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Determine influencer engagement rates and find out how well influencers connect with their audience.
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Discover influencers that match yourbrand’s niche, values, and personality from our database of 250Mn+ creators.

Find influencers across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube whose audience aligns with your target demographic.
Why stop at just checking for real vs. fake followers
Use insightIQ to discover the most relevant influencers, analyse their profiles, audiences, and affinities. Dig into all the data points you need to boost your ROI.

How to detect fake followers
Our fake follower checker tool helps you identify whether the Instagram account is followed by real people or bots by examining several key factors. Here’s what we look out for:
Lack of followers’ profile information
When verifying Instagram followers for authenticity, start by examining their profiles. A quick visit to a follower's profile can reveal valuable information. Fake accounts often lack complete details. You may notice that these fake profiles may lack a bio, have nonsensical usernames, and contain few or no posts.


Generic and repetitive comments
Fake followers are used to often leave artificial comments on a creator's posts, boosting the influencer's engagement rate. These comments are usually easy to spot due to their irrelevant, generic and repetitive nature. Look out for comments like "Great post!," "Awesome," or "Nice picture." Genuine engagement involves more meaningful and unique interactions.
Unusually low engagement rates
An influencer's engagement rate can be a clue to spot fake followers. If a profile has a significant number of fake followers who aren't genuinely engaging with the content, the engagement rates may be lower than expected. Specific benchmarks vary by niche and creator, with higher rates indicating better engagement. To assess authenticity, compare a creator's engagement with that of similar creators with similar audiences.

Irregular follower growth rate
Whenever an influencer purchases fake followers, it results in a noticeable spike in follower growth followed by periods of inactivity. Genuine influencers tend to have a more consistent, gradual follower growth rate over time, which may accelerate as they gain popularity. While influencers can experience rapid growth due to virality, genuine long-term growth is steadier, not characterized by abrupt spikes and drops.
Frequently asked questions
What are fake followers on Instagram?
Instagram engagement refers to users' interaction and connection with content on the platform. It encompasses likes, comments, shares, saves, Story views, and direct messages (DMs), among other forms of interaction with a given Instagram profile.
Should I work with influencers who have fake followers?
Low engagement suggests that the audience is not receptive to the content. It may also signal a significant presence of inactive accounts or automated bots among the creator's followers. For a precise evaluation of individual Instagram profiles, you can use our Instagram Engagement Calculator.
Is it legal to buy fake followers for my account?
Instagram Engagement includes any action taken by a user on a post. This includes things like likes, comments, and Stories views. The insightIQ free Instagram engagement calculator uses this simple formula to calculate Instagram engagement rate:
Instagram Engagement Rate = Total Engagement (likes+comments) / Total Followers x 100 %
We base this calculation on the 30 most recent posts to give you the average engagement rate. However, we exclude posts with extremely high or low engagement rates as they can skew the results. This way, we provide a fair evaluation.
With the insightIQ Instagram Engagement Rate Calculator, you can quickly check how well an Instagram account is performing. Our calculation is precise and free to use on the official insightIQ website.
Is Instagram removing fake followers?
To calculate the engagement rate per post on Instagram, use this formula:
Engagement Rate per Post = Total Engagement on Post (likes+comments) / Total Followers x 100 %
This measures the engagement of a specific post relative to your total followers.
What is the impact of collaborating with an Influencer who has fake followers?
In influencer marketing, high audience engagement means the audience is eager to interact with the influencer's posts. This is crucial for identifying an active and responsive audience for your campaign. For Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) brands, the engagement rate is a key factor in predicting the success of influencer marketing and calculating ROI.
How does a ‘Fake Follower Checker’ help?
Given that the average Instagram Engagement Rate is 2.2%, any value higher than this number is considered good. Note that when using an Instagram Engagement Rate Calculator to assess a profile, you should compare accounts with a similar number of followers for a fair evaluation.
How do you spot fake followers on Instagram?
The highest engagement rate on Instagram is usually between 30-40%. However, such a high engagement rate often means the likes and comments were artificially boosted. The insightIQ Instagram engagement calculator is designed to spot this kind of activity.
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