The best way to think of a fake Instagram follower is as another person (or bot) that follows you on Instagram. They might not be a real person, but they follow you, which can help you get more likes and comments on your Instagram photos in the beginning. However, they don’t usually interact with your posts, which means you can’t grow an organic following if you have too many fake followers.
What’s a Fake Instagram Account? And How They Can Hurt You
Social media is full of fake accounts, but Instagram is a particularly hot spot for this type of identity theft. A fake account might look identical to an authentic one, but a different person runs it, and it’s used to scam you. It might make your company look more influential than it is, or it might be part of a larger effort to hack into your account and steal your personal information.
The average person has around 300-500 Instagram followers. That’s great, but having more followers is always good if you’re looking to grow your account. However, there’s a downside to having more followers – it’s called “fake followers.” Fake followers are accounts that can do more harm than good. They can ruin your reputation, affect your engagement, and tank your relationship with Instagram.
Reasons How Fake Followers Create Problems For you
Don’t Engage With Your posts:
You can do several things to help keep track of your Instagram account and make sure you have real followers who engage with your posts. If you want to ensure that your account is not full of fake followers, you need to take a proactive approach to keep track of your engagement rate and your follower’s activity.
There are many ways to tell if Instagram users aren’t real. While it may take some time to identify all the patterns for a given fake Instagram account, there’s one strategy that’s pretty fool-proof: conversation. Even if you’re only using Instagram as a public platform to share your photos, you should still stay off the direct messaging function to stay safe.
They Hurt Your Credibility
Not all followers on Instagram are real. Many people have got fake followers. Several characters buy fake followers on Instagram. These fake followers are usually bots. Bots are nothing but accounts that are created to look like real people. People can buy these fake followers on the black market at cheap rates. Now, these fake followers are making you lose your reliability.
They Can Get You In Crisis With Instagram – And Even Outlawed
Being famous on Instagram can get you in a lot of trouble – even banned from the service altogether. In mid-March, Instagram announced a crackdown on fake followers, following years of reports of celebrities buying up followers and using bots to promote their posts.
Instagram accounts with large numbers of fake followers (i.e., those with a higher number of followers than people they are following) will be flagged and eventually banned from the service on the grounds of violating its terms of service.
Hurt Your Marketing Budget
If you manage an Instagram account, you know that it is imperative to get as many followers as possible. There are many methods to relinquish out to potential followers, from hashtags and contests to paid advertising. Still, it is always nice to have a healthy base of followers before starting any marketing campaigns.
(It is always better to have 100 followers that genuinely like your page than to have 1000 that may not have any interest in your business or your content.) Sadly, several spam accounts are designed to trick you into following them, and then they spam your followers.
Fake followers are becoming more of an issue on Instagram, so it’s important to identify them. Here are a few ways you can do that:
- Check their followers count – If a person has only a few posts but thousands of followers, they’re probably fake.
- Check the ratio between followers and posts – Real Instagram users often post multiple times a day.
- Check the ratio between followers and views – Real Instagram users get total views, which means they get real likes and comments.
- Check the engagement rate – If a person’s engagement is high (likes and comments compared to followers), they’re probably fake.
- Check the date of their last post – Most Instagram users.
5 Ways to Spot Fake Instagram Followers
There are a few ways to spot a fake Instagram follower. One of the best ways is to keep a close eye on the follower-to-following ratio. A normal account should have a higher following number than the following number because people usually follow others before they are followed back. If your follower-to-following ratio is off, then it’s a good idea to investigate further.
Calculate Their Engagement Rate
Instagram users can quickly spot fake followers, as they aren’t tagged with an engagement rate. To see how many fake followers a user has, multiply their follower count by their engagement rate. If their engagement rate is lower than 40%, they’re probably not getting as many real followers as they think they are.
Check Their Followers
If you’ve ever become one of the many victims of an Instagram scam, you already know that following and unfollowing people can be an emotional roller coaster. But why is this? And how can you determine if someone is following you for the wrong reasons? To answer those questions, it’s important to understand why some people follow back others. The best way to begin is by looking at your own Instagram profile and the people who follow you.
Please read The Comments They Make
Instagram has long been known as a great way to connect with other people, but some folks are not who they seem. You can identify fake Instagram followers by using a service called Instagress. Instagram allows you to send automated comments to people who you follow and have followed you in the past.
An analysis of Instagram comments is a great way to spot fake followers on Instagram. Since fake accounts typically comment on photos with spammy text in a calculated manner, you can just read their comments and search for the commonalities. Those include:
- Generic comments like “Great pic!”, “Nice!”, “Good to see you!”
- Commented on photos of popular Instagrammers.
- Inconsistent number of posts and photos (i.e., follows three people and has three followers, follows 27 people and has 27 followers, etc.)
- Posts nonsensical or unrelated comments
- Posts nonsensical or unrelated comments
Evaluate Their Profile (Bio, Photo, Username)
To ensure that our social media feeds don’t get filled with fakes, scams, and spam accounts, it’s worth knowing how to spot a fake. Fake accounts are easy to spot, and you can evaluate anyone’s profile by looking at their username, photo, and bio.
If you’re new to Instagram, you may not realize that the number of followers someone has doesn’t mean anything. The key to finding real, honest, quality followers is evaluating their profile (username, bio, photo). Copy-and-pasting the same text on your profile is a dead giveaway that will make your followers wonder if you are a bot.
And if you are using a stock photo, people will think you are hiding something. It is the easiest way to spot fake Instagram followers.
Conclusion
You might be wondering why your Instagram account has been getting thousands of followers, but the engagement doesn’t seem to follow. It’s probably because many of those followers are fake. (Fake followers are quite common on Instagram, and there are even websites that exist to help people buy them.)
If you want your Instagram account to be successful, it’s important to know how to spot fake followers and protect yourself from purchasing fake followers.
