How to detect the use of fake followers on Instagram

Buying fake followers on Instagram is something that is very present. In a world where influencers are making a lot of money a lot of services have started to appear designed to detect fake followers in the accounts of the most popular instagramers. Companies are investing large amounts of money in and one of the most used methods today is Instagram influencers.

An influencer is nothing more than a person who is followed by thousands of people (or millions).This means that this person can create trends or influence the decisions of possible buyers which makes them valuable to brands. It is therefore that buying followers is something that makes sense, since many people believe that the more followers an account has, the more chances they will have of receiving a good sum of money for sponsoring a specific brand. And this is partly true.

Are there ways to detect fake followers on Instagram?

Luckily, nowadays, there are tools, agencies and even several points that one can analyze to detect fake followers on Instagram Locate an account that has many fake followers, bots and bought is not complicated at all. Instagram works every day to eliminate fake accounts, but the truth is that its results are far from being able to identify all these accounts and eliminate them.

The damage that fake followers can do to brands is very great, as they could be paying campaigns to people who don't really have the number of followers expected and the payment for the campaign could be a waste of money. What's more, even without having bought followers, it is common for all large accounts to have a large number of non-real followers such as bots, etc. A person who buys a lot of followers is cheating himself. The problem is when she manages to deceive others as well.

How to identify an account with fake followers?

There are several points to analyze to identify an account of this type:

Weird Numbers: If an account follows more people than they follow, they receive very few likes on posts (fewer than 1.5-3% of his followers) and does not upload too many posts, this is an account that will hardly influence people.Influencers are generally followed by many more people than the people they follow. Some follow hundreds of accounts and are followed by millions of people. A normal instagramer could follow 1:1 but less than that will be a fraud. Also be wary of very high engagements (unless you are a very famous person and the interactions make sense). Typically, an account with 100,000 followers receives between 1,500 and 3,000 likes on their posts.
Random Activity: Real influencers often interact on platforms. If you see accounts that have a lot of interaction some days and very little on others, you are dealing with a fraud or a person who will not influence anyone. Also pay attention to how they grow. Real influencers grow steadily and not in spikes.
None Stories: Instagrammers usually upload a lot of stories to Instagram. It may depend a bit on the type of niche they attack but they are usually active people who pamper their followers.
Study the quality of the content: review the publications, through these you will see if there is quality of content, if the comments respond to the publications , if the followers are "normal" people interested in the product that the influencer offers, etc.

You could even ask an influencer for statistics when you want to work with him, the most serious ones usually offer you a "real" report of his account so you can evaluate his account, audience, etc.

The 3 best tools to detect fake followers on Instagram

There are several tools to study, in a more precise way, the followers of influencers or instagramers.

Socialblade, a complete analysis of Instagram accounts

The first of the platforms is Socialblade, also used to measure youtubers for a long time. It is a free website that has payment reports that allow us to see Instagram accounts and other platforms. Simply enter the nick of the account (it must be public and company) and it will allow us to see the results and data about the account.

We will see the quality of the followers and statistics. We can compare “known” accounts to see the variations from the more normal ones. Sometimes a small influencer can have a very high quality of followers and vice versa.

IG Audit, to monitor the number of fake followers on an Instagram account

IG Audit is another tool, perfect for detecting fake followers on Instagram accounts. Just enter the nick and click the Go button to start analyze the account information What IG Audit does is sample a number of followers to devise a pattern, so it is advisable to do several analyzes since the sample is always random. The tool uses Artificial Intelligence to compile the statistics. A result of more than 50% real followers is usually an indicator of a "he althy" account.

We will see a report with different data:

Average Likes on posts and expected.
Mean of comments and expected.

Enter IG Audit through this link.

Hype Auditor, another tool to analyze Instagram accounts

Hype Auditor is a tool that combines the two previous ones. It is enough to enter the nick of an account and it will give us a lot of data. Among these data will be an assessment of the audience of the account (the higher, the better quality). It also indicates the percentage of real users and even other more complete data talking about the type of follower that the accounts have. In Hype Auditor you even get insights into growth, engagement, and other important insights

It is not known very well how it works but it only works for accounts with more than 1000 followers. It seems to be one of those reliable tools. If you want to try Hype Auditor enter here.

How to remove fake followers on Instagram?

If you want to improve engagement, the ideal is to reduce the number of fake followers or ghost followers (those real ones that don't interact).This will turn your account into a quality profile All those followers who have 0 followers, 0 publications, do not have a profile photo, follow many people but no one follows them go on etc. they are really “trash” followers.

To eliminate them, you can delete them by hand or use tools like Unfollow for Instagram on Android, which allows us to see these types of accounts and stop following themOn Instagram, quality will always be better than quantity and all those who say otherwise are trying to deceive themselves. It is true that in the past companies could sting a lot with the "number" of followers but little by little they analyze the accounts better and avoid this type of poor quality influencers in their budgets.