.png)
Instagram is one of the most popular platforms with over 2.4 billion monthly active users, earning its place as the 4th most used social media network around the world. From influencer marketing to brand collaborations, Instagram has become a vital tool for both content creators and brands.
However, a major concern within the platform is the rise of Instagram bots and fake followers, with nearly 49% of influencers reportedly having some degree of inauthentic or automated accounts in their audience. These fake profiles can harm your engagement rate, distort analytics, and jeopardize partnership opportunities with brands.
Some clear indicators to identify bots on Instagram include:
In this article we’ll explore everything you need to know to identify Instagram bots, how to remove fake followers, and what steps you can take to protect your Instagram account. Let’s dive into it!
Instagram bots are automated accounts designed to perform certain actions on the platform. In other words, a bot is just a piece of software programmed to do certain tasks, such as following random users to grow your account.
These actions can include:
These bots are designed to increase your follower count. They automatically follow different accounts on Instagram, and sometimes they can also unfollow if they don’t get a follow back.
The thing with these bots is that they appear to be good as they increase your audience, however these bots hardly ever interact with your content. Most of the time they have zero posts, no profile picture and can be following lots and lots of other accounts.
These bots are designed to send messages to you with links to different accounts or products for you to try. They basically hit your DM’s advertising different things.
These bots are the most active ones, designed to like, comment and view your content in order to make your account appear more credible.
The engagement bots try to generate is always irrelevant, repetitive and even spammy.
At first glance, bots can inflate your numbers. The thing is that they don’t build real connections or help with long term growth.
Some key characteristics to identify fake subscribers include:
If you are on Instagram, you’ve probably already seen a bot comment or maybe, some bot DM you are trying to follow you at least once. While they might look normal on the surface, they look normal, there are some key signs that make them easily recognizable.
Sometimes you can find accounts with a massive number of followers that don’t have the high engagement expected. An imbalance between followers and likes and comments may indicate fake followers or bots.
Real followers are much more likely to interact with your posts because they truly enjoyed watching your content and that’s why they follow you.
How can you calculate an Instagram Influencer’s engagement? You can use the Engagement Rate formula.
If you want to, you can check out our free tool to automatically calculate your ER with Influencer Hero!
Typically a good engagement rate goes above 1%, but the average can vary from 0.50% to 5.0%, depending on the number of followers an account has, niche, audience location, and post format.
Whenever an Instagram account has an unnatural number of followers added to its community without an apparent reason, it may indicate bots presence.
It’s not that unpredictable growth can never happen overnight. Sometimes, Reels go viral and gain lots of views and followers in a couple of hours or days. But this would be justified as a viral trend or occasion that serves as an explanation for the fast growth.
Real followers make comments related to the main topics or discussion in your posts. Vague comments, generic phrases, like "Nice!" - “Cool pic!” or random emojis may indicate bots.
Also, sometimes there are a lot of spam comments promoting different sites or other accounts in the comment section.
Comparing the number of followers to the total interactions on different posts is a great way to detect the presence of bots.
If they are real followers, the number of likes and comments will be in a way related to that number. But if the follower count is high, but the account has almost no likes nor comments, that is a clear red flag for fake followers.
Abbie shared with her community her weekend at Coachella. She shared a funny video with different clips eating food and her comments blew up. She reached 30.1K likes and 100+ comments with people agreeing with her, commenting on what they also like and even tagging friends to see.
This is clearly a sign of a real community. Her followers are not only liking her posts, but also leaving related comments that reflect real interest.
Bots only follow you on Instagram but don’t take the time to really interact with your posts.
Organic audiences are often concentrated in the creator’s target demographic or region. But sometimes there are weird groups of followers for random countries that have no relation with the creator nor the content. In most cases, these are bots accounts.
A high follower count paired with very low Story views or Live viewers is a strong sign that an account might have bot followers. While fake followers can inflate numbers, they don’t watch Stories, join Lives, or engage in meaningful ways with what you post on Instagram.
Unlike feed likes, Stories and Lives are harder to fake, making them a more accurate reflection of real audience engagement.
Real followers often engage with a creator across multiple platforms, not just Instagram. If an influencer has a big community on Instagram but little to no presence on Twitter, YouTube or TikTok, it could indicate the presence of fake followers.
If you also want to learn how to detect fake audiences on YouTube, check out our article on How to Spot YouTube Fake Subscribers.
Instagram influencers, especially the ones focused on growing their community, are consistently posting new content. Consistency allows them to engage more with their audience as well as reach new audiences.
Long periods of inactivity followed by sudden posts after posts combined with an increase of followers, can be an indicator of bot activity or purchased subscribers.
Instagram offers creators Insights that can reveal a lot of information related to the authenticity of an influencer’s audience. By analyzing their metrics, you can identify potential red flags that might indicate fake followers or bot activity.
Reviewing your Instagram Insights helps you spot inconsistencies in your audience and work on them to protect your account's credibility.
Sometimes spotting fake followers manually isn’t enough. Luckily, there are tools that can do the hard work for you. We rounded up the Top Tools to Spot Fake Followers on YouTube, and the best part is, most of them can be used for Instagram accounts too.
Besides the basic signs you can manually learn to detect fake followers there are different online tools you can use to spot fake followers or bots on Instagram.
Tools to spot fake followers on Instagram are websites or apps designed to identify suspicious, inactive, or inauthentic accounts following Instagram profiles. These tools help users, creators, and brands ensure that their audience is real, engaged, and aligned with their goals.
The Top 3 tools to spot and remove fake followers on Instagram are:
If you want to learn more about these tools, you can check out our article on Top 5 Tools to Spot and Remove Instagram Fake Followers!
The short answer is: Engagement!
Let’s break it down a little bit. Instagram runs on engagement, meaning that the more your followers interact with your content, the better! The more engagement metrics such as likes, shares, comments, saves, Reels views, and Story views, the more the algorithm is going to push your content to new audiences.
When a huge portion of your followers are fake or bots, they won’t engage. Your posts won’t have as many impressions as if you were dealing only with real people interested in your content so Instagram algorithm won’t see the value in your posts and stop recommending you. Even worse? If it keeps happening, Instagram may stop showing your content altogether.
Here are some key metrics Instagram often uses to decide what content gets more reach:
Fake followers are not loyal to your content. They’re dead weight. And the algorithm knows it. Having lots of bots can trigger a series of bad consequences:
Instagram has strict guidelines about fake followers. By combining the algorithm and machine learning, the platform can detect suspicious activity, such as mass-following, fake followers and bots, not real engagement.
If Instagram detects fake followers on your account:
Hootsuit Lab is a YouTube channel that every week shares videos with experiments, hacks, explainers, and strategies. They recently made a series on what happens when you buy fake followers on Instagram.
They tried one of the different websites where you can purchase followers and they bought 1,000.
What happened next? Sure the Instagram followers increase but nothing else actually happens: they don't like your posts, they don't link your comments or click the link in your bio. They just hang around looking extremely fake.
Buying followers is both a waste of time and money and a high-risk activity that can hur your accotunt in the long run.
Building a loyal community on Instagram is going to make your account growth! Having real people following what you do is going to get you real engagement.
Real followers take longer to get, but once you convince them they are more likely to stay, interact with your content and ideas and help you grow your Instagram presence. So here are some tips to take into account while building your dream audience!
Always focus on the type of content you want to create and find the best way to do so. Find your niche and those topics that truly resonate with your audience. Create valuable, entertaining and engaging content that keeps your followers wanting more and more!
Use relevant keywords and hashtags in your posts description. Find relevant words and phrases to catch the attention of potential followers.
Consistency is the key to growth. Develop a content schedule, such as weekly or bi-weekly uploads and respect the posting days.
Take care of your community. Interact with your followers, encourage likes and comments. You can also use polls and live streams to build stronger connections and even have your own broadcast chat to share your latest news and ideas through DM’s.
Find a niche you are comfortable working in and explore every topic related to that specific subgroup. Niche content helps attract a specific, dedicated audience.
Share videos and photos on other platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter for better awareness and discoverability.
Work with creators in your niche for mutual promotion. Do collaborative posts in order to expose your profile to new audiences. It’s a win-win scenario for both creators as they both have the opportunity to gain more viewers.
Create content around trending challenges, events, or viral topics to boost your account’s visibility.
Keep Posting, Keep Learning! Success is always about consistency. Make different kinds of posts, such as photos, reels, carousels, and track their performance. Experiment with different descriptions and always check how your followers react to your content to find out what they like the most.
Protect your content from spammy comments. You can go to your account Settings, then click on Privacy and then “Hidden Words” to “Manage Custom Words or Phrases”. Here, you can enter common bot-like comments, such as “promote it on...” or “DM for collab”, to automatically hide them from your posts.
This won’t eliminate bots entirely, but it helps keep your comment section clean!
Regularly monitoring your overall performance is always recommended. If your account is growing fast, you can always double check your followers count to ensure your profile remains clean and authentic.
Once you learn how to identify bots and fake followers on Instagram, removing them is not that hard to do, but it will take time!
The best way to remove bots is to manually go over your followers and remove those suspicious accounts. Just go to your Profile, and click on your Followers list. Then, you can remove each bot or ghost account simply by clicking on ‘Remove’.
If you want to, you can also block these users to prevent them from interacting with your content in the future. Just go to their Profile, click on the three dots at the top right, and select ‘Block’.
You can take a couple of hours out of your week to check for bots and keep your audience clean.
If you struggle to find the time to work on this, you can always hire a virtual assistant. There are lots of candidates with flexible hour rates that can really help you out. Think of it as an investment in your account: the more authentic your audience is, the more monetization opportunities.
You can also find online tools to spot fake followers on Instagram and deal with them in a faster way!
Instagram might seem like a place where all that matters is the amount of followers you have. The bigger the numbers, the bigger opportunities on the platform.
Nonetheless, the actual most important thing is how engaged your audience is to your profile and content. That’s why identifying and removing fake followers and Instagram bots is crucial. Real followers drive meaningful interactions, improve your algorithmic reach, and attract better deals from brands that value organic engagement over vanity metrics. In the end, it’s not just about how many people follow you, it’s about how many truly connect with your content.
%20(1).jpg)
_logo.svg.png){kind=logo}
%201.png)
