Unmasking the Illusion: How to Spot Fake Influencers on Instagram

I'm a fake Influencer, of course My Follower Count Is Higher Than My Credit Score.

Everyone seems to be insta famous nowadays and if you are just looking at their follower count you may be led astray. Typically, people do not care about the legitimacy of someone’s Instagram followers, but this all changes when money is involved. Let’s say you want to work with an influencer that has 200k followers but want to make sure they weren’t all bought. The short answer is there is no surefire way to figure out if your favorite insta celeb bought all their followers. In this post we’re going to run something like an Instagram background check on them. If they aren’t on their game, we will be able to pull them out as obvious frauds!

 

I'm a fake Influencer, of course Half My Followers Are Bots.

Now let’s be honest for a second. A report came out not long ago from Mediakix where they discovered over 50% of the top influencers buy followers. This means that all our beliefs about followers are skewed because we're used to seeing accounts that bought followers and thinking they are legit upcoming influencers. At a certain point, you must acknowledge buying followers is a part of the game, but our mission is to dig in deeper to understand this activity. Please understand that we are not here to clown these people and it's about helping you identify fake influencers, so you don’t get scammed into buying their promo services.

The entire social system that runs Instagram is busted now that people can buy followers instead of posting engaging content to accumulate them. Historically, people have used following counts as a judge of how much social proof an influencer has, but I am here to tell you that approach is very outdated and will get you scammed. Deciding if someone's followers are real is a matter of money when it comes to dealing with influencers, because if their followers are bots, they will not interact with your post the same way that legitimate users will.

I’m a fake influencer, of course promo and donation are the same word.

Undoubtedly the biggest issue with fake influencers is the ability to lose your money faster than an FTX investor. Putting all that effort into developing a marketing strategy to work alongside an influencer, only to find out their followers aren't genuine is what we are going to avoid. The other risk is that you don't research the influencer and decide to work with them for them to come out as a scammer only later. People will associate the scamming with your business and refuse to do business with you. This can negatively hurt your brand reputation and make people hesitant to work with you in the future. You may think this is unfair, but I see it very similar to the guy selling your bike he stole off your front lawn to the pawn shop. Also, if you decide to work with a fake influencer, their followers will more than likely be bots and your posts will be daunted with spammy comments.

I’m a fake influencer, of course I am going to unfollow you next week.

Unless you are new to Instagram, you know about the accounts that follow a ton of other accounts, only to unfollow them a week later. They hope many people will follow them back, but they plan on unfollowing everybody within the next week. They rinse and repeat the same strategy so they can build their following account without having to produce any valuable content. Not always, but usually these accounts have following counts that are near their follower count. Influencers post engaging content and do not need to follow other people to build their following. They typically only follow less than 5% of their followers back. If you notice an account that has a following count very close to its follower account, there is a high probability that this account is not creating engaging content and does not have an interested audience. I think it goes without saying that any account following more people than they have in followers is likely not an influencer. While following too many accounts is a definite red flag, it is not a surefire way to decide if someone is a fake influencer.

Here is a random example account that I have picked off Instagram that has 26k followers and is only following 96 people. From the surface he looks like a legitimate influencer, but we are going to dig a bit deeper since he passed our first two red flags.

 

I’m a fake influencer, of course all my followers only have 8 followers.

Interestingly, we will use the guilty by association concept as one of our tactics in deciding if their influencer status is legitimate or all cap. Sorry, random person on the Internet, but today we're going to dig into your profile and see if we can figure out if your profile is real or giving major cap. It is not personal, but I just searched through Instagram for 5 minutes and your profile came up, so your influencer thing is working to a certain extent. So, now we're going to this person's following list to look for a certain type of follower and how often we see this type of follower. The type of follower we are looking for are accounts that do not have profile pictures, or accounts that follow an absurd amount of people while having very few followers of their own.

As soon as I started searching through this person's following list, I seen one of these followers. This appears to be a young woman who follows over 1000 people, while she only has one follower of her own. Additionally, she has posted 15 posts. This is not ordinary engagement for anyone who lives on Earth and has friends. It's safe to say that everyone has a few of these bots and spammy followers, but that's why we must explore how deep the spam accounts go. If we only see a few examples of fake followers, we can assume that that's somewhat normal. But if we notice an abnormally large number of bot accounts this should be a hint that the person may have bought followers in the past. Looking down their following list, I noticed 4 consecutive followers that all had very spammy stats for their followers and following count.

I would give the person one more benefit of the doubt and go far back or to another point inside of their following list to ensure this was not just a small period that they accumulated fake followers. If you find the prevalence of these accounts throughout their entire following list, I think it's safe to assume that they were a fake influencer, but if you need to confirm I do have better methods to know for sure.

I’m a fake influencer with 50k, of course my pics get 7 likes.

The next metric we will use to figure out if an account is legitimate is their engagement rates. What I mean when I say engagement rates is when they post how many people interact with that post. A very low engagement rate usually coincides with someone buying followers because. Bot accounts are not run by real people and do not like or interact with post and meaningful ways. Instagram has made this harder by giving people the ability to hide their likes, but we can still get an idea of how many likes a post got by seeing how long we're able to scroll or swipe until we hit the bottom of the list. If someone is truly influencer status, Instagram will need to reload the list several times to display how many likes the post got. If they are really a huge influencer, it will continue to load new pages of likes and it will be difficult to see the bottom. To judge our example page, we are going to take a post that he made about 5 weeks ago and judge the engagement.

The first red flag that I spot in this screenshot is that this person is supposed to have over 25,000 followers, but simultaneously cannot attract even a single comment on a post from a month ago. This is very suspicious. And again, another red flag you could use to conclude your search with the outcome that this person is not really an influencer. But we are going to dig deeper. Sorry random Instagram influencer. For this specific post we were able to reach the bottom of the likes. Now we can count these manually, but thanks to the use of some AI, we can get it to count the list for us.

So, AI counted this for us and saved us the labor of getting a headache from staring at the screen, but our AI found that he only had 31 likes on this post. Some quick AI math reveals that 31 out of 26,000 people is approximately .1% of your user base engaging with your content. This is not normal and a huge red flag of an account that has bought followers. An interesting rabbit hole that you can go down on Instagram is finding one of these accounts that have paid for followers, finding one of their followers that is obviously fake, and then seeing what pages they follow. Chances are that the accounts they are following are also engaged in this activity of buying followers.

I’m a fake influencer, of course most of my followers don’t like my posts.

OK, so enough of picking on that one random guy on Instagram. We are going to move on to a new page and decide if this page is legitimate or all cap. This one is more interesting because this person is offering story and post promotion, meaning that people are spending their hard-earned money on being promoted through this page. Time to figure out if those promo bucks will add anything to your marketing strategy.

At first glance, this could look like a nice marketing strategy for your business. But glancing a little closer, let's pay attention to some of the smaller details. One notable thing is that there are many examples of women posted on this page who appear to be different individuals. There is no clear distinction as to who the owner of the page is.

We try to keep things family friendly around here, but there's no denying that beautiful women attract attention on social media. This post depicts 2 beautiful women dancing content that typically resonates with audiences on Instagram. We are going to investigate the like count on this content. Some digging revealed that this post only has 33 likes. Some quick math reveals that this person has an engagement ratio of about .18%. This is very low for an influencer and is an indicator that this person's following is not organic or real.

I’m a fake influencer, of course none of my friends are tagging me.

The next thing we're going to look at is how many photos or videos is this person tagged in? Legitimate accounts typically have friends that are family or close acquaintances and will tag them in posts. This could be a little misleading for some business pages since they may not have as many tags. Someone having tags is a sign of positive social proof and should be taken as a sign their following may be legitimate.

Our example account is not tagged in any photos despite having almost 18,000 followers. I think it's safe to assume that this account is not legitimate, but we will move on to other metrics you can use to judge if an account is all cap. Genuine influencers will typically be tagged in posts from fan pages and their followers.

I’m a fake influencer, of course my best comment is 3 fire emojis.

Next, we are going to analyze another one of their posts and go straight for the comment section. We are looking for comments that reflect the content that is being posted. Bots leave comments such as just emojis or generic “beautiful” or “you look great” messages. Comments tailored towards the subject area of the content are proof of human activity.  I think it is safe to say that this account is just posting pictures of random attractive women and they're following is completely bought.

I’m a fake influencer, of course I’m hash tagging random stuff.

The next thing we're going to do is go to the person's post and look at their use of hashtags. Using a lot of hashtags can be a red flag but is not always an indicator of a fake profile. We want to consider what the hashtags are. If the hashtags pertain to the content they are posting, chances are their use is legitimate. However, if we dig into the hashtags and find a bunch of shady hashtags that people typically use to get exposure without an organic following, chances are the account is cap. Examples of hashtags like this are #followforfollow and other hashtags like this which only serve the purpose of attracting attention from bots. I personally do use a lot of hashtags on my posts, and I don't run a spam account. However, all my hashtags will be relevant to my content. Anyone using malicious hashtags likely does not have a large organic following.

I’m a fake influencer with 100k on Insta, of course my X account only has 23 followers.

The next thing to look for will be links to other social media pages, the influencer controls. Influencers are rarely low. Field to one platform, so you should find their present spread out across other social media websites. Observe their following on these websites. It should. Show some similarities to their following on Instagram. If you find them to have very low following counts on other platforms, they may have an illegitimate following on Instagram. Look for links to other social media platforms on their Instagram, such as X, formerly known as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or threads. Perform the same strategies on these social media pages and look for organic engagement.

 

I’m a fake influencer, of course I gained 20k overnight, stop hating.

The next technique that we can use to figure out if an account is buying followers is searching for unnatural follower growth. Unfortunately, Instagram does not offer us any insights into when the user accumulated their followers, so we must rely on 3rd party tools to do this. Instagrams API is not cheap and as a result many of these tools are not free to use. If you plan to hire an influencer soon, one of these reports is akin to a Carfax report on a car before buying. Do not hire an influencer without doing your due diligence first. Period.

We are not currently sponsored by any of the products we are going to recommend.

The first tool I am going to recommend is Phlanx.com Engagement Calculator.

This tool is free and allows you to enter a user's Instagram handle and the API will search through their posts and figure out their engagement percentage. An account that has an engagement score of less than .1% is likely a fake account. This means they have a ton of followers who do not engage with their content. Even if these followers are legitimate, they likely are not interested in the things that this person is posting.

Even accounts that do not have a lot of followers will pass this test if their followers are legitimate.

The next tool we are going to recommend is Fame Audit

While this service is not free, it only costs $1.00 per report, and if you are hiring someone to promote your business, that is a very low cost to pay to find out if they're legitimate. Hopefully, you don't need to pay to figure out if the account is legitimate, but this may be a last hope if the person has passed all the earlier checks. This software should allow you to determine at which moment in time the account accumulated all their followers. If you see all their followers came in a certain short period of time You can assume that they likely bought followers. This information is not free, but it is very valuable in judging if an account is legitimate.

This software does have a competitor that may be a little bit better, but since they start at 399 a month, I've decided to exclude them from this blog article as unaffordable solution.

 You’re not about to get scammed, of course you’re going to save our checklist.

Hopefully you now understand the need to conduct a detailed analysis of engagement patterns, follower growth, and content quality before deciding to pay an online influencer. As a small business owner marketer, we know it can be overwhelming to perform this research on your own and that is why we have provided you with a checklist to aid you in this as well as offering our personal aid. If you are planning to enhance your marketing strategy by bringing on social media influencers, you need to do your due diligence to ensure they are legitimate before handing over any cash. We have built out this checklist for you that you can use to ensure the people you are paying to promote your brand are who they say they are. Clickficks is always readily available to help you decide if an influencer is legitimate or not if you need help. We recommend sharing this checklist with friends and family to ensure they are not getting duped by these fake influencers.

  

I'm Your Next-Door Celeb, of course You've Never Seen Me with Actual People.

Not going to bore you with an unnecessarily long conclusion. Hopefully you've learned a little bit about how to maximize your return on investment and safeguard brand integrity when investing in social media influencers. I hate it if I had to be the bearer of bad news and tell you that your favorite influencer is fake, but I'd rather you hear from me than your audience. Now get out and tell your friends and family what you learned about the influencer down the street with a million followers that seems to never hang around any friends. I wish you the best in marketing and promoting your business. Clickficks is always around and ready to service your digital marketing and web development needs.

 

I'm Done Teaching, of course You're Now a Fake Influencer Detective.