I've put together 9 ways to determine if an influencer's account if real:

1. Watch The Likers: Turn on post notifications so you know right when the influencer posts. Then watch the likes roll in. If in the first 2 minutes you see a large chunk of likes load up all of a sudden then you need to look at their profiles. Is the influencer in Colorado and 1,000 people from Russia (for example) just liked their photo? If so, you’ve got a scammer. If you’re working with an influencer tell them you’re turning on post notifications and inspecting liker profiles.

2. Posts have the same like count. A promoted pic of hand soap is not going to get as many likes as babies sleeping, a swimsuit pic, or a breathtaking view. Think about it logically, not that many people even like posts. Only 40% of a influencers audience is ready to engage and 90% of those people just absorb content. You’re trying to tell me this small amount of people (or anyone else for that matter) likes a product shot of hand soap as much as a woman in a swimsuit holding a baby? Not a chance. If their like counts are similar they are fake likes.

3. Every post is an ad. This might not seem realistic, but it is and it’s prevalent. For people buying likes, every picture that isn’t an ad costs them money because they need to buy likes to keep up the guise of their status. That makes the Revenue Per Post more difficult to arbitrage against the Like Cost. Some of the biggest influencers out there are pumping out multiple ads everyday with fake accounts and killing it on the RPP/Like Cost arbitrage. These accounts can post so many ads because they have no real audience. A real influencer would be very concerned about posting too many ads and annoying their community that they painstakingly grew over the course of several years.

4. Call previously promoted brands. Ask for their social media manager and see if they will share the results with the influencer in question. Just ask how their performance was. What a thought, huh? In the name of reciprocity I suggest you be ready to mention a couple of influencers that you've had good experiences with. If you have the money, Revfluence has really nice features for this kind of information built in.

5. Look deep in their feed. See if you can find a time when the influencer’s like count jumped. A sly fake influencer will purchase their following over several months, but many don’t. You can see their like counts start to jump 100 here, 250 there and suddenly we’re at an extra 2,000 likes per post. Legitimate growth like this isn’t happening right now, unless one has amazingly unique content and operates their business across multiple channels.

6. Are they in an engagement pod? Influencers join these things called 'pods' to get their engagement numbers up. Since influencer remuneration is directly tied to their engagement numbers they need better engagement to get more money. This is why pods exist. A pod is the speakeasy of the influencer world. They grow through invitation or secret links only. Membership in a pod comes with requirements and rules. Below are a few examples:

7. Following Over 2,000 Profiles. Bots like StimSocial use hashtags/follow/unfollow/likes to grow accounts. Anyone using a bot like this is probably using other growth hack tactics that are against Instagram's T&Cs and it's a red flag. Actually following more than 1,000 profiles is very hard. Anyone following over 2,000 people is 100% running a bot. 800 profiles is the max you can actually follow and even then I encourage you to comb through your list of followed people. I guarantee you haven’t seen posts from over 40% of them. It’s just the way the algorithm is right now. If the influencer is following 5,000 people their community is low quality and their engagement is highly suspect. There are too many auto-replies and fake likes coming in for them to actually engage with their audience. If you want to grow, do the work yourself and use Peoplemap to track your efforts.


8. Check Their Followers. See if your influencer is being followed by fake profiles. A quick scroll through their followers will tell you a lot. If you see accounts without profile pictures, no posts or a ton of private accounts then they are probably fake. Do they have spammy irrelevant comments from users with spammy usernames? Then they are most likely fake. There are also tools for this like FakeCheck that scans profiles to determine the number of fake followers versus real ones. Social Audit Pro and Hype Auditor do full audits of a profile’s followers and provide follower analytics for Instagram accounts. Influencers can also get verified by a company called fohr.

9. Associated with Follower-Buying Services. If they are Following or Followed by any “follower-buying” service accounts then you should be highly suspicious. It’s a big red flag. Real influencers don’t want these kind of accounts anywhere near their precious profiles.

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