Influencer marketing continues to be a powerful strategy for brands aiming to connect with their target audiences. However, the rise of fake followers and fraudulent engagement poses significant challenges.
It is estimated that 45% of Instagram influencers take part in obtaining fake followers. This alarming statistic underscores the importance of verifying the authenticity of an influencer's audience before collaboration.
In this article, we'll delve into why they are a problem on social media platforms, exploring both manual and tool-based methods on how to check for fake followers. By understanding and utilizing these metrics and tools, brands can ensure their marketing efforts reach genuine audiences, maximizing return on investment and maintaining brand integrity.
Fake followers are inactive or fake social media accounts, including bots, that are usually created to mass-follow other social media profiles for money. Unfortunately, this is a growing business in social media marketing. Both brands and influencers may buy followers to increase their reputation, believing that a larger audience will enhance their market perception.
However, this works exactly the opposite way. Building an audience with fake followers can be detected through various methods we'll discuss later on. Once exposed, it can ruin the brand or influencer’s image. Additionally, it lowers engagement since these followers won’t interact with their content.
Therefore, fake followers represent a risk for brands on both ways:
Let’s explore the main reasons for both cases!
It's inevitable to get some fake accounts following you since they are likely paid to follow accounts randomly. However, this can affect your reputation, as you want to avoid other accounts noticing that a large part of your audience consists of these fake accounts. That’s why it’s important to conduct manual and frequent checks and clean up fake followers on your Instagram page or other social media platforms, to ensure you have an organic and engaged audience.
Engaging with influencers who have fake followers will make you waste your budget since they will be promoting your product to fake accounts such as bots and inactive accounts.
That’s why it’s essential to audit the amount of fake followers an influencer has before partnering up with them.
Let's discuss the different ways you can identify fake followers for both your own brand’s account and the influencers you’re planning to engage with!
A fake follower check is a method used to analyze the authenticity of a social media account’s audience. It helps identify followers that are inactive, bots, or created solely to inflate follower counts. These fake accounts usually don’t engage meaningfully with content and can distort an influencer's true reach and performance.
Running a fake follower check is essential when evaluating potential influencers to partner with, as it ensures your brand’s message reaches real people who are likely to interact and convert. These checks can be done manually by reviewing suspicious patterns or with specialized tools that offer detailed reports on audience credibility, engagement quality, and more.
The engagement rate (ER) calculates the overall interaction the audience has with the influencer’s content. It measures the amount of shares, clicks, saves, likes and comments on a social media post. If an influencer has a large amount of fake or mass followers within their audience, the engagement rate will be unusually low, as these accounts are mostly inactive. Therefore, calculating their engagement rate can provide some insights about their audience composition and behavior.
To calculate the engagement rate percentage, you can follow the formula below, or you can just use our free engagement rate calculator.
Engagement Rate=(Total Engagements/Total Followers or Impressions )×100
What average ER would be suspicious for having a large amount of fake followers? It’s hard to establish a benchmark since it depends on each niche or category and the size of the creators. However, our records show that a solid average ER varies from 1% to 2%, depending on the influencer's following size. Typically, we expect a bit higher ERs from smaller accounts. Therefore, an ER between 0% and 0.5% could be suspicious, and it’s best to try to avoid such accounts.
You can manually try to spot fake followers within the influencer’s audience by clicking on some of their followers profiles. Some potential signs which indicate fake accounts include:
Scan through some of their posts and take a look at the comments on them. In the current business of fake followers, it's quite common to buy them to comment on posts to increase engagement. These can be identified by repetitive and generic comments that don’t completely relate to the influencer’s content or are not personal.
If you see a majority of these types of comments, such as “Great post” or only emojis, you can click on a few of them to double-check if these profiles show signs of being fake accounts by following the steps described above.
When an influencer buys fake followers, we can typically see a sudden spike in their follower growth rate, followed by a quick drop, instead of a more consistent growth over time.
An influencer might have rapid organic growth if any of their content goes viral, but this is usually followed by a more stable period instead of a marked up-and-down pattern. Therefore, it may be good to look at this rate over the last 3 to 6 months to notice any suspicious increases in their follower base.
To identify fake followers, brands and marketers typically analyze a few essential metrics:
Different social media platforms require unique approaches when detecting fake followers:
Doing a manual search can be time-consuming, especially for macro influencers, and it is hard to scale if you’re working with a large number of influencers.
Here are some of the most effective tools brands use to audit influencer audiences:
There are multiple tools available to help brands detect fake followers and assess audience credibility—each offering different features and levels of insight. However, Influencer Hero takes the lead as one of the most comprehensive and user-friendly solutions in the market.
Influencer Hero is an all-in-one influencer marketing platform designed to streamline every stage of your campaign. From identifying influencers using advanced filters to managing outreach and tracking performance, the platform makes your workflow more efficient.
Our software identifies four types of followers within an influencer’s audience:
Both mass followers and suspicious accounts are perceived by brands as red flags for account authenticity and credibility.
According to the followers types’ segmentation, Influencer Hero’s analytics also offers a percentage of audience credibility. Though it is hard to establish a parameter of credibility you should consider for working with an influencer, the median audience credibility for influencers is around 60 to 75%, depending on their followers size. Our influencer marketing software will provide insight not only on the percentage but the range in which this is normal for the market.
However, it is suggested that you make a decision based not only on fake followers % but on the overall picture. Take a look at other metrics such as engagement rate and audience demographics to see if it is worthy to invest in them.
In addition to the full version, you can access our free fake follower check, which allows you to audit Instagram profiles and get quick insights about their audience's quality and other important KPIs. This will ensure that you connect with influencers who have genuine followers and authentic engagement.
Check out this article to learn more about how Influencer Hero detects fake followers.
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It's probably useless to partner with an influencer who has +1M followers and can get you wide reach while 70% of their audience is located in Japan, if you have a store located in the United States which only ships products there. It’s essential to ensure you are targeting the right audience, by analyzing every detail of the influencer’s audience.
This includes audience gender split and age demographics. These factors ensure that you reach precisely the people within your target audience. For example, if you are a maternity brand selling baby products, it would be essential to collaborate with an influencer whose primary audience consists of females aged 25-45.
Our tool provides a percentage of fake followers and its average across market, regarding influencers from the same size. As discussed, it’s essential to make sure that you’re partnering with influencers who have an authentic and engaging audience.
All marketers are eager to estimate how much an influencer could sell, as ultimately all marketing strategies come down to sales. Our tool will assist you in predicting estimated sales and EMV, according to their previous performance and overall KPI’s.
As we saw previously, follower growth during the last few months is one indicator of audience credibility. Additionally, it is one of the main metrics that correlates with conversion, as an active and increasing audience will impact the campaign’s performance.
Brands rely on fake follower audits to ensure their marketing dollars are well spent. Here’s how:
Avoiding fake followers is essential for maintaining credibility—both for your brand’s own accounts and the influencers you collaborate with. Regularly checking for fake followers helps ensure your content reaches real people and that your marketing budget is well spent.
You can manually review profiles or use key metrics like engagement rate to spot suspicious activity. However, for deeper insights, influencer marketing tools offer detailed audience analysis. Try our free fake follower checker and scanner tool to evaluate authenticity and make smarter partnership decisions.
Fake followers can harm your account by lowering engagement rates, harming potential partnerships, and reducing overall credibility.
Yes, engaging with influencers who have fake followers can waste your budget and promote your products to inactive accounts, resulting in lower ROI.
You can manually spot fake followers by analyzing engagement rates, reviewing follower profiles for suspicious signs, and monitoring follower growth rates for unusual spikes.
Yes, there are influencer marketing tools like Influencer Hero that provide comprehensive analytics on an influencer’s audience, including demographics and credibility metrics.
Metrics such as engagement rate, follower growth rate, audience demographics, and credibility percentage are important factors to consider when evaluating an influencer’s audience.
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