How to Spot Fake Accounts and Bots on Instagram

So, you have a product you hope to promote…any product (be it your writing or something else). By a stroke of amazing luck you just got contacted by an influencer with 100k followers who would be happy to partner with you.

Of course, you’ll need to pay for them to feature and discuss your product on their social media. But, it will be worth it because your product will be showcased in front of a potential, new audience of over 100k! Right?

Maybe. IF the audience is real.

You can purchase almost anything on websites like GoDaddy. That includes social media followers, post likes and post comments. While these can make an account look appealing, purchased followers are generally inactive accounts opened solely for the purpose of fake-following for money. I’m focusing on spotting these fakes on IG, however, it’s not that different on TikTok and Facebook.

So, before you send any money in anyone’s direction on IG, check…

How old is the account?

Unless a person was already famous prior to opening their social media account, it will take them years to build up a real audience of over 100k followers. Even 2–3k followers take months of regular posting. How old is the influencer account?

To check, open their profile, click on the three dots in the right-hand corner and then click on ‘About This Account’. Here you will see the date when they joined Instagram. If the account is a month old, has 100k followers and they aren’t Ariana Grande or Michelle Obama then it’s all fake.

What’s on the account?

Next step is to quickly scroll down their content.

Click on a recent post. When is it from? Click on an older post. When is it from? If it looks like 50 posts were made in the span of a week then the account is fake: they were just filling it quickly with content to make it look real.

What are the demographics of the followers?

Click on some of the followers of the account. Purchased followers are easy to identify.

1. Their accounts will have either zero or almost zero posts.
2. If the fake-follower accounts do contain posts, those posts will make little sense: just a couple of random, disjointed photos. Additionally most, if not all, posts on fake accounts will have been made in a span of a day or two, again meaning that the follower account was quickly opened and filled up with just enough content to make it look legit so that it could be used to fake-follow for money.
3. The accounts of fake followers will follow thousands of people while having zero (or close to zero) followers of their own.
4. Companies selling followers provide followers mainly from one specific country or continent. Therefore, you will notice that an account that has fake followers will have hundreds of followers in a row with Arabic user names (or hundreds of Indian user names or hundreds of Mandarin user names etc…) even though the content of the account is in English and aimed at North America, Europe or Australia.

Are there post views and/or comments?

Content engagement can be difficult to obtain, even for real accounts. However, the average rate of engagement is 0.5%-2% per post. So, if someone has 100 followers and their post receives 1 like or comment, that means they got a 1% engagement.

Therefore, if an account has 10k followers and their posts are receiving 1-2 likes each, that is a 0.1-0.2% engagement, meaning that the majority of this account's followers are low quality and most likely purchased.

Is the frequency or number of the views odd?

You can also purchase views for IG posts. However, what you will notice with purchased views is that there will be a very precise number of views for every post, OR they purchase views only every now and then so you’ll get 5 posts in a row with 1k views and then the next five will have 1 view each, yet the quality or type of the post is not different enough to warrant such a discrepancy in post views.

Is the quality of comments low?

Sadly, you can also purchase comments for IG. However, bought comments are always very obvious for the following reasons:

1. They will be vague, low quality comments such as “great post”. You will not see any real questions, discussions or high quality interactions.
2. The same type of comment will repeat over and over for most posts, regardless of post content.
3. The grammar and spelling will usually be horrendous.

It may seem like a hassle to check the above but it honestly takes only a couple of minutes of clicking and, when it saves you money, that clicking is worth it. Also, once you figure out what fake-follower accounts look like, you will be able to pick them out in seconds.

Even if an account is legitimate and has legitimate, active followers, you still need to ask yourself whether the followers of said-account are the right ones for your product. For example, if you write horror novels a bookstagram account that mostly focuses on romance may not be the right use of your promotional budget.

Lastly, think hard about what you are actually trying to accomplish when advertising on Instagram and whether it’s the right fit for your goals. For myself, I’ve actually found that IG has been the least cost effective method to promote my books. I’ve had much better results with other forms of advertising and media. If you are interested, check out this article where I go over many of the advertising methods I tried and how they worked out for me, as well as some tips on how to use them to their best advantage:

MARKETING FOR INDIE BOOKS

Hope this helped some of you out there!

*Also published on Medium*