How to spot fake Instagram followers: Free Instagram Audit tools and fake followers check

Fake Instagram followers:- With the changing times, influencer marketing has risen to success. The first thing that anyone notices in an influencer account are their followers count.

But number the only parameter to trust these influencers? Well, no. As a business, thinking of collaborating with influencers on Instagram, you must not get bluffed by the high numbers.

As influencer marketing has been trending, many influencers have turned their way towards fake online following to drive attention towards their businesses. And at times, it becomes difficult to spot these accounts, having such fake followers.

With this article, we aim to throw light on everything you need to know about spotting fake Instagram followers. So, keep reading!!

Fake followers- What are they and where do they come from?

You can’t trust everything that you see on the internet and when it comes to social media, you need to be extra careful. Just because there are huge followers, that does not mean these accounts are trustworthy enough to be collaborated with.

These followers might not be real. In some cases, these have even turned out to be malicious and hacked the user’s account. 

So, what is the need for fake Instagram followers?

Fake followers are set up to maximize any account’s earning potential by increasing the mass following of any account in return for some amount of money. These accounts are mostly bots and inactive.

Also, they won’t provide any engagement on your Instagram posts. And even if they are active, they usually spread spam messages and comments.

Now coming to the second question- where do fake followers come from? Well, there are some apps available which allow you to expand the number of your followers through automatically liking and commenting on photos.

So, are fake followers worth your time?

Building your following based on fake following might pose certain risks to your account. Some of which are:

1. Wasting your money: Imagine you spent a genuine amount of money collaborating with any influencer only to find out they were promoting your brand’s content to bots and inactive accounts.
2. Decreasing the engagement: Since fake followers are inactive accounts, they are not going to interact with your content, which means your engagement value is going to drop. As a result, your account’s reach will decrease. 
3. Ruining your brand’s engagement: Imagine being exposed to the market as a business that follows poor tactics of social media to grow their business. Buying fake followers can shatter your brand’s image and there is a huge chance that people will start questioning the trust quotient of your brand which can damage the sales of your company.
4. Flooding your account with irrelevant content: You would not want your news feed to be flooded with trashy or spam content and this is exactly what you get when you buy followers being made up of fake accounts.

How to spot fake Instagram followers?

Spotting fake Instagram followers is not always easy. However, there are certain signs that you can look for to detect fake followers. Have a look, here:

A noticeable unbalanced ratio between the number of followers and followings: The best way to spot a fake account is to check the difference between the followers and following list. That could say a lot about the account.

Very little information about the profile: Usually, people mention themselves or their business in the bio section of Instagram. But the bots won’t do that.

Having less or no posts of their own: No post is a sign that the account is just there for increasing the followers count.

Significantly high or low engagement rate: Anyone who is active is sure to engage with your content. 

Irrelevant comments and posts: Generally, fake accounts post irrelevant stuff or comments.

But, you must know that even if an account shows all these signs, that does not mean it’s a fake account. So, you need to observe closely.

Having said that, brands that are looking to collaborate with influencers need to observe the genuine online reach of the influencers. 

Why are genuine Instagram followers important?

For any brand campaign to become successful, it is important that the followers don’t just see the content but engage with it too.

The main purpose of having a large number of followers on Instagram is to provide engagement on your posts or to increase the potential reach of your account. And this can be achieved when you have genuine followers in your account.

Fake followers are there just to increase the number. They won’t engage with your content, thereby reducing your reach and ultimately decreasing your online presence.   

How to do a fake followers audit?

It is important to do fake followers check on your Instagram account every six months. Now, you might be thinking why? Even if you are not into buying fake followers, there is a chance that some fake followers are following you in order to look real.

As fake followers are inactive, they would be having less or no engagement in their profiles. 

There are two ways to measure the engagement rate of your audience:

By calculating engagement rate percentage

For calculating engagement rate percentage, you can use the given formula:

Engagement rate percentage = (Total number of interactions/ Total number of followers)*100

Now, let us see how we can use this formula. 

Suppose the total number of interactions you get is 873 and your total number of followers is 17,116.

So, putting these numbers in the above formula:

(873/17,116)*100, which gives us approximately 5%.

This means that roughly 5% of your audience has engaged with your content. 

By measuring your number of interactions per thousand followers

Source

With this formula, you can easily find out how many users out of each 1000 followers are active and are engaging with your content. 

Number of interactions per 1,000 fans = (Sum of interactions received on a post/ Total number of followers when the post was published) * 1,000 

Let’s see how this formula works:

Suppose the sum of interactions you got on your latest post is 75.

Your total number of followers when the post was published: 8,167

(75/8,167)*1000, which gives us 9.07.

So, you can see for each 1000 of your followers, 9 engaged with your content, which is a very good number.

The benefit of using this formula is that you can get an idea of the engagement share for each of your posts.

But with these formulas, you can’t get to know about fake followers. Also, you can’t check it manually. Therefore, you must know about some tools that can help you do an audit of the fake followers.

Some commonly used free Instagram Audit Tools

Check out some of the best tools to detect fake followers on Instagram:

Analisa

If you are a blogger or agency, you would need to keep a check on your account’s activities and demographics. Analisa is one such tool that lets you do so. It lets you check the authenticity of followers, their engagement rate and also lets you compare it with other influencers.

This tool is free to use and can be used to cut off fake accounts, leaving only authentic followers behind.

SocialBlade

SocialBlade has both free and paid versions. It gives you an insight into the Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube accounts. It can also be used to cover various other platforms and social networks.

While the paid version can give you access to deeper insight and historical data, we would suggest using the free version first as it can provide you with everything you need to know about fake followers. 

FakeCheck

FakeCheck takes into consideration the engagements made by the accounts for eliminating the fake followers. It offers you many free searches to check the authenticity of any account.

HypeAuditor

Being one of the best tools to check real followers on Instagram, HypeAuditor is a free tool that can provide you data on fake followers. It can also let you know about the audience location, authentic engagement, and engagement rate.

How to build a healthy and engaged social media following?

There are ways through which you can organically grow followers on your social media accounts without having the need to buy fake followers.

Understand your audience

It does not matter whether you have a following of 100 or 10,000, understanding what your audience likes are important. Analyze the interests, behaviors, and demographics of your audience. As a result, you would be able to plan your social media strategy in a way that can help you win new followers.

Post relevant content

The more you know about your audience, the more personalized content you would be able to share. This in turn will bring more interactions and users in your niche to your account.

Post consistently

One way to keep yourself fresh in people’s minds is to post on a frequent basis. This helps you to optimize your workflow content, draw the attention of users and increase the engagement on your posts.

Collaborate with influencers

Collaborating with influencers in real-time allows your brand to reach more people in a short time. Of course, you need to look for influencers who have genuine followers that can help you promote your brand’s content to a larger section of the audience.

Create posts that can be shared

Another great tactic to drive the attention of your followers is to create posts that can be easily shared by your audience. You need to create posts that are short and informative and that display strong emotions with which users can easily connect.

Engage with your audience

To make your audience feel connected with yourself, you should try to indulge them in your posts or stories. What you can do is focus on creating posts that ensure their involvement like Instagram polls, questions, and answers, suggestions, etc.

This way, they will feel special and engage more with your content, thereby exposing it to more people.

Fix a time for posting

You must know that the time when you are posting your content on Instagram can create a lot of difference in the kind of engagement it will get.

Therefore, it is crucial that you fix a particular time, probably in the morning or in the evening for posting.

Share some inside story

Let your audience have a view of behind the scenes of your business or brand. You can share about your products or how they are made or about your staff in your Instagram stories.

This will help in letting your audience believe that they know about you on a personal level. In return, they will feel more trusted and show their loyalty towards your brand, thereby helping it to grow.

Organize giveaways and contests

This is by far the best and easiest way to grow your followers count. All you need is to organize a giveaway with a prize at the end.

Ask your followers to like, comment, and share your content on various platforms to have access to that free gift.

Conclusion

No brand or business would want to have fake followers in their account or would like to engage with accounts having fake followers. Therefore, it’s important to do a regular audit on fake followers. But how can you achieve this? Well, there are many tools available out there that can help you in detecting fake followers.

In order to increase your brand’s value and online reach, it’s important to stay away from buying fake followers. So, keep your Instagram account authentic and collaborate only with the legit influencers by doing a regular audit to detect fake followers.

With the above-mentioned tips and tools, we hope we have done justice in providing you enough knowledge about spotting fake Instagram followers. 

If you have any questions, feel free to get in touch with us in the comments section.