Are Your Instagram Influencers Buying Their Followers?!
A lot of marketers fell into this trap, where they are astonished with the amount of followers that some popular Instagram influencers have. This may seen very tempting as you think about what those numbers may mean to your brand exposure, awareness, and engagement. From what I’ve learned in University of Ottawa, NEVER trust those numbers 100%. Those numbers cannot tell you the full truth, just like how you cannot judge a book by its cover. If you do not do your research before hiring your Instagram influencer, you will waste thousands of dollars in ineffective promotions. So do your research before hand, as it only takes less than 1 hour, and at a zero to a minimum cost.
Buying fake Instagram followers
Currently, there are many services in the marketplace that offers Instagrammers to buy hundrends and thouands of fake followers onto their account effortlessly. Some companies have packages, which state the amount of comments and likes that it will generate with their service, etc. Some companies even differentiate themselves by stating that quality of followers that it can give to their customers. As you can see from the picture below, these services can range from tens to hundreds of dollar.
There are more people than you think that use these services, and YES, people are willing to pay this money to use these services. Think about it, if someone depended their livelihood on their Instagram followers, then their numbers matter a lot to them. The higher number of followers implies more sponsorships, better deals, and more profit.
I’m pretty sure you have seen one of these accounts before on Instagram. These accounts tend to have very few followers and are following a large amount of accounts. These accounts barely have any posts. If all of these points are satisfied, then this account is highly suspicious of being a fake account.
Instagram bot services are becoming more sophisticated now. As we saw from the first picture, services are offering different qualities of followers. BUT, there are still ways in determining whether your Instagram influencer, or your desired Instagram influencer have fake followers.
Uncovering fake followers
Social blade is a website that allows you to analyze an Instagram account statistics on its growth. Social blade is a great data anyltics tool to use to help track any stats you want to analyze, be it YouTube, Twitter, Twitch, and more. Most importantly, this tool is FREE.
Social Blade Website: https://socialblade.com
Here is where the fun and drama really begins. I will enter certain popular Instagram influencers and analyze their stats, and give you some hints whether they have bought their followers, and whether it is genuine. But for the sake of my chosen Instagram influencer, I will not expose any of their names.
Healthy growing account
This is what a healthy and growing Instagram account should look like. This graph displays a steady and smooth growth, which does not indicate any shady activities.
Slightly suspicious account
Now take a look at this one. This particular Instagram influencer have on average an incremental increase of hundreds of followers. The graph does not look anything special. but on the highlighted day, this particular person suddenly had an increase in thousand of followers, and the very next day it drops back to the usual hundreds. This is an example that suggests some fishy activities going. This account is highly suspicious of buying followers on that particular day.
Highly suspicious account
This one displays very VERY interesting statistics. As you can see, there was an unusual surge of growth during some days. Then, right after this trend, there were huge numbers of followers unfollowing. This trend follows through the month of January. Through my speculation, this user has bought followers, and right after the payment was done, those followers unfollowed this account. Scenario 2 is that Instagram has found out about those fake accounts and immediately shut them down. These data exhibits high chances that this user has bought their followings.
Dying account
The world is changing and so are people. People’s taste are ever changing and evolving. An Instagram account with a huge following base does mean everything, even if its followers are real. Take a look at this Instagram account. This account have approximately 600,000 thousand followers. However, this account is decreasing in number of followers day by day. It may suggest that this influencer is no longer relevant to a broad base of audience. This implies major reconsideration whether collaborating with this influencer would benefit the brand, considering you want to establish a sustainable long-term brand strategy.
Intuitively, you can make cross-reference between the numbers of followers a user may have, in relation to the number of comments and likes they have. If this account is growing, the number of likes and comments should show similar trend. However, if this trend is not present, you may want to further investigate how authentic the influencer following is.
Final words
I hope you enjoyed my content and have found it interesting and educating. My intentions are not to scare away marketers from influence marketing on Instagram. But instead, to provide marketers with more information to make more informed choices. Everything has a risk, but being an informed consumer would definitely reduce these risks. On an endnote, if the influencers have a healthy following, I do believe utilizing Instagram exhibits high potential for a brand’s web marketing strategy. That is if the strategy is coherent with your brand.
If you find my content to be interesting follow for more upcoming interesting content. And if you want to learn more about the author behind these content, feel free to click on below to go to my personal website.
