How to tell if someone buys 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?

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.
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.
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.
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.
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)

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:
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.
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?
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.
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.

Check an influencer for FREE

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.

How to recognize bots in your Instagram account and remove them - Travelpayouts Blog

Why is it important to regularly clean your profile from bots and spammers among subscribers?

Many novice Instagram users do not pay attention to bots in their followers, or even promote their account by attracting bots.
It would seem, but what is it? After all, with a large number of subscribers, the account looks more solid. And who would guess that most of them are bots and spammers, no one will rummage through thousands of subscribers, checking everyone.

This is an erroneous opinion, which very often ruins accounts that begin their lives.

With the current Instagram algorithms, the number of followers is not directly proportional to how actively the account will be promoted by the platform. Only the percentage of active people from the total is important. That is, if you have 1,000 followers, and only 50-60 of them are active, Instagram will rarely recommend you to people, and your posts will be at the bottom of the feed.

The activity indicator on Instagram is called ER (Engagement Rate), or engagement rate. It is considered very simple - the sum of likes and comments on the last publication is divided by the number of subscribers and multiplied by 100%. If you want a more extensive analysis, then take the arithmetic average of the last 10-15 posts.

The more inactive subscribers you have, the worse the ER. And bots are definitely not active subscribers.

Look at the screenshots below: after cleaning from bots, the percentage of accounts that saw publications increases.

Also, cleaning from bots has a positive effect on actions with posts. The more live audience sees your post, the more actions are performed in relation to it.

How to detect the presence of bots

You need to carefully monitor your statistics. You can do this using special services, or you can switch to business account mode and open statistics on Instagram itself.

Pay special attention to reach and subscription growth. If it happens in sharp jerks, then most likely someone winds up bots on your account. This is what some unscrupulous competitors do when they want to lower someone's ER and thereby lower him in the top.

If you actively use mass following as a means of promotion, then keep track of which subscribers come to you. It is better to sort out all suspicious ones in a timely manner so that they do not accumulate and do not have time to seriously affect the statistics. It is better to use not mass following, but mass liking and mass looking. The result will not be so noticeable, but there will be more live subscribers.

How can you recognize a bot?

No avatar, non-original nickname, empty or closed profile. Individually, this may not mean anything, but if the three points match, then you probably have a bot.
Comments with advertising. If someone writes newsletters under your posts, then you can be sure that this is done by a spam bot. The stories of such commentators about how they started earning millions by clicking on the link are nonsense. Clean these up as soon as possible.
Some business accounts use mass following to build an audience. These are not bots, but they bring no more benefits. The best solution would be to unsubscribe them from yourself, ridding the profile of the "dead weight".

Below is an example of a suspicious account. So many subscribers and subscriptions, but the profile is empty. Isn't it strange?

Analysis and purification

Analysis can be carried out manually or using services that clean the account automatically. Let's consider both options.

Manual account cleaning

If there are few subscribers and the activity is not bad, then you can analyze the account yourself. Based on the criteria above, you can check each account. This is a very tedious process that takes a lot of time.

Services for cleaning Instagram account from bots

There are services that automate all the shenanigans that you do.

SpamGuard

It will check and clean up your account in a few minutes:

Analyze the audience.
Adjusts the list of accounts based on your preferences.
Will clear the account.

It also provides protection against bot attacks and spam comments. Test analysis can be done for 1 ruble. Verification must be made within three days after payment. After three days, the full price subscription will be automatically activated. The subscription can be canceled at any time.

Try SpamGuard →

Nofak.es

An English-language service, also focused exclusively on clearing an account. You can try for free. For regular use, you can buy a monthly subscription or pay once and use the service for an unlimited time.

Try nofak.es →

Zeus

This is a service for comprehensive account promotion. It can collect and filter the audience, provide detailed analytics and account reporting, and block bots.

You can use only the whole range of services, you can not pay separately and use only cleaning bots. You can try the Zeus service for free.

Try Zeus →

How to avoid bot and spam attacks

It's not enough just to clean the bots, because they will come again if certain worlds are not taken. How to avoid it?

Mass following more carefully. After each call, check the newly arrived subscribers. If you don’t have the opportunity to look at Instagram so often, or if you just don’t want to take risks, then use mass liking and mass looking instead of mass following.
Do not click on suspicious links. Even such a seemingly harmless action can turn into not only an invasion of bots and spam, but also an account hacking.
Do not use #followback, #like4like and similar hashtags : they are often used by commercial accounts, bots and spam. Also, do not use millionaire tags, as there will be no live subscribers from them.
Respond quickly. Others come for some bots. Spammers often duplicate comments, and if you simply delete them, new ones will appear.
Do not wind up bots yourself. Seriously, don't.

How to promote your Instagram account

After all the warnings, a logical question arises - how then to promote your Instagram account?

It all depends on how much free time you have. You can promote your account for free, but it will take a lot of time and effort.

A faster solution is to promote your account for a fee. Allocate a certain amount for a month, not necessarily a large amount, which you will definitely invest in promotion. Money can be spent on advertising (from other bloggers or on Instagram itself), on special services for promoting and cleaning your account, or on the work of an SMM specialist.

The main thing is to approach the matter with love. An Instagram account is not something that can be completely shifted to other people, and even more so services. Colorful photos, pleasant posts, communication with readers - all this is exclusively under your control.

Create an interesting image for yourself, enter your own unique rubric or other feature, interact with other bloggers. Be interesting, and subscribers will find you!

Instagram followers who should have been deleted yesterday - Social networks on vc.

“What are you talking about? Everyone understands that subscribers need to be recruited by all methods, and you are talking about deletion. Alas, yes. You need to “clean” subscribers regularly.

12494 views

I'll make a reservation right away: if Instagram is run "just like that", "to be", then do not waste time reading. If it is interesting to delve into the algorithms, then everyone is glad.

As always: first a little theory, then move on to practice.

So, if someone thinks that the main thing on the Instagram business page is the number of followers, they wind them up by all possible methods and don’t care what kind of accounts they are, then I will disappoint you: the path to nowhere.

In social networks, there is the concept of ER (Engagement Rate) - this is an indicator of engagement on a page or under a specific post. There are many of them, I will consider one.

How is ER calculated for a specific Instagram post?

ER = (likes + comments + saves) / number of followers * 100%

Now imagine you have 3000 subscribers. 7 people put likes on the post, did not comment, did not repost. 4 people saved the post. Calculate the percentage of engagement under the post.

ER = (7 + 0 + 4) / 3000 * 100% = 0.36%

When calculating the total ER for several posts or for a certain period:

ER = (all likes + all comments + all reposts + all saves) / number of subscribers (at the time of calculation) * 100%

Well, low ER (less than 1%), but what's the problem?

There seems to be a lot of subscribers, but there is no reach and engagement.

In such accounts 2 problems: content and audience quality.

About the content another time. Here, without me, you know how to attract a subscriber. If you still want to discuss - write in the comments, I will prepare another article.
Audience. What's wrong with her? Not active, you say. Why don't subscribers like and comment? Because they don't see posts. And the fewer followers leave a reaction to your post, the fewer followers Instagram will show the publication. It turns out a vicious circle.

"Does not like" - read "and does not save", "does not comment", "does not share"

Because of this, the ER is low. Why it's bad:

Firstly, 's blog does not inspire confidence, it does not look like an expert.

Secondly, when searching for keywords, the first places will be those accounts in which the total ER is higher. The number of subscribers in such blogs may be less than that of big competitors. On August 25, 2021, Instagram wrote about this in an article about algorithms.

Ok, but why delete subscribers?

We have come to the most interesting part.

Checking who is subscribed to the profile. How do you like subscribers who are subscribed to 2000 profiles, to 3000? For 5000? Everyone has seen these. But if not, I will give examples:

This is what insta-parasites look like)

Now answer the question: will such subscribers see all the content?

If someone tries to prove otherwise, then look at the number of your subscriptions. Do you keep track of all the news?

But it's so important that subscribers see the posts and like them...

ER over 30% in business accounts is, of course, ironic!))) But you can get close to 7%.

What indicators should we aim for?

There is an opinion:

less than 1% is a bad indicator;

1% to 3.5% - average;

from 3.5% to 6% - above average;

over 6% is a high rate.

My practice shows that this happens in business accounts. If without cheats, giveaways, like-chats and other nonsense. Write in the comments if you have a different experience, preferably with examples. It will be interesting.

So, back to the idea that you need to get rid of insta-parasites.

They will pull accounts to the bottom every day. And profile owners puzzle over why the account has low activity, deplorable reach.

Well, you can't only have good subscribers, can you? Will they always be like this?

Yes. And that's okay. The percentage of low-quality audience should not exceed 10%. And the Instagram profile will take a deep breath.

But if the percentage of mass followers among subscribers has already approached 30%, we won’t see blog activity, as well as reaching the top in hashtags and large coverage.

Mass Followers lead to the situation described in the pie chart above. They do not see the posts (of course, among thousands of subscriptions!), thereby killing the reach, ER and the blog as a whole.

You can spend money on content managers and copywriters, publish interesting posts, but the activity in your account will still hit the bottom every day.

How to calculate a similar audience?

Here are a couple of services: Instaparser, Instahero.

They can upload general statistics on subscribers, make lists of those that need to be deleted (profiles subscribed to more than 2000 accounts, inactive and abandoned accounts).