Why Buying Fake Instagram Followers Is a Terrible Idea (And What You Should Do Instead) (2024)

FAQs

Why Buying Fake Instagram Followers Is a Terrible Idea (And What You Should Do Instead)? ›

It can harm your engagement rate: Fake followers are often inactive and do not engage with your content, which can harm your engagement rate. This can also negatively affect how Instagram's algorithm ranks your content and may make it harder for your posts to reach your real followers.

FAQs: Instagram followers

While buying Instagram followers won't get you into legal trouble, it's almost never the best strategy. Instead, it's typically more effective to grow your Instagram following organically by posting high-quality content and engaging with your audience.

Interacting with these fake bot accounts could have real consequences for private and business accounts. It could include a banned Instagram account, decreased reach for your posts, poor brand image, or even stolen content and brand information.

Technically, buying Instagram followers can lead to account deletion, but this outcome is extremely rare. In most cases, Instagram may issue a warning rather than outright ban an account. The reality is, if purchasing followers directly led to bans, it could be misused against competitors by buying followers for them.

Fake Followers Kill Your Reach

Fake followers don't engage with your posts and people who run follow/unfollow campaigns will mute your account. This causes bad engagement (as described above) which leads to less reach. If no one likes your posts, Facebook and other social networks take notice.

Instagram accounts with 1,000 followers make $1,420/month on average and up to $100 per sponsored post.

Buying followers is a big no-no when it comes to Instagram verification. Instagram can easily detect fake or bot followers. This will negatively impact your chances of getting verified. Furthermore, such deceptive tactics could lead to your account being suspended or banned.

One of these avenues is Instagram bots. These bots will follow other accounts, like posts and leave comments on targeted lists of Instagram accounts to help increase reach, followers, and engagement on a companies account. If there is one pet-peeve about Instagram – it's the bots. And it really isn't Instagram's fault.

Hashtags are a staple of Instagram. That said, #tags can attract fake followers if you aren't careful. Many bot accounts are tied to generic hashtags (think: #beauty or #haircut). They'll seek out accounts posting to those tags and spam them with comments.

Those interactions are generated with bots, disregarded by Instagram, and won't do a thing to help their purchasers. In fact, using fake engagements can get accounts penalized or banned.

How do I remove fake followers from Instagram? ›

Ruin Credibility & Brand Reputation

If you're a brand wanting to work with influencers, creators, brand ambassadors or even other brands, getting caught buying fake followers can ruin your brand's reputation and create long-lasting negative impacts.

Fake Instagram followers are accounts that have been created with the sole purpose of boosting someone's follower count. These accounts are typically generated by bots or purchased from third-party services that specialize in selling fake followers.

The average number of followers for an Instagram account is 697. The fashion industry is the most popular among brands on Instagram, accounting for 35% of ad content. Instagram users spend nearly half of their time on the platform watching videos.