Having a large number of followers on Instagram helps increase your popularity. Also, companies will communicate much more quickly with profiles characterized by a very high number of followers. The number of followers is still significant, but what really matters is the quality of engagement and content.
Driven by the desire to increase their popularity, many users began to buy fake followers. This guide will tell you how to discover fake or purchased Instagram followers using some tricks.
Find Fake Instagram Followers
As we told you before, some tricks allow you to determine if a particular profile is buying followers. Buying followers may seem strange and unconventional to you.
Bots and applications for increasing followers on Instagram have increased significantly in recent years. Users who want to improve their reputation use these apps to communicate with various companies and sponsors. You need to watch out for to find fake Instagram followers!
Check Interaction Level
The first doubts arise when a profile has many followers and low engagement. Real influencers on Instagram stay in close contact with their community. This means that the number of likes and comments is proportional to the number of followers.
However, a profile with 1000 followers doesn’t necessarily have to receive 1000 likes and comments on their photos. Generally, a profile with 100,000 to 1 million followers has around 2% engagement as the level of engagement decreases as the number of followers increases.
If the engagement level is shallow, the reviewed user doesn’t have an audience that engages with their profile and content. Also, even a level far from the standard can mean that profile gains followers in unusual ways. You can use free online tools to check the engagement level of a particular profile.
Compare Followers Level with Followed Users
There is a strange relationship between the number of followers of fake profiles and the number of users they follow. Bots follow thousands of people. But they don’t have nearly the same number of followers. On the other hand, real accounts usually have the same number of followers.
However, this doesn’t apply to all account types. Influencers or celebrities can follow millions and only a few hundred people. Therefore, you should only do this check if you decide to analyze the profile of a regular user or an apparent influencer. Further inspections are necessary to unmask fake influencers.
Be Wary of Abnormal Increase in Followers
Another way to recognize fake profiles is to check for follower spikes. Usually, the growth of a profile occurs organically. Organic growth involves a gradual and uniform increase in the number of your followers. Therefore, a reckless increase in followers may indicate that the user under review is buying their followers.
Pay Attention to the 1000 Rule
The first rule of thumb to find out if someone bought fake Instagram followers is to see if they purchased roughly a thousand (or multiples of a thousand) followers at once.
A thousand followers are the minimum amount that you can buy. But in reality, even a significant spike in followers should be suspicious. Organic, that is, actual growth is more gradual.
Review Posts
But let’s say we didn’t notice any irregularities in the performance of an Instagram profile because, if anything, fake follower acquisition dates back a while. How do we evaluate the authenticity of an influencer? Here another trick comes into play.
Open the list of followers of the profile and observe them well. Most fake followers usually have less than six posts. They’re followed by more than a thousand while being followed by very few people. This is a questionable disproportion.
Shipment Time
There is another feature that fake followers can share. All of their posts appear to post on the same day. These fake profiles are the result of automation. A small program steals photos of a real user and posts them all in a new profile to give them a sense of accuracy.
Examine Likes
Another tip that should make us suspicious is that an Instagram profile always has the same number of likes. This really doesn’t make sense. Some posts are better, others worse, and the same number of likes, so it’s not real. Videos often get fewer likes than photos, mainly if that profile also posts videos.