If someone asked me 2 years ago what it means to be an Instagrammer, I would have imagined stars, contracts, product placements. I would have answered that an Instagrammer is a person who earns money simply by taking photos. How wrong was I. Only after I started my journey with Instagram I learnt that when you want to be fair, it actually is a really hard job. Half of all Insta-cooperations are based on fake likes and false statistics. So, how do you go around that and check if someone has bought their likes?
METHOD NO 1 | LIKES TO OBSERVERS RATIO
You simply have to compare the number of likes under a single photo to the number of followers. The number of likes should be around 5-10% of the number of followers. Of course, this method is not perfect, because our followers could simply not enjoy this particular photo. Or… the “Instagrammer” may buy the fakes likes only for some photos, not for every single one of them. Trust me, there are people who actually do that.
Here you can check out two of our photos -one from August 2018 and one from March 2019. The first one was published when we had 1000 followers and the second one – when we had 7000 followers. Our followers clearly thought the elephant was more attractive than Red. Podsiadły and the total number of followers did not matter in this case, so let’s be careful when using this method.
METHOD NO 2 | SPECIAL TOOLS
Two semi-professional tools that will allow you to analyze Instagram and that we often use are SocialBlade and Hypeauditor. SocialBlade allows you to check, among others, ER (Engagement Rate). Below you can check out analyses of two Instagram accounts which have ER and the number of comments on a ‘no comment’ level. It’s worth noting that they have more than 10k and 20k followers. Below you can see an example of Podróż Odbyta’s Engagement Rate.
SocialBlade also allows us to check the number of followers an account has gained in a particular time. In the screenshot below you can also see how fake followers tend to “disappear” after some time.
Thanks to SocialBlade, you can also check if someone has used a follow4follow strategy, which occurs when someone follows us just for a few hours to attract attention to our account and then unfollows us. This strategy does not contribute to the engagement on our account, which you can spot by looking at the number of comments.
Hypeauditor is a bit more advanced tool that you have to pay for, however it does allow you to analyze one account for free. In Hypeauditor you can check where the followers of a particular account come from. For example, a Polish account should not have 40% of their followers coming from India, should it? XD
METHOD NO 3 (THE MOST PROFESSIONAL ONE) | INFLUTOOL
How to check if someone has fake followers? According to our friend Olga who works at an Influencer company, agencies mostly use paid tools– for example Influtool. Therefore we should make sure that our data are available in their database.
INSTAGRAM ACCOUNTS THAT ARE 100% LEGIT
We can guarantee that these accounts are 100% legit and their owners genuinely work really hard to attract all of their followers. Apologies if we forgot about someone – it is impossible to name everyone.