Social media accounts with fake followers make up the majority of influencer accounts. That’s according to A Good Company, who uncovered a cheating scam worth almost $1B.
Hype Auditor found that from 7,000 UK influencers analyzed, about half the followers of influencers with up to 20,000 followers are “low-quality”.
Almost every account has fake followers, unwanted or not. Sometimes accounts created by bots or hackers will follow you on social. It’s unlikely you’ll get any interaction from these “users”. The result is a drop in your account's overall user engagement rate.
Note that fake Instagram followers are not the same as ghost followers, who sign up and follow other accounts but never interact. If you’re looking to improve the interaction rate statistic on your account then you could consider removing ghost followers. Again, this is a choice you need to make. Not all your fans want to interact with you and many are happy just to read your posts. Removing ghost followers could potentially remove some of your biggest fans.
Buying followers is a common practice among certain bloggers and especially among influencers. You might think this is harmless enough. What’s the problem with spending your own money to make your follower group look a bit more impressive than just your mum and your friends from high school? Nothing. But you could also look at it this way: if you get paid by companies to promote products and this payment is based purely on your follower count, you are committing fraud.
How to Check Fake Followers on Instagram
If you’re a marketing agency, travel blogger, food blogger, fashion blogger, or social media influencer and you’re wondering how many of your Instagram followers are real and how many are fake, the following tools will help you understand the lie of the land.
If you represent an agency and are looking for influencers and bloggers with real followers, active engagement, and genuine readers on Instagram and TikTok, run your potential partners through these ‘fake followers checks'.
HypeAuditor
HypeAuditor is one of the best tools to check real followers on Instagram.
The tool also offers information on the influencers' topics, location, audience location, and the important metrics: engagement rate and authentic engagement.
HypeAudior has a great free plan which gives you data on how many fake followers any account has. The paid tool offers a wealth of insights and is a great first choice of fake Instagram account checker.
Analisa
Analisa is a tool for bloggers and agencies. It lets you check the follower demographics of an account, discover the “follower authenticity”, find out how engaged the audience is and compare with other influencers.
There are also historical data and tools like Influencer Mapping and Tagged Relationships. The hashtags analytics tool, which is free, is very useful and will weed out the fake accounts from the real deals. Analisa now has a TikTok analysis tool so you can run a fake followers audit on both platforms.
TrendHERO
A relatively new addition to the list of platforms is TrendHERO. With a beautiful and easy-to-use interface, this tool offers very detailed information about any Instagram account. There's even an ad post database so you can view the ads your competitors are publishing.
TrendHERO also allows you to discover Instagram accounts based on natural language searches.
Use the filters to find accounts based on the number of posts, follower growth, comments, engagement rate, and more. Check fake followers easily with this professional social media auditing tool and followed checker.
Promoty
Promoty's smart system evaluates the credibility of an influencer based on the most important metrics.
Find the right influencers, keep them organized, monitor content, and save time on Instagram influencer marketing by weeding out the accounts with fake followers.
Promoty has built tools to make identifying fake followers easier, faster, and more cost-effective.
Get a detailed report of social media influencers worldwide, including their followers' growth over time, audience demographics, and influencer credibility. View their social media metrics, influencer posts, similar profiles, notable followers, and much more
FakeCheck
FakeCheck uses engagement as a measure of an accounts fake follower count.
Fakecheck says that bloggers or influencers use their service to “…ensure they have the highest possible level of social engagement so that their promotional or paid posts return the greatest benefit to clients…”
The tool offers a few free searches and after that, you will need to pay a fee. Check fake followers to improve your influencer marketing with this fake follower detection tool.
Upfluence
Open a social media profile in your browser and instantly view an influencer's profile performance metrics & statistics as well as contact information in one dashboard.
The Upfluence Chrome plugin provides comprehensive insights for Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, and even blogs.
Upfluence helps you find influencers with real social media following by providing a follower analysis (% of real vs. fake) and follower demographic data for each account you check. This is a trustworthy Instagram bot checker tool.
And the best part is that the Chrome Extension is 100% free.
SocialBlade
Social Blade offers insights into YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Twitch, and Twitter accounts. It also covers networks and platforms that no other tool does.
It's a great Instagram audit tool that you can use to spot fake followers on your own accounts and also to discover and verify authentic influencers to work with.
The free plan does pretty much everthing you might need but Social Blade offers paid plans that allow you to bookmark and track accounts. You can also get access to historical data and deeper insights.