Fake Influencer & Credibility Tool

Fake followers are bots or fraudulent social media accounts that follow people to boost their overall audience count. People can pay services that use these bots to follow them and artificially inflate their audience on social media, leading to potential brand partnerships. Another method of gaining fraudulent followers is participating in follow-for-follow schemes, in which a creator follows a random account if they reciprocate the favor. 

You can determine if a social media profile has fake followers by checking several things, including: 

• Whether the comments seem spammy. If they don’t make sense, it’s probably a bot. 
• The accounts of several followers. If a few of them have no profile info, no posts, or no followers themselves, they may be bots. 
• Whether the creator’s engagement rate is abnormal. If the rate is super low or high, this can signify something isn’t quite right. 

You can also use GRIN’s Fake Influencer & Credibility tool to determine the authenticity of a creator’s audience with little to no effort. 

A 2018 report from The Information showed that bots comprised roughly 10% of all Instagram accounts. 

There are a few key things to look for when evaluating whether or not a follower is real, including: 

• How many friends/followers/subscribers they have and how many accounts they follow in return. Many fake profiles use a follow-for-follow scheme to inflate their audience artificially. If their following is roughly the same size as the number of accounts they follow, they may be a bot. On the other hand, if they have almost no followers but follow a ton of profiles, that’s also a red flag. 

• Their profile information. If their username is a string of random characters, they’re missing a profile photo, or they only have a handful of posts, they are probably a fake account. 

• Their posts. If they only share content from others and don’t post any original content, they may be fake. 

• Their comments on posts. If most of their comments are spammy, irrelevant, nonsensical, or in a different language than the majority of their content, they may be a bot. 

• The age of their account. If they have a significant following and their profile is only a few weeks or months old, this can be a sign they’re a fake account. 

If you want to determine the authenticity of an Instagram influencer’s followers, do the following: 

• Click into a follower’s profile, and look around. Do they have a profile pic, a bio, and a legitimate-sounding handle? Do they have a reasonable number of posts, and if so, were they shared at regular intervals or within a short period? 

• Check their tagged photos. If they don’t have any tagged images or their tagged photos seem spammy, they’re probably a bot. 

• Do steps 1 and 2 with several of the influencer’s followers. If a significant number of accounts seem fake, their audience is probably not very credible. 

• Head back to the influencer’s account and check their engagement rate. You can do this by dividing the number of engagements by their number of followers. If the engagement rate seems way too high or way too low, they might have a significant number of bots following them. Learn more about reasonable engagement rates. 

You can also tell if an Instagram influencer has many fraudulent followers using GRIN’s Fake Influencer & Credibility tool. 

While it isn’t illegal to have fake followers, it is against most major social platforms’ community guidelines. Repercussions for purchasing fraudulent followers or participating in follow-for-follow schemes can include reduced capabilities on the platforms and losing your account entirely. 

You can take a manual approach to searching through a creator’s audience and evaluating their followers’ credibility, but that can take a significant amount of time, especially when considering mega or celebrity influencers. 

Instead, save your time and use GRIN’s Fake Influencer & Credibility tool to determine the authenticity of a person's audience in seconds. 

Meta, Instagram’s parent company, announced in May 2022 that it had removed billions of fraudulent profiles from Facebook, another one of its social platforms. While the company did not provide news about deleting fake accounts from Instagram, we can assume it is launching the same efforts across all platforms, including Instagram and WhatsApp. 

Bots are one type of fake follower, but there are also follow-for-follow or share-for-share schemes where people will agree to interact with random profiles if they reciprocate the favor. These followers are also fake since they don’t have a genuine interest in a creator’s content. 

You can manually audit an influencer’s followers to see how many of them seem authentic, but this can be prone to human error and take a ton of time. Instead, use GRIN’s Fake Influencer and Credibility tool to get a credibility score in seconds. 

We don’t recommend working with an influencer with fraudulent followers for two main reasons. These are: 

• Weaker ROI - When you pay an influencer to share your brand story with their audience, you want to be sure it’s being seen by real people who will remember your company and make purchases. Fake followers have no interest in listening to creators or supporting the businesses they promote. 

• Lack of trust - When you’re building a business relationship with a creator, you want to be able to trust them. If they artificially inflate their follower count to land brand deals, they probably won’t make an ideal partner. 

While there’s no way to be certain whether someone is buying followers on social media, you can determine their audience credibility and make assumptions from there. Here’s how to do it: 

• Use GRIN’s Fake Influencer & Audience Credibility tool. Copy and paste a link to a person’s social media profile and click “Check.”

• Analyze the credibility score. The closer the score is to 100, the more authentic their audience is. 

When gauging the authenticity of an Instagram follower, they are likely real if: 

• They have several posts spaced out over time. Some bots have very few posts, while others may have a ton posted within a very short period. Also, check for original-looking content. If all the account does is RT or share other people’s content, it may be fake. 

• They have tagged photos of themselves. If they aren't tagged in pictures or their tagged photos seem spammy, they may be a bot. 

• They have authentic interactions with other users. Are they leaving thoughtful comments on posts? If so, they’re probably real. If they’re posting irrelevant, confusing, or extremely vague comments, they’re probably fake.