Social media numbers can be deceiving. An influencer may appear to have hundreds of thousands of followers, but not all of them are real. Many accounts boost their profiles by purchasing bots or inactive followers, making their audience look larger than it actually is.
For brands and marketers, this creates a serious problem: how do you know if the followers you are paying to reach are genuine? The answer lies in doing a proper fake follower check before investing in any influencer collaboration.
What Are Fake Followers?
Fake followers are inactive, bot, or spam accounts that artificially inflate a profile’s follower count. They don’t engage with content, share posts, or convert into customers. These accounts are often created in bulk and sold to users who want to appear more popular or influential.
Key indicators of a fake follower include:
- Generic or Missing Profile: No profile picture, or a stock image/irrelevant photo.
- Random Username: A handle filled with random letters, numbers, or sequences (e.g., “user38945721”).
- Little to No Content: Few posts, if any, often of low quality or completely unrelated.
- Zero Engagement: No likes, comments, or shares on their own content.
- Suspicious Following/Followers Ratio: They often follow thousands of accounts but have very few followers themselves.
Another category is “inactive accounts”—formerly real profiles that have been abandoned. Neither type contributes to genuine engagement or community growth.
Why You Must Check Fake Followers Before a Partnership
Before you partner with an influencer, it’s essential to audit their audience for fake followers. A high follower count can be misleading and lead to wasted resources. Here’s why a fake follower check is a critical step in your marketing strategy.
Wasted Marketing Budget and Poor ROI
For businesses and brands, paying an influencer with fake followers is a major waste of money. Bots and fake accounts don’t buy products, use services, or become customers. This means you’re paying to reach an audience that doesn’t exist, leading to a terrible return on your investment (ROI).
Damaged Credibility and Trust
Working with an inauthentic influencer can harm your brand’s reputation. If your audience discovers that you partnered with someone who has fake followers, it can make your brand appear untrustworthy.
Skewed Analytics and Insights
Fake followers corrupt your data. They inflate an influencer’s follower count, making their engagement rate appear much lower than it should be. Without accurate data, you can’t properly measure the success of your campaign.
How to Check If Someone Has Fake Followers
You can perform a fake follower check either manually or by using specialized tools. The best method depends on the size of the account and your available time.
Method 1: The Manual Check Fake Followers
A manual review is effective for spot-checking an account’s authenticity.
1. Inspect Follower Profiles
- Randomly select 20-30 followers from the account’s list.
- Scan their profiles for red flags: lack of a profile picture, nonsensical bios, no recent posts (within the last 6 months), and a suspicious following-to-follower ratio. If a majority of the sampled accounts exhibit these traits, it’s a strong indicator of fake followers.
2. Look at the Engagement Rate
This is the most important factor. A high follower count with a low engagement rate is a major red flag. Engagement rate is the percentage of your followers who interact with your content (likes, comments, shares, etc.).
How to calculate engagement rate:
Average engagement rate = (Total likes + Total comments) / Follower count x 100
A healthy engagement rate typically ranges from 1% to 5%. If someone has 100,000 followers but only gets 200 likes per post, many of their followers are likely fake.
3. Review Comment Quality
Fake followers often leave low-effort or generic comments that add no real value to the conversation.
Signs of suspicious comments:
- Generic phrases: “Great post!”, “Nice pic!”, or only emojis.
- Comments in unrelated languages or completely irrelevant to the content.
- A large number of comments that all look similar.
Real followers will ask questions, give detailed feedback, or reference the post’s content. A flood of these generic comments can indicate someone has purchased fake followers.
4. Monitor Follower Growth Patterns
Real followers usually grow steadily over time. Sudden spikes, such as gaining 5,000 followers overnight, often suggest that the account purchased fake followers.
What to look for:
- Use social media analytics tools to track growth history.
- A sharp, unnatural increase in followers without a viral post or campaign is suspicious.
- Consistent small increases are a sign of organic growth.
5. Compare Follower Count to Content Performance
This method is crucial for platforms like TikTok and YouTube. There should be a reasonable balance between an account’s follower count and its content’s performance.
- Instagram: A profile with 50,000 followers that only gets 200 likes per post is a clear sign of fake followers.
- TikTok: If a user has 100,000 followers but their videos only get a few thousand views, it’s a huge red flag.
- YouTube: A channel with 200,000 subscribers but only 500 views per video likely has a large number of purchased or inactive subscribers.
Method 2: Use a Fake Follower Checker Tool
For a thorough, large-scale influencer analysis, a dedicated tool is the most efficient and accurate solution. Gleemo is a leading option that supports Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.
How to use Gleemo to check if someone has fake followers:
📌 Use Gleemo’s free fake follower checker tool
📌 Select the Platform: Choose the social media platform you want to analyze, such as Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube.
📌 Enter the Username: Input the username of the account you wish to evaluate. This can be your own account or an influencer’s profile.
📌 Check Fake Followers: The tool scans the audience and generates a detailed report in seconds.
The report includes detailed insights such as:
- Estimated percentage of fake or inactive followers–helping you understand audience authenticity.
- Engagement rate trends–showing how interactions compare to follower count over time.
- Audience quality and growth analysis–identifying real, active followers versus suspicious accounts.
These tools offer free basic scans and more detailed, paid reports, making them indispensable for brands vetting influencers or creators auditing their own audiences.
Final Thoughts
Performing a fake follower check has become essential for any brand or marketer working with social media influencers. By reviewing growth patterns, engagement, comments, follower profiles, and audience demographics—and by using reliable tools like Gleemo—you can separate real influence from inflated numbers.
Ready to check your account? Use the tools below:
👉 Free Instagram Fake Follower Checker
👉 Free TikTok Fake Follower Checker
👉 Free YouTube Fake Follower Checker
FAQs
How to check fake followers on Instagram?
Look at growth history, engagement rates, and comment quality. Automated tools like Gleemo can save time by analyzing follower authenticity at scale.
How to tell if someone bought Instagram followers?
Signs include sudden spikes in followers, poor engagement compared to audience size, and large numbers of inactive or empty accounts.
What is the best way to check TikTok fake followers?
Compare follower count with average video views. If the numbers do not align, the account may rely on fake followers.
Do fake followers affect YouTube?
Yes. Fake subscribers make a channel look bigger but do not engage with videos. This lowers watch time and misleads advertisers.
Why should brands care about fake followers?
Because fake audiences waste money, reduce trust, and harm campaign outcomes. A proper fake followers check protects both budgets and reputation.
