How to spot fake followers
Whether you’re vetting an influencer, checking a competitor or wondering how your own account looks, these are the checks people actually use.
Five quick checks
- Engagement rate. Add up likes and comments on recent posts, divide by followers. Under about 1% on Instagram, with tens of thousands of followers, is a common warning sign. Our engagement calculator does the sum.
- Comment quality. Generic comments (“Nice pic 🔥”, “Love this!”) from accounts with no connection to the topic suggest pods or bots.
- The follower list. Scroll a few dozen. Lots of blank profile photos, random strings of letters and numbers, and accounts that follow thousands but have no posts are the obvious ones.
- Growth pattern. Third-party tools that chart follower history show sudden vertical jumps. Organic growth is lumpy but rarely a cliff.
- Audience location. A Brisbane café whose followers are mostly in countries it has never mentioned is worth a second look. Brands ask creators for screenshots of Insights for this reason.
TikTok-specific signs
- Views versus followers. TikTok videos often reach far beyond followers, so low followers with high views is normal. High followers with consistently tiny views is the stranger pattern.
- Likes versus views. Likes usually run at a few per cent of views. Far above that suggests bought likes; a video with masses of views and almost no likes suggests bought views.
- Profile total likes. The total likes number on a profile divided by videos gives a rough average. If it doesn’t match what the recent videos show, something has changed.
What this means if you buy
We’d rather you know what an observer checks, because it’s the best guide to ordering sensibly. Keep follower orders in proportion, keep posting, and remember that a careful brand will look at engagement before the count. Bought followers raise a number; they don’t survive scrutiny as an audience, and we don’t claim they do.
Can you remove fake followers?
On Instagram you can remove individual followers from your follower list. On TikTok you can remove followers from your list too. Instagram also periodically removes accounts it judges inauthentic, which is why follower counts sometimes dip without warning. Removing a few obvious bots by hand won’t change much; the platforms’ own clean-ups do most of it.