Fake subscribers detection

Instagram 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 Instagram 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 influencer to partner with your brand.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDNlHgTmTJQ

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. 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.

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 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.

Use an Automated Tool

If searching through 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.

Signs of Fake TikTok Followers

It is not quite as easy to recognize fake TikTok followers as it is on platforms like Instagram or Facebook – the provided data is not as detailed. However, we do have some general tips, and of course, recommend our free TikTok audit tool to assist your decision-making.

1. An Account Has Strange Numbers

Genuine accounts show similar patterns when it comes to follower numbers, people followed, and levels of engagement. Although everybody operates their accounts differently, and some beginners don’t run their accounts like more experienced TikTok users, you can still easily spot outliers.

They may like and follow thousands of people, but don’t have many TikTok users following them in return. Perhaps they don’t share many, if any, videos themselves. This doesn’t necessarily mean that they are a bot, but it does suggest that they will be of little value as a follower. 

2. Short Bursts of Activity

When somebody creates a bot, they will often follow thousands of people at the beginning, and then leave the account alone. They may even share a few videos on the account creation day, before stopping sharing fresh content. You may see similar patterns recurring when the bot creators bring the account back to life to snare another batch of accounts to follow misleadingly.

3. An Empty Bio

TikTok’s bios are generally short. You only have 80 characters with which to craft your message. Some users write what appears to be nonsense … just because they can. However, you will often find that fake accounts don’t even bother to do that. They leave their bio blank. You should consider a lack of a profile picture to be a red flag, too, particularly on such a visual platform as TikTok.

4. Clueless Comments

Some fake accounts create comments to make them appear genuine. The problem is that these comments are generic and lack substance. While most TikTok users write relatively brief comments, you want them to at least sound intelligent. Technically, these comments count as engagement, but they are of little value to a brand that is looking for useful followers who match their target market.

5. Few Original Videos

The whole point of TikTok, of course, is to share short videos. Virtually every user shares some, even if the quality is poor. If you come across an account that has operated for more than a few days, you would expect it to have shared original videos, and you should treat the absence of these as a red flag. The Influencer Marketing Hub, in association with HypeAuditor, offers a tool you can use to analyze the quality of the followers of any TikTok account. This tool is in no way affiliated to TikTok. You can either use this to help you determine whether you have quality followers to your TikTok account who will help you meet your goals, or whether you have an inordinate number of fake followers.

Most Channels Suffer from Fake YouTube Subscribers

As with most social media and video sharing networks, YouTube suffers from its share of fake accounts and fake subscribers. Wherever there is a way of making money, you are sure to find somebody trying to game the system. People are far more likely to view videos from popular accounts recommended when they open YouTube than videos shared by newcomers and people with few subscribers. YouTube has a precise algorithm that promotes some videos and ignores others. 

There is also the psychological factor of having a large number of subscribers. It makes your account appear incredibly popular with others, and this has the effect of encouraging many to subscribe.

Many brands who look for influencers with whom to collaborate, scrutinize subscriber numbers and are more willing to talk to channels with large numbers of subscribers. They are also willing to pay more to these channels than to those with fewer subscribers. This means that too many channel owners become tempted to fudge their figures and artificially boost their numbers. 

FREE YouTube Audit Tool [Fake Subscriber & Audience Credibility Checker]

We now provide you with a tool that can help you determine the credibility of any YouTube channel. You can check whether an apparently successful YouTube channel is genuine, or whether it has built its subscriber base using less ethical practices. Enter any YouTube channel’s handle into the YouTube Bot Analytics Tool [YouTube Audit – Fake Subscriber & Audience Credibility Checker]. It will give you an excellent guide to the genuineness of the account.

Of course, you can also use the above Fake Follower Checker to do a YouTube Audit of your channel, to establish the audience quality score of the YouTube channel.