You Won’t Go Anywhere With Fake Followers!

Nader Abdi
8 min readJan 1, 2021
Fake followers pulling down the upgoing arrow representing your page’s progress.

If you believe a high number of followers is enough for success on Instagram, think twice! If you intend to make your account become a popular and first-rated Instagram page with no great effort, you only have one way to get there: persuade the Instagram itself to help your page grow! how? by removing fake followers, high-quality contents and keeping your Engagement rate above average. All these will eventually come together and help Instagram algorithm recognize your page user-friendly. However, as you may have already guessed, this is much easier said than done.

removing fake followers will reflect that you have no intention to grow with cheating. Also, It will help you keep your Engagement Rate above standard. But, what does fake follower mean? what’s engagement rate? how are these two related? we will tell you everything you need to know.

What Does “Fake Follower” Mean at All?

To make a long story short, fake followers are those accounts on Instagram which have followed you but do not belong to a real person. These accounts are usually created in massive quantities in order to follow certain accounts and increase their number of followers in a very short time. to make everything look right, they randomly follow other pages, too. After this stage, they are mostly abandoned and they do not perform any activity.

Additionally, sometimes the phrase “Fake Followers” may refer to ghost accounts. ghost accounts are the ones that haven’t been active for ages, despite belonging to a real person. accordingly, no matter what kind of fake followers we are dealing with, they all have one thing in common: they won’t have any engagement with your page.

What Does “Engagement Rate” Mean on Instagram?

A woman standing next to different chart types.

“Engagement rate” simply determines what percentage of the viewers of your Instagram profile choose to react to your content in a certain period of time. Public users may react to your posts by liking, sharing, saving, or writing a comment underneath them. when it comes to Instagram stories or lives, number of views and replies are considered as engagements. If your page is already a business or creator page, this score is highlighted in Instagram Insights section as ’’Interactions’’ . If we divide total interactions by the number of followers, then multiply the answer by 100, the final score will be the engagement rate of your Instagram page in a specific period of time by percentage.

Why Is Engagement Rate So Important?

Engagement rate is the main factor that determines whether your page and its content is important to public users or not. If a certain page has an engagement rate above the average, even if it doesn’t have a high number of followers, there is a quite good chance its posts might be featured in Instagram explore section. If so, the number of this page’s followers will keep rising significantly and passively without need to any certain activity more than just content creation.

Why Should I Remove My Fake Followers?

Generally, even real followers who have more followings than usual, will do no good for your page. There is a small chance that these accounts will notice your content on their feed, let alone having interaction with them. These accounts, no matter fake or real, are responsible for a significant drop of your engagement rate which is not desirable for any user willing to improve the performance of his/her page on Instagram.

Another reason for removing fake followers is trust-related issues. This is especially important if you have business page on Instagram. Clients should trust you and your page in order to purchase your goods or services. Although high number of followers may seem to attract attention at first glance; but having numerous abandoned pages with no profile pictures and weird usernames, will make users think twice before trusting you, and that’s what you don’t really want to happen.

An infographic comparing real and fake followers.

In addition to what’s been said above, fake followers may inflict additional charges to page owners whose followers are mostly consisted of fake accounts. As these account won’t have any interaction with your page, you will have to purchase likes and comments to make everything seem normal and steady. This may not seem a serious problem if only a minor fraction of your followers are fake. However, if you own a business or creator page with serious number of fake followers, you will need to purchase likes and comments in order to avoid the poor interaction stats damage your reputation. You surely don’t want a page, for example, with 10K followers which its posts hits only 90–200 likes and just a couple of comments represent you or your business on Instagram, do you?

How to Spot Fake Followers?

A magnifier and ways to distinguish fake followers written in boxes around it.

Although sometimes it is possible to mistaken real pages for fake ones, but there are a couple of ways to distinguish fake followers from real accounts with a high accuracy. But how? As we said before, fake accounts do not belong to real people, so it is already expected that they often won’t function as normal page. Here are some ways to spot fake followers of your page.

1. Number of Followers & Followings

As mentioned above, fake accounts are created in order to follow rather than being followed so most of them don’t feature a high number of followers. Another reason for this issue is that these pages usually don’t share any posts or stories, so there is no reason for users to follower such pages. This issue gets even more notable when we compare their number of followers and followings. Sometimes even followers to followings ratio of these pages reaches 1:40!

sometimes fake accounts themselves have numerous fake followers to deceive other users they are real. Even is this situation, it is obviously understandable. how can a newly created page with no proper username, no valid profile photo and no content shared on it, have a considerable number of followers?

2. Profile Picture

As these accounts do not have real owners, they normally lack a valid profile photo. Even if there is a profile picture, it is usually a picture of animals, landscapes, flowers, etc. Sometimes they even use photos which don’t make sense at all: like a naively cropped picture. It is obvious that some users may choose to hide their identity in Instagram by using an unrelated profile photo, but it is convincing enough if we assume that the first and the most important motive of many people for being on Instagram is to see and to be seen by the other users. Not having a profile photo increases the possibility of an account being fake, but it is not enough for jumping to conclusions.

3. Fake Account Activity

Fake accounts often do not perform any activity, but sometimes creators of these accounts may even publish a couple of posts to convince other users that they are real. Take it to your consideration that since these accounts are created in mass quantities, the quality of contents on these pages are noticeably low. they usually share their posts without proper caption, location or tags. Also, they usually post only pictures, most of them with a resolution not anywhere near good, in order to simply keep charges low. Moreover, it is usually seen that a single content is reposted for several times on this type of accounts.

When it comes to story, usually these accounts simply don't share any stories or lives. To make long story short, fake pages do not preform any activity or even if they do, their activities are not reasonable. It can be said that this factor is the most important one when judging if a page is real or fake.

4. Interactions of Fake Followers With Your Content

Another evidence for fake follower distinction, is their interactions with your post. As we said before, because these accounts don’t belong to real people, so it is obvious that they either won’t have any interactions with your content at all or their interactions won’t be relative to your content by any means. Although most of fake accounts are abandoned at the very first stages, some of them are being run by spam bots. but how to spot fake accounts which are being run by these bots?

Bots usually show no emotion or flexibility in their activities. For example, a normal follower of your page may like some of your posts, comment on some other and every comment contains unique texts expressing certain feelings. On the other hand, bots either like all your posts or they like none. It is likely just the same about comments, too. They whether comment on all posts of yours or on none of them. Also, their comments are some invariant texts which they use for several times and they are sometimes ridiculously unrelated to the content of your posts. This factor too is very important in fake follower distinction.

What if I Already Have Plenty of Followers? Do I Have to Check for Fake Followers ONE BY ONE?

A robot representing INBO Instagram bot.

Simply, NO! There are some Instagram bots out there which can do this job for you. One of best Instagram bots that not only helps you manage your Instagram page activity (including sharing posts and stories, posting comments to followers posts, liking posts of followers, etc.), but it has a fake-follower-removing feature, is INBO smart Instagram bot. This bot spots fake followers with an accuracy over 92% and removes them instantly.

You can use INBO bot to increase your number of reaches in Instagram significantly. You can define your target users to INBO bot using hashtags, opponent pages, or your location of interest. Then, the only thing you have to do is to choose which action you want the bot to perform on these target users: to like, to comment or to follow them. Undoubtedly, you will be amazed by what INBO bot is capable of!

Wrapping Up

Even if it means losing a great number of your followers (sometimes even half of them!), fake followers need to be removed from your followers list. If you intend to simply BE on Instagram, it really doesn’t matter much whether you remove fake followers or not. But if you are considering business aspects and want to increase your income from Instagram significantly, or if you have a normal page but you intend to gain more followers and do this rapidly, you have to play by Instagram rules: This means you should keep your Engagement Rate high and The first step towards this goal, is losing your fake followers. In this article, we describe why it is important to remove fake followers, how to spot them and how to remove them if you have numerous followers. Thank you for reading this, and hope you found this helpful!

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Nader Abdi

دنیایه کوچکی داخل کامپیوترم دارم عاشق برنامه نویسی فعال در حوزه بلاکچین کلا طرفدار آزدی هستم سیستم عامل لینوکس زبان های برنامه نویسی اوپن سورس و در نهایت بیت کو