How to Tell If an Instagram Account Has Fake Followers

In this article you’ll learn how to tell if an Instagram account has fake followers.

I’ve been doing a lot of Instagram influencer marketing lately.

And as part of that, I’ve had to develop ways to predict how well an Instagram shoutout will go.

But before I get into that, let me give you some context.

What is Instagram Influencer Marketing?

Instagram influencer marketing is an easy way to get your product in front of a large audience.

The way it usually works is like this:

You DM someone with a page of at least 100,000 followers in your niche and ask if they offer shoutouts. It’s a numbers game, so you have to message plenty of Instagram pages.

Negotiate with those who respond to your DM.

Ask about their prices.

Alternatively, you can also buy Instagram influencer shoutouts from a marketplace like Shoutcart.

But in my experience you’ll get better results if you DM influencers personally.

Once you’ve agreed on a price and sent over the money, you’ll have to provide the Influencer with a photo or video and a caption. This is going to be your advertisement.

Sometimes it also makes sense to send a free product to your Influencer and have them pose with it.

This is especially effective when you’re working with personal brands and social media celebrities who have big followings.

Let’s say an Instagram influencer has 500,000 followers.

That’s a lot of eyeballs in one place.

If you’ve got a relevant product you can make a lot of money from shoutouts. I know a 17-year old who made over $29,000 in about two weeks with Instagram influencers.

This stuff works.

But you have to do your “due diligence” first.

How to Tell If an Instagram Account Has Fake Followers or Not

Getting good results with Instagram influencer marketing takes some preparation.

A common newbie mistake is to get sidetracked by the absolute size of an Instagram account. It’s easy to get excited when you see a page has 100,000 or 500,000 followers.

But the absolute size of an Instagram page is almost irrelevant.

It has nothing to do with how successful your Instagram shoutout will be.

So what should you look out for?

Fake followers.

There’s a whole bunch of factors that determine how successful your shoutout will be, but the first and most important factor is to reach real people.

1) Average Likes and Comments per Post

Make sure each post is getting a decent amount of likes and comments.

• A page with 100,000 followers or more should get at least 1,000 likes and 10-30 comments per post
• A page with 500,000 or more followers should get multiple thousand likes and 30-100 comments per post
• A page with 2,000,000 followers or more should get at least 10,000-30,000 likes and multiple hundreds or even thousands of comments per post

These are just some ballpark figures.

There is no “perfect ratio”.

Make sure you don’t overanalyse the average number of likes and comments a page gets.

Just stay away from pages with millions of followers with an average number of ten likes and zero comments. These are dead pages or pages with fake followers.

How to tell if an Instagram account has fake followers?

Look for authentic engagement.

2) Check If Real People are Commenting

At this point you’ve made sure a page is getting enough likes and comments.

But you have to take things one step further.

In a second step, you have to scroll through some recent posts and look at who is commenting.

A lot of Instagram influencers use engagement groups to get fake comments. This makes it appear like their posts are getting a ton of engagement, but it’s not from real people.

So what are engagement groups?

Engagement groups are groups of Instagram influencers who all comment on each others recent posts. This helps their posts hit the explore tab and it makes their posts appear more popular to people like you and me, who are interested in buying a paid promotion.

The main way most Instagram influencers make money is through sponsored posts.

That’s the product they sell.

Obviously, they are going to do anything they can to make their account appear attractive.

And the way they do this is by boosting their number of followers, likes and comments (oftentimes by using bots, engagement groups and other methods).

So how can you tell if an Instagram account has fake followers?

Read the comments.

Click on the names of people who comment and look if they are real people.

How can you tell if followers are fake?

• If they follow thousands of people but have less than 10 followers and 10 posts (these are bots that have been programmed to follow thousands of people and auto-comment on posts)
• If they have tens of thousands or more followers (these are other Instagram influencers from an engagement group trying to boost the engagement of the post)
• If they have between 10-5,000 followers and their profile is private chances are good these are real people (most Instagram profiles are private and have a low number of followers)

But our “due diligence” isn’t completed at this point.

3) Look for Abnormal Follower Statistics

Some Instagram influencers buy a bunch of followers to boost their audience.

Of course, all of these purchased followers are fake.

How to tell if an Instagram account has fake followers? Check the historic follower growth. Look out for big spikes of followers directly followed by consistent daily loss of followers.

This type of research can be done with SocialBlade.

Above you can see an example of what account stats shouldn’t look like.

This account is likely purchasing fake followers.

How do you know?

First of all, this account isn’t seeing any consistent growth. People aren’t organically following this page. Instead, the page is losing 3,810 followers per month on average.

This is not a “healthy” Instagram account.

Take a look at these stats.

This is a page that’s growing consistently.

Sure, the owner of the page could still be buying fake followers.

But the follower behavior of this page looks a lot more natural and organic.

In fact, I’ve bought a promotion from the page above for $20 and made $500 profit.

This is how to tell if an Instagram account has fake followers.

Use the three methods explained in this article to do your “due diligence” before buying a shoutout from an Instagram influencer. This will help you prevent a lot of headache.