than the accounts they follow – often by a large margin. As a recent example, we recently looked at the top 10 fitness influencers on Instagram.
The top of the list is Sommer Ray. While she has 18.2 million followers, she only follows 264 accounts in return. As you may be aware, Izabel Goulart, the tenth person on our list, is also ranked one-sided by the ratio: 4.2 million followers are paired with 340 accounts followed. The average Instagram user’s rate of Accounts Following: Followers might be closer to 1:1 than this, but no one (aside from perhaps a complete “newbie”) should have substantially more Accounts Followed than Followers.
In the same way, you should look at a potential influencer’s engagement rate when researching him or her. The engagement rate (likes and comments) of an influencer is between 1.5 and 3% of the followers they have, e.g. if an influencer has 100,000 followers, they should receive between 1,500 and 3,000 likes and comments on an average post. Many influencers, depending on their niche, can get by with engagement rates of one percent or higher. If an “influencer’s” engagement rate for his/her posts is regularly well below than this, you should be suspicious, however.
It is not always better to go higher. There is a possibility that an engagement rate over 10% could raise suspicions. It is possible that these high engagement rates are due to the influencer using artificial engagement techniques, such as being a part of an engagement group (influencers like each other’s posts and comment on them in order to boost their statistics).
2. A lot of action for a few days, but then little other activity.
Someone will often create a bot that will follow tens or hundreds of thousands of people on the day of its creation. The bot may even share some content on that day in order to give the appearance that it is genuine. Once the bot has followed sufficient people, it stops and relies on people not checking their accounts and unfollowing the fake account.
A genuine influencer is likely to have a steady growth in the number of followers they have. After they are recognized by the community as an influencers, their followers may increase at a faster rate, but they are unlikely to receive a burst of followers quickly (as most of the fake accounts do).
3. Empty, Hidden or Copied Profile Sections
The majority of people who create fake accounts do not put much effort into creating realistic-sounding bios. Many people leave the bio section blank, or they fill in the minimum details in the bio section. Many people even adjust the settings of the profile to make it invisible. By doing this, you will not be able to see any information about the person. The question you should ask yourself, however, is whether someone who hides their bio details has any real value to them. Are they likely to make an engaging, dedicated follower?
Similarly, in a visual medium such as Instagram, you should consider the absence of a profile picture a sign of dishonesty.
There are some cases where unscrupulous Instagram users fool you by creating totally fake bios on their accounts, often using someone else’s picture as the bio picture. In most cases, these are simply images taken from stock photo sites.
4. Spammy, Irrelevant and Clueless Comments
Even some dishonest human-operated accounts (and some of the smarter bot accounts) create comments to seem authentic. However, the problem with these comments is that they are generic and lack substance. If you notice, for example, that a particular account continually comments “good picture” or “good job” then you might take immediate action.
Although comments like these are technically engagement, they have no significance to a brand hoping an influencer will convince his/her followers that the product will be a good fit for their followers.
Likewise, some accounts leave irrelevant spam comments, which most likely try to sell something. In some cases, these are well intentioned, but poorly executed sales tactics. On the other hand, they may be more sinister and encourage you to leave your contact information so they can steal your identity.
