How do you know if an influencer has bought followers?
The power of Instagram influencer partnerships has been proven to impact brand sales. A simple post featuring a product and a few carefully chosen words and hashtags can lead to thousands of sales overnight. But choosing your Instagram influencer partner isn’t as easy as just seeing who has the biggest fan base, as even on this platform fake followers can be bought!
So how do you detect fake followers?
1. Look at the individual followers
This can be a good way to detect if the influencer purchased followers. If fake, you will notice that their followers have very minimal activity on the page (no pictures, no posts, no followers). Or they haven’t been updated in years. These are known as “dead accounts”.
2. How many people are responding to content?
Look at how much people are responding to the influencer’s post. Specifically, for low to no engagement. Take a look at their “likes” to “follows” ratio. You can look and see an account has a large number of followers, but a small amount of likes/comments. Chances are they have “dead accounts” following them.
3. Look at the quality of comments
Take a look at the comments by the followers on a post. Do they make absolutely no sense whatsoever to any language in the world? It’s spam.
4. Use a tool to check
There are tools out there, like Instacheck which will look up and let you know how many fan accounts are fake. I tested it, and of course it detected that I haven’t bought any followers it also had a few people show up as fake. So whether or not it is absolutely accurate, or if some of our fans just haven’t used their accounts in a while.
