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Becoming a social media influencer is a potentially lucrative career, and Instagram is a fantastic platform for getting started, with studies suggesting 92 percent of marketers and over 87 percent of influencers believe Instagram is the most important social media platform. But becoming an influencer isn’t easy. It takes a lot of time and effort to build an audience of loyal followers. That’s why some people consider shortcuts, such as purchasing fake followers. The first step to running a fake Instagram followers audit is to identify and remove unwanted accounts.

Why You Need a Fake Instagram Followers Audit

Building an audience from scratch is a daunting prospect, and purchasing some fake followers may seem like a great way to kick start your new venture. Unfortunately, once you have those followers, they’re going to stick around — and they have the potential to become an albatross around your neck. There are several compelling reasons to get real and remove the fake accounts as soon as possible.

You might end up getting banned:

You may feel there’s nothing wrong with buying a few fake accounts to make yourself look more impressive, but Instagram doesn’t agree. Buying fake accounts artificially builds your status and damages the end-user experience for people who want to see the very best of Instagram, or who want to partner with successful influencers. As a result, Instagram’s Platform Policy clearly states, “Don’t participate in any ‘like,’ ‘share,’ ‘comment,’ or ‘follower’ exchange programs.” Failure to abide by this policy may result in the termination of your account.

It harms your reputation:

The secret to influencer marketing is authenticity. Audiences admire content creators, trusting them in the same way they would trust their closest friends. In fact, 40 percent of millennial YouTube subscribers say their favorite creators understand them better than their friends. These subscribers rely on influencers to guide their purchasing decisions, and to help them make the best choices. If you break the trust at the heart of the influencer-audience relationship by fronting as something you aren’t, your career in social media may come to an abrupt end.

It doesn’t work, anyway:

You may think that buying some fake followers to boost your online presence is going to be good for business. After all, it stands to reason that people are going to see you have a lot of followers and recognize that you’re someone worth following. But your fake followers aren’t going to engage with your content, and that lack of engagement is going to seem very strange if you have a large audience. At best, it’s going to make it look like you don’t have the skill to interact with the crowd. At worst, it’s going to highlight the fact that your audience isn’t authentic. Ultimately, fake followers are just numbers. They don’t help you to build engagement with a loyal fan base, and if you do run influencer marketing campaigns for brand partners, you’re unlikely to see positive results.

How to Run a Fake Instagram Followers Audit

Whether you’re trying to remove unwanted accounts from your own Instagram audience or you’re searching for influencers to partner with and want to make sure they’re the real deal, it’s worth learning how to identify fake followers. Common methods involve studying follower activity or using an automated program to do the hard work. Of course, it’s worth remembering that the methods you use to perform such an audit are available to anybody else who might be doing some research on you.

Studying Followers

It’s often possible to identify fake followers by studying their profiles and posts. Watch out for these red flags:

  • No profile picture or biography
  • A username generated by a random name generator
  • No posts
  • Posts of stock photographs with no personal content
  • Regular use of tags such as #followback or #like4like
  • A large group of users who all started following at the same time, indicating the use of a fan-buying service
  • Users who don’t comment or like anything
  • Users who leave generic comments such as “wow” or “nice,” which are often stock phrases generated by bots

Using Automated Programs

Manually conducting a fake Instagram followers audit means searching through thousands of users to identify possible fakes. It is an arduous, time-consuming task. If you have a large following, it’s a much better idea to use an automated program to sift through the accounts. Options include free apps with comprehensive analytics, and web-based services where you enter your Instagram handle for an instant report. You may want to install and experiment with several programs to see what kinds of results you get, and to ensure a thorough audit.

Takeaway: Honesty Is the Best Policy

The success of social media is a double-edged sword. Instagram has over one billion active users, a huge number that still pales in comparison to Facebook’s 2.196 billion users. On the one hand, that’s a huge market of hungry internet users who crave a daily dose of quality content. But on the other hand, every post you make is vying for attention against thousands of others. Quickly building an audience with some fake followers may seem like a good way to gain visibility, but there’s a real risk of users spotting you for all the wrong reasons. Don’t be tempted by promises of “real followers” from companies that only want your hard-earned cash. Trust in your content, and develop your audience organically. If you’re concerned about your existing audience, run a fake Instagram followers audit, clear out accounts that aren’t legitimate, and start building from a position of trust.

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