How to Spot Fake Followers on Instagram

Influencer marketing is highly undervalued, and brands are beginning to discover this quite quickly. The influencer marketing space is on pace to be a $15 billion industry by 2022, and it shows no signs of slowing down. With the rapid growth of the industry, fraudulent behaviour such as purchasing mass followers and bots has become all too common. Many so-called influencers have joined this trend in hopes of deceiving brands into sponsorships when in-fact, their audience is predominantly fake. This ultimately results in brands losing significant amounts of money on campaigns that produce no results.

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The value of an influencer is typically based on the number of followers that engage with their content (engagement rate) as well as the number of followers they can reach through their posts (audience reachability). The higher an influencers engagement rate and audience reachability, the more they are typically paid to promote sponsored content. With so many influencers cheating the system. Brands need a way to verify the authenticity of an influencer’s audience before partnering with them.

Hypevertise hopes to bring transparency to the influencer marketing space by offering their Instagram auditor to brands. Hypevertise’s auditing tool allows brands to audit any Instagram account in a matter of seconds. They can then view an in-depth report of the influencer, which contains analytics about their audience, engagement rate and posts. Hypevertise has developed an algorithm that is able to differentiate between a legitimate and fraudulent account. Which is done by analyzing the behaviour of the influencer and their audience. Hypevertise also allows users to save reports for future reference. And run comparison audits on multiple influencers at once giving you the option to compare their analytics side-by-side.

An overall score is calculated based off of all analytics for the account:

Audience Breakdown:

Engagement Breakdown:

Posts Breakdown:

By using tools like Hypevertise’s Instagram auditor, brands can determine the best influencer to use in their campaign, allowing them to receive the most optimal return on investment.