Influencers have an easy route to growing their platform: buying followers. While a massive following seems essential to attract good campaign results, in reality, brands should prioritize social media authenticity if they seek to achieve genuine connections in their influencer campaigns.
In 2021, one in four Instagram influencers had purchased at least 15% of their following. Looking ahead, VPNRanks predicts that by the end of 2025, the number of fake followers on Instagram will have increased by 60%, while TikTok could see approximately 950 million fake accounts.
This means that brands should take immediate action and adopt tools to identify and combat inauthentic activity on social media. Recently, the use of AI can be an additional tool to help brands detect fake followers and engagement. For now, we can take use of the following steps to run a fake follower audit on Instagram and TikTok:
The most important thing to note is that working with unreliable influencers can significantly impact your campaign’s ROI. Artificially inflating key metrics that don’t reflect real connections or results with your products is one of the main factors that negatively impact ROI in influencer marketing. Here you can read our investigation about how key metrics impact ROI in a negative way.
In other terms, partnering with these influencers can ultimately result in lower-than-expected engagement metrics and interaction with the brand. As a consequence, both the brand’s and the influencer’s credibility ends up compromised.
For this reason, conducting a fake follower audit is especially important for businesses and marketers who rely on authentic engagement and want to ensure that their influencer campaigns are truly worth the investment.
Moreover, working with trustworthy influencers gives you more reliable results for monitoring and reporting, and helps build a long-term growth marketing strategy from genuine metrics.
You can only audit public profiles. For that, we recommend collecting the correct handles of the influencers you’re interested in working with, and making sure we’re able to access all posts and followers without needing to follow them to view the content.
If the account is private, you can either ask them to temporarily switch to public for the audit or request some media kit screenshots on their part to check analytics directly from their profile.
Engagement Rate analyzes how active an influencer’s audience is with their content.
You can check this by analyzing likes and comments under posts. If there is a significant dissonance between the number of followers and the interaction, it may be an indicator. On TikTok, make sure to also take into account the number of shares and duets.
You can manually calculate an account’s engagement rate with this formula:
For Instagram: (Likes + Comments+Shares) ÷ Followers × 100 = Engagement Rate (%)
For TikTok: (Likes + Comments + Shares+Duets) ÷ Followers × 100 = Engagement Rate (%)
Interpretation of results:
By comparing multiple posts, from recent and older dates, you can detect and track inconsistencies and make correlations between the quality of the content, the topics treated and more. Inconsistent metrics are reliable indicators, because unless an account goes viral, it tends to grow steadily as the influencer posts.
We recommend using online engagement rate calculators, like the one we provide, to automate this step. In these cases, tools can easily show sudden spikes in followers or engagement that can be used to compare engagement rates over time.
Be in alert for the following signs:
These fake accounts drive artificial engagement with the following methods:
So, an organic and genuine comment section would have the following interactions:
Apart from making sure that the influencer’s followers match your target audience, a mismatch can be an indicator of bough followers, especially if the influencer makes content marked by their location, culture and language.
For that, you’ll want to check the country and region percentage and distribution of the influencer’s audience, making sure it matches with the markets and target audiences you want to reach. For some products, it’s also useful to check the age or the gender distribution as well.
For this step, you can request their media kit, screenshots of their analytics straight from Instagram Insights or their TikTok analytics and use some online tools for more precise data.
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As mentioned before, an account grows steadily over time, matching the influencer’s posting rhythm. The only exception to this would be if a video of the influencer becomes viral, but you would also see that inflation reflected on engagement and interactions.
For those reasons, a very accurate detection method would be to review if there is a sudden spike in follower count, especially without any viralcontent or giveaway to justify the growth.
As a consequence, you’ll also be able to foresee declines in engagement rate after the sudden spike, and general inconsistent grow graph or follower fluctuations over time.
Influencer Hero is an all-in-one influencer marketing software that helps tackle and organize all areas of influencer marketing campaigns, from the onboarding to maintaining relationships with influencers.
On the website, they offer a Free Influencer Authenticity Checker Tool For Instagram and a Fake Follower Scanner Tool For Instagram and for TikTok.
How to Use: Enter an influencer’s handle, and the tool will generate a report on audience authenticity, suspicious activity, and engagement quality. You can also download the chrome extension to access analytics of profiles while you navigate.
HypeAuditor is a leading AI-powered tool specializing in influencer fraud detection. It provides deep analytics on fake followers, audience quality, and engagement authenticity across Instagram and TikTok.
How to Use: Input the influencer’s username to receive a detailed report on fake followers, engagement credibility, and follower demographics.
FakeCheck.co is a quick and easy-to-use tool for identifying fake Instagram followers. It evaluates an influencer’s audience by detecting unusual activity, such as low engagement rates compared to follower count. The platform assigns a risk score to help brands determine whether an influencer’s following is organic or artificial.
How to Use: Enter the Instagram handle to receive a risk score that highlights suspicious followers and engagement fraud.
Modash offers a free online tool for auditing fake followers that supports both Instagram and TikTok. It offers real-time data on audience authenticity, spotting potential bot activity and fake engagement patterns. With its detailed reports, brands can ensure their influencer collaborations are based on genuine engagement rather than misleading metrics.
How to Use: Enter an influencer’s username to access data on follower credibility, suspicious activity, and bot detection.
Socialauditor.io focuses on Instagram and TikTok audits, helping brands detect fake followers and assess audience quality. It identifies inactive or suspicious accounts following an influencer and provides insights into engagement consistency.
The platform also highlights potential red flags, such as high follower counts with low engagement, which often indicate purchased or bot followers.
How to Use: Choose whether you’re analyzing a TikTok or an Instagram account, add the username, register, and the tool will generate a breakdown of real vs. fake followers, inactive accounts, and suspicious activity.
An alternative is to perform the follower audit manually or by cross-checking the results with tools. We recommend paying attention to the following metrics:
After gathering the results for each influencer, we recommend reporting and basing your decisions on your campaign’s strategy and desired outcomes.
Sometimes, working with a profile that has a slightly higher fake follower score is acceptable, depending on your campaign objectives and structure. While it’s not ideal, that influencer might still have a strong real following who are highly engaged and continue to interact with their content. As a result, they may still deliver clicks and conversions despite their inflated following.
It’s also fine if you’re looking to run a campaign targeting niche markets, products, or audiences. These types of influencers can help increase reach and visibility.
But ultimately, if the goal is brand awareness or you’re paying a fixed fee, prioritize authentic engagement and follower quality over just reach.
As influencer marketing continues to grow, brands that implement routine audits and choose genuine creators will see better long-term results, stronger ROI, and partnerships built on trust rather than inflated numbers. Because as we talked about, fake followers can impact ROI in a very significant way.
A fake follower audit is the process of analyzing a social media account to identify followers who are likely fake, inactive, or bots. The audit helps brands and marketers evaluate the quality of an influencer's audience to ensure their campaigns are reaching real, engaged users rather than inflated numbers.
Auditing influencers before a campaign helps prevent wasted budgets on creators with low-quality or fake audiences. It ensures your brand message reaches genuine followers, improves campaign performance, and protects your brand’s reputation from being associated with inflated metrics or spammy engagement.
Yes. A small percentage of fake followers is normal for almost every account, especially large ones. What matters most is the overall engagement rate, content quality, and whether their real audience matches your target demographic. If an influencer consistently drives results, a few fake followers shouldn’t be a deal-breaker.
Several tools offer free versions, including FakeCheck.co, Modash, and Influencer Hero. Each provides key insights like fake follower percentages, engagement rates, and growth patterns. While free versions give a strong overview, premium versions usually offer more in-depth metrics and exportable reports.
It’s best to run an audit before onboarding any influencer. For long-term collaborations, consider doing an audit every few months or before each new campaign to ensure their audience quality hasn’t declined over time. This is especially important in industries where trust and authenticity directly impact sales or brand perception.
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