Social media is all about the numbers, and people are often impressed when someone boasts a million plus followers on any platform, but what if they bought those followers? How can you tell? It’s easy to do, and easy to spot fake followers and engagement when you know what to look for.

3 Ways to Spot Fake Followers

It’s incredibly easy to buy followers and likes for any platform, and it doesn’t cost that much either. A quick Google search will result in tons of options, with some even offering a free sample. You may be tempted to boost your numbers with these services, but if you ever want your account to do well, I advise against artificially inflating your numbers.

But many people do try and take the easy route to social media stardom, and there are ways you can easily tell:

1 – Big Follower Number, Little Engagement

One of the easiest ways to tell someone has bought followers is when they have a supposed big following, but nobody likes or comments. At first glance, it’s pretty impressive they have 200k followers, but then why do all their posts have very little likes and comments?

It’s because bots and fake accounts don’t engage. They don’t like or comment. And because the account has so many fake followers, the real followers won’t get to see their posts. They should at least be able to get 100+ likes with that many followers!

2 – Lots of Likes, but No Comments

The next tipoff is when their posts have thousands of likes, but no comments. This is because likes are cheap, and comments are expensive! You can easily get a thousand likes for a few dollars, but it would cost you five times that much for actual comments.

3 – Generic or Strange Comments

Some people have a lot of money to invest in their fake following and buy comments as well. They can have a hundred comments, but they will be mostly a few emojis, like the fire symbol or thumbs ups. And also, random generic statements of just 2-3 words like “Great post.”

Is It Ever OK to Buy Followers?

If you are wondering why I know these things, it’s because I actually bought followers before! It was on my @geekmamasblog Instagram account, and I needed at least 5k followers to apply for a certain campaign, and in a moment of weakness, I bought 1000 followers for $3. It was that easy!

Within about five minutes, my notifications were flooded with my new followers. A quick glance at their names looked a little suspicious, as they were all things like “Brian6749437” or “Angel8696746.” Mostly names and a lot of numbers.

Clicking on their profile would reveal a handful of photos and very little followers, but they were following thousands of people. Thousands of other people like me, who paid for them to follow.

And guess what happened shortly after? My engagement tanked and the followers started dropping off rather quickly. I did manage to snag that campaign that I needed the numbers for, but after posting the work for it, it got very little likes and comments.

Why? Because my new followers weren’t real, and Meta was busy pushing my content to them and not my real followers.

My likes continued to be pretty dismal after that and have barely bounced back. I also tried an Instagram marketing agency, and their results were about the same- it all came off as fake, forced engagement.

Heed My Warning- it’s not worth it!

You are guaranteed to get a short-term boost on your account, but if you plan on doing this for the long haul, you are setting yourself up for failure. I don’t know if I’ll ever get that account back to where it was, but I’ve been trying to go through and remove all the fake accounts.

Instagram actually made that easier a couple months ago when they added the new feature that lets you bulk remove spam accounts! It’s really saved me some time. Almost all the ones that show up on the list are the fake followers. So, I should have them all removed soon.

So, here’s the bottom line: Fake followers are easy to get, but your account will suffer and the only way to keep it going is to continuously buy more followers, likes and comments. So don’t get that cycle started.