Instagram has been a hub for social media influencers for a few years now. Many of them have genuinely worked to build an organic audience, but amidst them, there are some who have bought fake Instagram followers. Many services assist them in this regard. As an influencer marketing manager or marketer, your first step before selecting someone for collaboration is ensuring that their followers are genuine, not fake. Failure to do so will defeat the entire purpose
of your marketing campaign, and your budget will surely go to waste. To prevent such distressing consequences, we have listed advice below to detect fake Instagram followers.
However, before delving into the details, you should be aware of the different kinds of fake Instagram followers:
Bots
These usually account with no posts but are only used to like and comment on other posts based on tags.
Fakes
These are generally used to spam, cheat, and advertising. Often real accounts are hacked and used for this purpose.
Offers
These are real people, but for a certain price would follow, like, comment, or share your post. As long as you pay them, they will keep doing this for you.
Red Flags to Detect Fake Instagram Followers
There are a few red flags you can keep an eye out for that would be a clear giveaway of fake Instagram followers:
Most fake accounts or bots don’t use their pictures but avatars or celebrities or anything abstract.
The username would be a series of numbers or jumbled letters, not something a real person would want for their username.
They usually follow numerous accounts and are followed by similar fake accounts.
There is hardly any content to validate their existence. There wouldn’t be any posts, stories, tagged photos, or even a bio.
There are likely to be a lot of reports to make the account in question look full of content and less suspicious.
How to Tell if Someone Bought Fake Instagram Followers
As a marketing manager, you need to ensure the influencer you choose for your brand is genuine and you can do so by combing through their feed and followers. It is a long tedious process, but it is worthwhile and necessary to protect your marketing budget. Here are a few details you need to keep an eye out for:
Have a look at their followers. Go through them and have a look at what sort of accounts generally follow them. You might not be able to go through each and every follower but you would be able to tell the genuineness through the profile picture and username too. If an account has only other shops, businesses, beauty salons, a username with numbers following them, they have bought fake Instagram followers.
Have a look at how many people they are following. Yes, it is entirely possible they know a lot of people but the greater this number is, the higher the chance that they have fake followers.
Go through the comments. Are they generic comments like “nice post”, “beautiful”, or just lots of emojis? Fake Instagram followers alert!
What about the likes on each picture? The likes on each picture should be somewhat close to each other. If one post has 200 but the other 2000, it is a red flag.
If there are videos on the account, have a look at the views and the likes. Generally, the views should be two to three times more than the likes. If there are just 70 likes but thousands of views, it should have you concerned.
Going through an account for fake Instagram followers and ensuring authenticity is essential to the success of your marketing campaign. As a marketer, you should be detail-oriented and patient. It might be a tedious process but overlooking it will be a bigger mistake.