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How to check bought followers on instagram


How to Check if Someone Bought Instagram Followers

A few years ago, a large number of followers on Instagram pointed to some kind of success and certain importance. Every second person tried to buy as many fakes as possible just to get a nice number in the graph “Followers”. At present, there are still people interested in that stuff, and there are still services ready to assist them in Instagram cheating.

It’s vital for marketers and influencer marketing managers to check opinion leaders for cheating prior to the start of the collaboration. There is a risk to get trapped in cheating and waste the marketing budget, as a result.

To prevent you from such sad consequences, we have compiled useful pieces of advice on how to check if someone bought Instagram followers. Forewarned is forearmed!

Why do people buy Instagram followers?

Those people who strive for becoming influencers are the main fans of cheating.

They are tempted with an opportunity to earn money by means of social media as well as become reputable and famous. They don’t stop believing that a number of followers is one of the key indicators to show that an account is in demand. Actually, it’s a delusion.

However, nobody canceled the crowd effect. People “go” more actively to the accounts where there are many followers. They assume by default that there will be interesting and high-quality content or an abundance of lucrative offers. Based on this, aspiring bloggers abandon themselves to buying IG followers. This is the reason why cheating is still blooming.

There is another group of people: already recognized influencers who aspire to get 1M followers.

They either organize giveaways or buy fake Instagram followers to reach a goal. It’s like a cherry dream for them to get exactly 1M and not less. There are a lot of accounts with 1M followers but several thousand likes under the posts. It’s very foolish but I’m here not to judge.

To cut a long story short, some individuals simply satisfy their ambitions by buying followers. They are impressed by the fact that their account is popular, even if in fact this is not always the case. Honest or they are sometimes called “white” methods of promotion can take months. It’s easier and faster to artificially expand the audience and then enjoy an embellished number of followers.

How to detect fake followers on Instagram?


Fortunately, it’s not rocket science, therefore, everyone can easily detect fake followers on Instagram. Let’s figure out the types of fakes, first. There are several types of them, did you know?

  • Instagram bots are mainly empty accounts that subscribe to other accounts, like or leave comments set by tags. Bots are created by special tools and appear on Instagram automatically.
  • Fakes are different from bots, although they are also created automatically for advertising, spamming, and cheating. Hacked accounts of real people can be seized and used by fakes. The main difference between bots and fakes is that the latters’ accounts are filled with someone else’s (stolen) content.
  • Offers are real people who, for a certain reward, follow you or perform some targeted actions: likes, shares, comments. However, they will be active as long as you pay for their every action. This group includes members of Instagram pods.

We have written more about bots on Instagram in this article. Inviting you to take a look.

So, let’s see how to detect bots and ig fake followers. There are some red flags to look at.

  • Photo. Bots and fakes often don’t put any pictures on their avatars or just use photos of celebrities, cartoon characters, or something abstract.
  • Username. Basically, they look too spammy and artificial. It might be a meaningless jumble of letters or combinations of letters and numbers. In a word, a real person is unlikely to choose such a username for his account.
  • Mass character. Fake accounts are following lots of people and are followed by similar (artificial) accounts. Usually, the number of followers can be more than a thousand.
  • Lack of personal data. No content in Instagram Stories and feed, no information in BIO, no photos in “Tagged”.
  • A lot of reposts. To ensure that the page is not empty and does not look suspicious, fake accounts fill it with reposts very often.

Please note: it is not necessarily a fake account if there is a lack of information or no photos in it. Some users are on Instagram for the sake of curiosity and just browse other profiles. Therefore, they are not interested in producing content themselves and leave accounts empty. However, a large number of coincidences mentioned above is most likely to give warning of bots.

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How to tell if someone bought Instagram followers?

I hope that the information from the first paragraph has significantly clarified who is who on Instagram. At this stage, you are almost ready to join the ranks of Insta police. We will move further and delve into more details to effortlessly find out the violators of Instagram Policy who have already bought Instagram followers. So, how to bring them out?

Manually

Depending on the followers’ number of the account under investigation, the manual check may take either a long or short time. The advantage of this method is that you will make sure with your own eyes whether a person resorts to cheating on Instagram or not. What should you do?

  1. Take a look at followers. Scroll down several times and check what kind of accounts predominate among followers. I agree, you will not get a representative result of your research but it’s a good idea to start with. You will not be able to check each follower. However, if flipping through, you come across a large number of shops, beauty salons, usernames with numbers, you have got on the trail of someone who has bought followers.
  2. Pay attention to how many accounts a person is following. The more, the worse. It’s not out of the question that he knows a lot of people but let’s be honest, nobody canceled mass following.
  3. What is going on in the comments? If you see standard phrases like “so beautiful”, “cool post”, or the abundance of emojis under the posts, this is cheating in its pure form.
  4. Check the dynamics of likes. Basically, the natural spread is 40-100%. If one post gets a thousand likes but another one did not even reach a hundred, someone is trying to trick his audience. There is a reverse situation: all posts have the same quantity of likes. It may point to the case when all posts are liked by fakes.
  5. Find a video in the account and see how many views and likes it has. As a rule, the number of video views is 2-3 times more than the number of likes. However, if there are thousands of views but 50 likes, this should alert you.

Automatically

It will be easier and faster to perform fake Instagram followers check with the aid of specially designed tools. If you are not afraid of delegating and can trust in automatic tools, I recommend using them without delay.

trendHERO is your magic wand in this case. It’s an online service that will help you study in detail the target audience, analyze statistics, and the quality of content if any Instagram account. trendHERO uses machine learning for checking algorithms.

Keep in mind: when signing up, you get 1 check for free.

How to tell if someone buys followers (using trendHERO analytics)
  1. The chart “Audience type” can tell a lot about the account straight away. If the suspicious audience and mass followers predominate, it’s quite clear that this user uses or has used cheating:
  2. ER is an indicator that helps to calculate the ratio of the number of followers to the active actions that they take in the account. When it is low (less than 1%), there are two variants: either this user has poor content or he sins buying bots.
  3. Pay attention to the graph that shows the dynamics of followers and following growth. There should not be sharp surges.

    Look: on the left graph, the growth is going gradually. Meanwhile, on the right graph, you can see that a person began to unfollow at some moment for an unknown reason. Mass following or not?
  4. Don’t forget to analyze the audience’s interests. If these are real people, then their hobbies should correspond to the theme of the account.
  5. Basically, up to 10% of followers are active likers. On average, this is 2-4%. Remember, too many likes are just as suspicious as too few. Using trendHERO you can consider likes spread. Again, if the numbers spring, I mean some posts get a lot of likes when others are completely unpopular, it might also be the evidence of cheating.

trendHERO is a very powerful tool to help you reveal cheats. All you need to do is just to enter the Instagram username of the account and the service will collect and provide you all the data.

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Is Instagram cleaning fake followers?

Oh, yes! According to the Instagram Policy, buying bots and other forms of cheating are assessed as a violation against the platform. The cheating of any indicators in social networks (subscribers, likes, comments, reposts) is recognized as a fraudulent way of promotion.

Instagram is actively blocking bots and fake followers as well as punishes those who resorted to them for dishonorable actions. It can shadowban, block, or even delete an account forever.

Conclusion

Checking Instagram followers for authenticity is an absorbing activity that requires attention to detail, patience, and analytical thinking. No matter whether you will do it manually or automatically, our pieces of advice will come in handy. Bots and fake accounts are true evil that does nothing but harm to Instagram accounts.

Now you know how to tell if someone bought instagram followers. Come to the good side, reveal cheaters, and help social media justice prevail!

3 Ways to Check if Your Brand Influencer Has Fake Followers

Working with brand influencers is an excellent way for a brand to expand its audience, develop social proof, and create user-generated content. However, brands need to carefully vet their influencers before initiating a partnership. One important thing that brands should look out for is fake followers — here's how you can conduct a fake follower check.

Instagram and TikTok influencers are powerful due to their large number of followers and the trust their followers have in their opinions. In today's day and age, it's not unusual to have hundreds of thousands of followers.

It may surprise you that this scale of following is so common, but brands should be aware that there are ways to buy fake followers or to get fake followers for free. Some of these social media users access fake followers to boost their follower count and to appeal more influential than they actually are.

For those brands that work with influencers, checking for fake followers is critical when choosing an Instagram or TikTok influencer to partner with your brand.

1. Check Out Their Followers

Before reaching out to a potential brand influencer, look through their account to see if they have fake followers. It's easier to figure out when your influencer is being followed by fake profiles than you think. Here's what you need to know:

Look for these red flags:

  • Followers with No Photos or Posts: If an influencer is followed by users that have not posted and/or lack a profile picture, you can typically assume that these followers are fake. Brands should also look out for influencers with followings of tons of private accounts and “spammy” usernames.
  • Irrelevant and/or Spam Comments: If an influencer has a ton of comments, it’s easy to assume that their followers are active. Look through a few photos and scan the comments. If the comments are clearly irrelevant or gibberish, they’re from fake followers.
  • Following/Followed by “fan-buying” services: If you look through their followers and who they’re following, you might see one or two fan-buying accounts. These are huge red flags that the influencer is gaining fake Instagram followers.

2. Check Follower Engagement

If an account has thousands of followers, it can be expected that their engagement rates are proportional. Brands can figure this out by comparing the number of followers to the number of likes and number of comments. Instagram or TikTok accounts with many followers and very low engagement rates likely have a bunch of fake followers. Calculate engagement rates for an account by dividing the total number of likes and comments by the total number of followers.

Use these numbers as a benchmark for checking follower engagement. Take the user’s last 10 photos and average the total number of comments and likes, then divide by the number of followers and multiply by 10 to get the average engagement rate. Even if the engagement checks out, make sure you look through their followers and comments to confirm that the account hasn’t purchased these likes and comments from fake followers.

3. Use an Automated Tool

If searching through TikTok or Instagram followers and comparing engagement rates manually isn’t the right fit, there are some tools available to help determine whether an influencer’s followers are fake.

FakeCheck scans a profile and determines the number of fake followers versus real ones. The tool also names the most suspicious followers. FollowerCheck is a free tool that provides a snapshot of an account’s followers. It can even be helpful for legitimate accounts. If a legitimate account realizes several fake followers have latched on to their account, they can go in and block/remove those users. FollowerCheck works best on accounts with a larger number of followers, and it isn’t 100% accurate, but it can give a big picture view of an account’s follower breakdown.

Social Audit Pro is a paid service that provides follower analytics for Instagram accounts. The platform does a full audit of a profile’s followers that includes useful analytics. There are different paid levels depending on how large an account is – ranging from $5 for accounts with 5,000 followers to $20 for accounts with 20,000 followers. The payments are a one-time fee and are reasonable even for brands with small budgets.

Conclusion

Many Instagram users have found that padding their followings with paid accounts can help them earn money as an influencer. However, this clearly undermines their authenticity and influence. Manually checking followers for spam accounts and comments is a quick way to find out if the comments and likes are from real or fake followers. Some legitimate accounts may be followed by spam accounts or fan-buying services, but if a potential influencer has massive amounts of fake followers, brands should pass on that partnership.

Three services to expose cheating "likes" and followers on Instagram

Most brands will only partner with a blogger if they have a quality follower base. For the advertiser, it is not the number of “followers” ​​and “likes” that matters, but the views, reach and engagement of the audience. This was shown by a recent study by the World Federation of Advertisers. Hello Blogger, together with an expert from the LiveDune service, figured out how to expose fakes on Instagram and chose three Russian-language tools to automate this process.

How to detect cheating

To determine the quality of an audience, experts look at engagement, likes, and comments. The indicators are compared with accounts that have the same number of subscribers.

The ratio of subscribers to "likes" and comments - Engagement rate (ER). To calculate ER, add up the number of likes and comments on the last posts, for example 20, and divide by 20. This will give you the average number of reactions per post. Next, calculate what percentage this number is of the total number of subscribers. The larger the subscriber base, the smaller this figure will be.

Services are able to compare this indicator with that of similar accounts and give an estimate. Low ER means a low-quality subscriber base: for an account with 1 thousand subscribers, an indicator of 7-15% will be good, for a blogger with 50 thousand “followers” ​​and more, an ER of 5% is normal.

The ratio of "likes" to comments. Divide the number of firsts by the number of seconds in the last few posts. The higher this figure, the higher the audience engagement - subscribers are more actively discussing the content. The coefficient will be low if the blogger does not write texts under the photos and does not ask the audience questions. Or if the "likes" are screwed up. To evaluate this indicator, compare it with those of accounts with the same audience.

Spread in the number of “likes” on posts. The scatter shows how the number of "likes" for posts changes relative to each other. It can also be calculated manually by comparing the number of "likes" to the latest posts. In addition, there should be fewer “likes” on posters and other stand-out posts, and cheaters will have the same number.

"Healthy" is considered a spread of at least 10%. If you see about the same number of likes on blogger posts, then they are probably being bought. For example, on the last five posts of one account, there were 1072, 1064, 1087, 1083 and 1077 likes. It turned out that he bought 1000 reactions per post, and the real number was: 72, 64, 87, 83, 77.

Dynamics of a set of "likes". You won't be able to evaluate the dynamics without the service - you need statistics for each individual post. The service will determine the dynamics of the latest posts and compare it with those of bloggers who are not suspected of cheating. This indicator is not always accurate: sometimes the service evaluates the dynamics negatively, although the blogger did not have a cheat. For example, due to the fact that the instagrammer announces "like times" - he encourages subscribers to go through the latest posts and put a "like". Therefore, it is better to additionally check the dynamics "by eye" according to the graphs - anomalies are visible on them.

The ratio of "likes" and video views. If your Instagram account is posting a video, compare the number of views with the average number of likes. Fewer views means “likes” are probably bought.

A sharp increase in "likes" without increasing the subscriber base. If a post has an average of 1,000 "likes", and a month ago it was 20 with a similar number of "followers" - the blogger is working dishonestly.

Analytics service

Live Dune

Service for working with Instagram, LiveJournal, YouTube, VKontakte, Facebook and Odnoklassniki. It analyzes accounts in social networks, searches for bloggers according to the given parameters, issues files with reports and helps to track comments.

LiveDune evaluates the quality of the account's audience at the beginning of the report.

Price. Three checks within three days - free of charge. Further from 30 ₽ for one check when buying 10 pieces.

Analytics service

InBlogs

The service determines the cheating of bots and "likes" on Instagram. In addition to this, it gives the approximate cost of advertising for a blogger. According to the developers, the price matches the real one in 90% of cases.

The tool estimates the cost of a post from a novice blogger at 70 ₽

Price. Three checks - free of charge, then 25 ₽ for one check when buying 10 pieces.

Analytics service

FakeLikeInfo

The service performs a narrow function - it detects cheats on Instagram. It allows you to check how many "likes" for each post are wound up, how many have been put by live users.

The service shows the estimated number of "live" subscribers, it is usually lower than

Price. Analysis of one or several accounts with a total of up to 5 thousand subscribers - free of charge. Further, from 199 ₽ for 20 thousand subscribers, depending on the tariff, the analysis of an account for 5 million subscribers will cost almost 3 thousand ₽.

Briefly: the price of checking a blogger on the service

  1. If you do not limit yourself to a test period on the service, you will have to pay for checking bloggers for cheating. 99.5 ₽ Account per 100 thousand 30 ₽ 25 ₽ 400 ₽ Account for 1 million 30 ₽ 900
  2. Checking in LiveDune costs 5 ₽ more than in InBlogs, but the service displays the indicators more clearly and compares with similar accounts. FakeLikeInfo is only beneficial when checking accounts with a small audience, up to 3,000 subscribers.

Author: Ilya Novikov

How to check an Instagram account for cheating

The cost of advertising for an Insta-blogger depends primarily on the number of followers and their activity. However, both are successfully wound up. Today, it is possible to wind up subscribers, views, likes, comments without much effort, and most bloggers take advantage of this opportunity, winding everything up at the same time and creating the appearance of an attractive channel for advertising. By ordering a post from such an unscrupulous blogger, the advertiser will only get a beautiful picture - no sales, no increase in loyalty and brand awareness. Therefore, before agreeing on advertising, you must definitely check your Instagram account for cheating. We'll show you how.

Why checking for cheating is necessary before starting cooperation

Opinion leaders are admired, their words are listened to, they are trusted much more than noname companies offering to buy something. One post from a good blogger can get thousands of subscribers and hundreds of sales, but the effectiveness of such advertising directly depends on the quality of the blogger's audience.

According to various studies, up to 80% of bloggers on Instagram resort to cheating. And if a few years ago it was possible to recognize a bot with the naked eye, today you can buy almost real users - with realistic nicknames, avatars and completed profiles. A lot of top bloggers drive up the price due to the large number of followers, while their lion's share may turn out to be cheating, and the number of real subscribers does not differ from the audience of any local micro-influencer. Even celebrities resort to cheating.

Checking Instagram for bots is a must if you want to get a really good advertising case. When the predominant part of the profile audience is bots and cheated subscribers who are not interested in the blogger's content, the advertising budget simply goes down the drain. In addition, working with suspicious accounts can cast a shadow on your brand.

How to check a blogger for cheating

On some pages it is quite easy to detect cheating, in other cases you need to conduct a fundamental analysis. Bloggers have learned how to masterfully disguise cheating. If earlier it was possible to meet many profiles with a 100,000 audience and 2-3 likes under posts, which immediately pushed to certain conclusions, today everyone is pulling up to the desired indicators.

Basic account information

First of all, you need to study the basic information about the account, namely the number:

  • subscriptions;
  • subscribers;
  • publications in total;
  • publications per day;
  • likes per post;
  • comments per post;
  • video views.

According to the data obtained, you can roughly understand what audience is on the account, evaluate its activity and the activity of the blogger himself. Agree, if there are only a few dozen publications on the account, new ones appear rarely and do not gain many likes, but at the same time it is followed by more than 10k subscribers, then this, at least, looks very suspicious.

It is important that the basic information already contains some kind of harmony and the right balance. For advertisers, accounts look delicious, for example, with 500K subscribers and 25K likes under posts. It’s good if the number of subscriptions is much less than the number of followers, and several publications appear per day and comment on them.

Account statistics

Next, you can proceed to a more in-depth study of the profile using trendHERO, because the correct spread of numbers in terms of basic information does not mean anything.

trendHERO knows everything about influencers. It provides over 90 metrics to check the blogger and choose the best one.

The first thing we look at is the number of subscriber growth. Ideally, the subscriber growth graph should gradually increase.

If you see a sharp surge in the growth of subscribers, and then a less dynamic unsubscribe, then in 99% of cases this indicates cheating. There is still, of course, a slight chance that the account mentioned a top blogger, or a Giveaway was held. Here you need to remember that the audience, as a rule, show interest in any post within the first three days after publication. If the increase actually happened in a day, and then only an unsubscribe, then this is a 100% cheat.

Next, look at the increase in subscriptions. If you can see that a blogger constantly subscribes to hundreds of profiles, then unsubscribes and subscribes again, then most likely he uses mass following to attract subscribers. In general, there is nothing criminal in this. Mass following is one of the “gray” promotion methods.

Engagement

Check subscribers "for reality" will help the engagement indicator.

Engagement Rate is essentially the ratio of the number of the audience to the active actions taken by it. Purchased followers do not show any activity on the account and reduce engagement.

On average, an ER of 5% is considered normal, it is good if the engagement on the account is 8-15%. But it’s better to compare the profile score with the average ER for similar accounts in terms of the number of subscribers.

A low engagement rate indicates that the account has either bad content or subscribers were bought.

Also pay attention to the user's publications and compare the ratio of likes and comments under the posts. As a rule, there is one comment for every 100 likes. If the ratio is different, we can draw the first conclusions about the increase in likes and comments, and, accordingly, assume that the ER indicator is also slightly twisted.

Checking for bots in followers

Checking for Instagram bots consists in a scrupulous analysis of the audience. First, we pay attention to the demographic characteristics of the audience - audience gender, location, interests.


It is important to know not only which people of what gender and from what region are the primary subscribers of the account, but also which of them is an active part of it. This can be clearly demonstrated by graphs divided according to the principle “all” and “likes”. Dominant positions in both charts must match. It is very suspicious if the predominant number of subscribers is demographically different from the active audience on the account.

Next, pay attention to the interests of subscribers. In a good way, the dominant value should match the theme of the account. The minimum is acceptable if the subject of the profile occupies one of the highest values.

The next step is to analyze the "Audience Type" diagram. Most of the audience should be real subscribers. The number of all others should be reduced as much as possible. The only exceptions are cases when goods and services of the B2B category are promoted, then the number of commercial accounts may be greater.

In conclusion, we pay attention to such indicators as:

  • “Accessibility to the audience” - the higher this indicator, the greater the potential advertising conversion can be.
  • “Audience Authenticity” — the more followers look authentic, the less likely you are to run into an account with bots.
  • “Average number of likes” - in fact, this is an approximate indicator of the response to advertising.

Checking bots also includes monitoring subscriber growth graphs and their activity. In the complex, this information will be more than enough to understand whether the blogger resorts to cheating or not.

How to check the number of likes on Instagram

When choosing a blogger, activity must be checked, and the first step to this is to track the reality of likes. Wrapped likes or not will show the graph of the distribution of likes and posts. We pay attention to how many percent of likes posts get and the spread of these values.

On a good account, posts will gain approximately the same number of likes, fluctuations can be within a few tens of percent. Too sharp jumps indicate that under some posts the blogger makes a cheat, but forgets about some. Here you need to understand that advertising posts will always gain fewer likes than informational ones, and the latter, in turn, will be less than entertaining. So a little scatter is normal. It is much worse if a blogger has the same number of likes under all publications - a certain number of likes between posts should obviously be supported by someone.

It is recommended to pay attention also to the top hashtags. They must be neutral. If the most frequently used ones contain tags like #likeme #liketime and the like, then we can conclude that most of the likes were attracted in an unnatural way.

How to identify cheated comments

Today, absolutely everything is cheated, including comments. To check for cheating a comment, as a rule, it is enough to open several posts and familiarize yourself with the text of the comments. If they are all of the same type and generalized, then most likely they were left by bots.

The comment type diagram will save you time. It immediately shows how many likes the author himself leaves, how many comments are detailed, and how many are short, suspicious and most likely twisted. Pay attention to how many comments a blogger receives per number of likes.

Myths and facts about cheating

When a business first comes to Instagram and plunges into the wilds of SMM promotion, it faces a banal problem — cheating. Everyone has heard that in social networks you can wind up likes, the number of subscribers, but few people know how it works in reality. Often you have to learn everything the hard way, but we will try to dispel the main myths about cheating with real facts.

  • If the percentage of involvement is high, then there are no markups. In fact, a high ER indicator only indicates that the blogger competently monitors the account, but does not mean at all that the origin of the activity is natural.
  • Good feedback is a guarantee of productive cooperation. Unfortunately no. They resort to cheating not only within Instagram. Until you check everything yourself, there is a risk of falling into the wrong audience.
  • Quality content = good audience. Commercial bloggers will naturally make sure their "product" looks attractive, but that doesn't mean anything.
  • You need to select verified accounts. The blue check mark next to the nickname only indicates that the user has confirmed his name. Even top bloggers and stars resort to cheating.
  • The main thing is that the video has a lot of views. Many people think that if the number of views under the video is approximately equal to the number of subscribers, then there are no markups. This is really one of the signs of a quality account, but you need to at least make sure that the views themselves are not cheated.

Tips and tricks

Cheat in social networks is the scourge of Internet marketing. Bots, fakes, fake comments and likes are dangerous, useless and spoil the aesthetics. For advertisers, they also pose a threat to waste advertising budget on a useless post.

In order not to become a victim of a cheat blogger, you will need to spend a lot of time. First, you carefully select bloggers suitable for the target audience. Then you will have to track the ratio of likes to subscribers, evaluate the meaningfulness of the comments, and thoroughly study the blogger's posts.

It is very difficult to do this manually. Firstly, because Instagram itself gives little information about the profile to visitors. Secondly, because tracking at least 10% of the audience of even an average blogger is physically difficult and impossible in a reasonable time. If you plan to use the services of bloggers on an ongoing basis, then it is rational to use the trendHERO special analytics service, which provides professional tools for analysis.

It is unrealistic to fight cheating. They can only be tracked by in-depth analysis of the account, its audience and activity. Despite the fact that Instagram algorithms have not taken into account the number of followers for a long time, many still prefer the number of the audience to its quality. Be sure to carefully check the profiles for cheating to protect yourself from pointless spending.

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