Wondering if someone bought fake followers on Instagram?
You’re in the right place.
In this article, I will cover 4 signs you can use to check if someone has bought or has fake followers on Instagram.
At the end of the article, you will be able to apply this knowledge and detect if the followers of a particular user are real or not.
What are fake followers?
Fake followers are basically accounts created through spam emails for sales and bot activity.
Micro-influencers often buy fake followers to show off their influencer status and fool their popularity.
Organic growth is a challenge, so they can buy fake followers to grow their account as quickly as possible.
However, fake followers are very harmful to your account and they are ruining the influencer marketing industry.
Basically, these accounts are created and used by bots for sales vehicles.
How can you tell if someone has fake followers?
There are four signs you can use to tell if someone has fake followers.
1. Their followers don’t have profile pictures.
2. The usernames of their followers are a random combination of words and numbers.
3. Their followers have few or no posts.
4. Engagement rate is either very low or limited.
Their followers don’t have profile pictures.
The first step you want to take to check if someone has fake followers is to check their list of followers.
Navigate to their profile > followers.
Check out their followers and find people who don’t have a profile picture.
If their followers are mainly composed of users who do not have a profile picture as shown above, that is a sign of a fake account.
The usernames of their followers are a random combination of words and numbers.
The next step you want to take is to check the follower’s username.
You may want to ask yourself these questions.
Does the username mean anything?
Are usernames made up of random words?
Does it contain multiple numbers?
If the profile meets 2 out of 3 or more, it’s probably a fake account.
Their followers have little or no posts.
Following the previous step, check if the follower has any posts.
Usually, a fake follower has few or no posts.
If they have posts, you might want to check their engagement rate.
If they have several posts, it’s usually no engagement.
Engagement rates are either very low or extreme.
The final step to take is to check the user engagement rate (which you are testing).
Usually, someone buying fake followers will have very little engagement rate on their posts. This is because fake followers are not engaged.
This is an exception if they buy fake likes along with fake followers.
If that’s the case, the likes on their posts can have different highs and lows.
There can be one post that gets 50 likes and another that gets 400 likes. This is a clear sign that the user has purchased fake likes.
Why you should never buy fake followers on Instagram
Buying fake followers is one of the worst decisions anyone can make on Instagram.
People are drawn to status and popularity when it comes to social media. It’s a number game.
Therefore, some people may buy followers because it is very difficult to grow naturally.
But there are many disadvantages to buying fake followers.
Read on to find them.
No interaction.
There are many ads online claiming that you can “Grow your Instagram account to 5,000 followers per month”. or “The Ultimate Instagram Organic Marketing Solution”.
Don’t fall into their trap.
Unfortunately, these claims are untrue as the followers you are about to buy from these services are fake and do not participate in any of your posts at all.
Here is a real review from a customer who used these ‘growth services’:
Don’t waste your time with them.
I signed up for the free trial out of curiosity, and in fact, I gained over 200 followers in just one night. However, upon closer inspection, I can tell that they are all bot/fake accounts that have nothing to do with my niche.
As soon as the trial period ended and I canceled my subscription, they all started to disappear. Sure enough, three days later I’m back where I started.
They don’t give you any legitimate followers that are actually interested in your content, they can only increase the number – preferably temporarily.
Also, due to Instagram’s algorithm, having the majority of your followers bots/ghosts can ruin the chances of your content showing up on real followers’ feeds.
Again, don’t waste your time and money with them.
Source: Trustpilot
If you’re hoping to become an influencer, the most important metric brands look for is your engagement rate. The number of followers you have is not as important.
It puts your account at risk
Buying Instagram followers directly violates Instagram’s Terms of Service.
Buying them puts your account at risk of permanent suspension.
Furthermore, with recent updates to their algorithm, Instagram is constantly removing fake accounts.
This means that the followers you have purchased will be removed over time.
Totally unworthy. It has a lot of fake accounts that have been around for 1 hour and have absolutely no profile pictures and the followers start disappearing immediately after a few minutes.
Source: Trustpilot
Most of these services are ‘scams’
Looking to buy fake followers from ‘growth services’?
Be prepared for terrible customer service and no refunds.
I wouldn’t recommend them all! I bought 750 followers and 3 days later I lost almost half, I tried to contact them many times but no response. Received your money quickly but failed to respond to emails or provide quality service. If they read this, I want my money back
Source: Trustpilot
Alternative to buying fake followers and what you should do instead
Instead of buying fake followers, you should follow communities of followers on Instagram.
Followchain.org – A community of followers for Instagram.
This is basically where you can self-promote your Instagram page.
You can connect with people in your niche, which will not only help increase your followers but also increase engagement rates.
The best part is, it’s free.
It’s like a social network like Facebook. Instead, it acts as an intermediary so that you can easily connect with others on Instagram.
There are many other watch-to-follow communities on the web.
A complete list of these communities can be found here: https://www.followchain.org/list-of-instagram-follow-for-follow-groups/.
TD;LR: How to tell if someone buys fake followers on Instagram
This is how you can tell the difference between users with fake followers and users with real followers.
Someone with real followers:
If the following list of users looks like this, then they have real followers.
Someone with fake followers:
If the following list of users looks like this, they have fake followers.
Author: Lim How Wei. Lim How Wei is the founder of Followchain, a community that simplifies development and networking for Instagram users. Follow him on Instagram.
Categories: Social Media
Source: thpttranhungdao.edu.vn/en/
