Under the Influence- How to Fake Your Way Into Getting Rich on Instagram

by Trey Ratcliff

  You can check out this unusual pattern in the following graphs, which show followers gained and lost on a daily basis. Organic growth, as you can see in @theblondeabroad’s chart, also has ups and downs, but the variation we see in @theblondeabroad’s chart is orders of magnitude smaller than the variation in @miss.everywhere’s.

  You can see possible buying sprees by @miss.everywhere. Source: Socialblade.com

  Over 5 days in July 2017, it appears @miss.everywhere bought over 60,000 followers. I cannot find any other logical explanation for that spike. Remember that a mention from @gopro, which has about 15 million followers, only got @theblondeabroad about 2,500 followers. So, using that example for scale, @miss.everywhere would have had to get over 20 mentions from a @gopro-sized account. Source: Socialblade.com

  The smooth growth curve of @theblondeabroad. Source: Socialblade.com

  Let’s explore why there might be a significant decrease in followers, like the ones you can see in @miss.everywhere’s daily follower chart, that you wouldn’t often see in organic growth.

  Here are the three likely explanations for why she loses followers after big gains:

  Bots behave differently to humans. Many automated services, such as Jarvee, automatically follow and unfollow a certain number of people every day. Computers are much more efficient at repetitive tasks and can work without breaks and sleep. There are armies of bots out there, constantly following and unfollowing accounts with mind-numbing regularity. It’s likely that many of these bot followers she purchased automatically unfollowed her in the next few days.

  Instagram has an automated service designed to remove some bot accounts. Some number of bots will get trapped in their automated sweep every day and removed from Instagram.

  Sometimes, an aspirational Influencer will be followed by real people, like you, even if you didn’t choose to follow this person. Naturally, when you discover you’re following someone that you don’t remember choosing to follow, you unfollow them. We discussed this phenomenon in the previous chapter.

  Comparison: @genttravel

  For comparison, you can see a screenshot of our fake Influencer’s follower growth. It is clearly suspicious. We could have made it look less suspicious if we had paid for the more expensive services that slowly trickle in new followers over a month-long period.

  Here is an example of the daily follower count for our fake Influencer account of @genttravel. You can see, for example, that on 03-05 we bought 12,085 followers. Source: Socialblade.com

  Dive into Comments

  When you see questionable accounts getting hundreds of comments, it’s worthwhile to dive deeply into those comments and see who’s behind them. This is a time-consuming process and requires a certain concentration, but the results are often telling.

  What sort of flags would indicate bot-generated comments? To identify fraudulently purchased comments, look for ones that are an arrangement of emoticons or generalized comments, such as, “Thanks dear,” “Amazing look,” “Soooo Perfect,” and these sorts of vague sweet nothings. When you then click into those accounts, you usually find bots behind the comments. Less often, you’ll find real people, who are paying a service to auto-comment for them.

  If you take the time to drop in to comment threads with 1000+ comments, you’ll see many have long chains of nonsensical “engagement” like this. Many of the most popular accounts have automated services that post these emoticon-filled comments for just a few pennies.

  In fact, most people who commit fraud on Instagram do pay a service to “Auto-Reply” for them to every single comment on their posts. These automatically generated comments often take the form of emojis, the classic “Thanks Dear,” or custom-written replies on a rotation. These automatic responses cleverly double the total comments on the post, because, when the original poster also replies, 150 comments turn into 300, for example.

  Don’t think about this too much because it may make your brain hurt, but most of those 150 initial comments may be bots. And, if the Influencer is paying for automatic replies, then the replies also come from bots. This means that many comments on Instagram posts are simply bots talking to one another. What a bizarre world we live in.

  Few people in marketing have the time to examine comments on a post. I’m sure if they did, they’d quickly see the inane comments are clearly coming from scripts and bot accounts. For example, you can see above that she received the exact same comment from the rather generic sounding accounts of @travel_greatness, @globe_greatness, and @exploring_greatness.

  The person behind the account that I’ve screenshotted above, who will remain nameless, was paid significant money to join me at a location to “boost” a project.

  I have confronted many people who I thought were buying fake comments. I’ve even done this in person. The reactions are priceless. I’ll try to describe one of these reactions here.

  I was in Asia at a luxury resort and there were two Influencers who came along to collaborate by taking photos for Instagram. Husband and wife. They lived in Hong Kong, spoke perfect English as most people there do and traveled a lot for these sorts of boondoggles. Let’s call them Mork and Mindy.

  Like me, they were paid a lot of money and got free rooms and food. Unlike me, they appeared to buy their followers, likes, and comments. I didn’t find this out until late one night when I got a bit suspicious and did some lookups on Socialblade.com.

  Let’s get back to Mork and Mindy. Mindy (obviously the wife) was one to wear a wide-brimmed Influencer hat, often touching it while she lords over a vast breakfast that has just been delivered by room service. Mork, her husband photographer, would help her meticulously lay out the smorgasbord. He was tall and spindly, seeming to barely know how to operate a cropped-sensor Canon. They might take one photo of Mindy lounging in bed, wearing a white robe, obviously pondering Chaucer while she sips a mimosa. The next photo might be outside on the deck of her villa while she lounges by her private pool. I know this because I had the same villa next door with the same pool. I must admit that I also ordered room service, but it was just pizza I downed with an entire bottle of Pinot Noir. I didn’t take any photos because I was in a shame spiral. There was also a huge blow-up rainbow swan in the pool that I attempted to mount, with a rather embarrassing conclusion.

  After looking into these two Hongkongers, I knew what was going on. I had found my quarry to query.

  I sat down with Mork and Mindy for a final dinner at this resort. The meal was absolutely incredible, designed just for us by a Michelin star chef. It was a warm tropical night with a nice breeze. The breeze would blow the thick white tablecloth around while we attempted to have a conversation. I say “attempt,” because I was desperate to get a polysyllabic word in response.

  We were close to the beach and could see the South China Sea in the distance. Mindy sipped some champagne.

  “Hey Mindy,” I said, using her real name, as that reference would have definitely confused her. “I’ve been asked by my editor at WIRED to write an article about Instagram.”

  “Oh!” she said excitedly as if she could sense I might mention her in the article and possibly get her some real human followers. She leaned in with her champagne.

  Tane (the actual @genttravel) was there, sitting beside me. He smiled ruefully, sensing my, now classic, rope-a-dope method.

  “Yeah!” I said. “They are very interested in Influencers like you that have so quickly built up a huge number of followers and engagement!”

  She was positively beaming now. Finally, someone understands how incredible she is.

  “Oh!” she exclaimed with monosyllabic wonder.

  I excitedly said, “Yes! They are very interested in how people like you are so successful!”

  Still beaming, she now relaxed back into her chair, her champagne casually between two fingers while the three others opened. She didn’t need to sip the champagne. It just languished in a dance as she began to pontificate on her methods.<
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  “It’s a lot of hard work,” she said, sticking to one-syllable words. She furrowed her brows as if she was trying to put a thought together. “I had to move an ice cream truck under a palm tree for a better photo.” Then, suddenly, Mork joins the conversation in a valiant manner offering, “Actually I had to move the ice cream truck!” They laughed uproariously. I couldn’t get enough of their comic stylings.

  The next course arrived as the intoxicating laughter slowly died down.

  “So…” I began while picking up a fork, holding it in the air, tines up, “One of the aspects of the article is about people that buy followers, comments, and likes so that they can defraud honest companies. These Influencers make a lot of money and get free trips. Do you know anything about that?”

  And what had begun as a most delightful dinner became super-awkward. But I love that stuff. You know that show, Curb Your Enthusiasm, where Larry David gets stuck in really awkward situations?

  Mork’s eyes got as big as Steve Buscemi’s and Mindy’s eyes became downcast and furtive. Now, her conversation devolved from monosyllabic to zero-syllabic. But I continued to take a schadenfreudic pleasure in pursuing this line of questioning. “Hey Mindy,” I innocently asked, “Do you know anyone that buys followers, comments, and likes in order to get cash, free trips, and free food, like, for example, this amazing meal that this talented chef created for us tonight?”

  Forced to respond, she said, while avoiding all eye contact, “Yes, I’ve heard of that.” She wouldn’t even look at Mork.

  And then I gave Tane a knowing and seductive stare.

  Look for Bots Talking to Bots

  Some Influencers often try to pump up their comment counts through artificial means because having a higher number of comments looks impressive to brands. The following two screenshots are a great example of what appear to be bots leaving comments, which automated scripted bots then reply to.

  OMG. One can see a common theme and pattern in these comments, not to mention the unusual names of the commenters. Note the names, because you’ll see them again in the next screenshot.

  Here, you can see that each of the replies from @miss.everywhere have a similar format. It appears that her replies are generated by an automated script. This particular post had over 700 comments in total, many of them like this. Remember that if you use Instagram on the web, the comments appear in chronological order, which is why you see the same names in chunks like this.

  Going into these comments and doing a forensic analysis takes a lot of time and patience and this is why so few agencies and brands go through the trouble. It goes without saying that automatic responses from computers are completely worthless from a marketing perspective, as they are not actual humans and it’s unlikely they’ll buy your product.

  Employ a Third Party “Audit” Site

  There are maybe half a dozen sites out there that claim to help you analyze dubious Influencer accounts. This technique doesn’t work quite as well as they claim. I tried several of them to find out if they could detect fake Influencers, and unfortunately, none of them were satisfactory.

  In the experiments I ran on these audit sites, the reports were guessing in the right direction, but not with much accuracy. For example, I ran our fake Influencer account against it and it said about half the followers were fake when actually we bought 100% of the followers. Good guess though.

  I also performed the same side-by-side analyses of two sizable accounts, one of which we determined was all-fake using an analysis of historical growth, and the other of which I know is authentic. You can see both of the results here.

  The report on the left is an analysis of the legitimate account. It’s my friend Kiersten @theblondeabroad. The one on the right is an account of someone I know who claims to have purchased 99% of his followers. Source: HypeAuditor

  You can see that this website, which purports to know the difference between real and fake users, says that 17% of Kiersten’s followers are suspicious, while only 8.6% of the followers for the account on the right are suspicious. This conclusion is ridiculous—when you look lower in the report, you can see that the report on the right lists India and Turkey as the two top countries from which followers hail for that account. This should automatically set off an alarm bell.

  Socialblade.com appears to be one of the only sites that currently keep historical records of follower growth. Unfortunately, Socialblade.com seems to be in a constant state of flux and was even not working for a few months. As I write this, I cannot compare accounts or see a full history as I used to be able to do when I initially grabbed these screenshots a few months ago.

  In April of 2018, Instagram cut off access to data for Socialblade.com (and every third-party site) to track follower count. This is either because of the Cambridge Analytica privacy debacle or because of the looming WIRED article that prompted all of my questions. About four months later, Instagram stats came back to Socialblade.com with a few changes, such as the ability to track data only if you have an authenticated business account. The features are always in flux, so it’s possible things will change (or even go away) by the time you read this.

  Case Study: How Valuable Are @miss.everywhere’s Fake Followers?

  Unfortunately, as I mentioned before, purchased followers are worthless to brands and are not valuable like organic followers. However, most brands can’t tell the difference. I’ll give you one more example of how ineffective @miss.everywhere appears to be in actually influencing anybody. Examine the post below from December 14, 2018.

  On December 14, 2018, @miss.everywhere did a paid post from the presidential suite inside Hotel Das Central Sölden, which she tagged with the Instagram account of @dascentral_soelden. Not to add another issue in here, but you may want to take a closer look at the way those comments are repeated and the usernames.

  Below is a historical growth chart for @dascentral_soelden over the time period during which @miss.everywhere mentioned their brand, which she did on December 14, 2018. One might assume to see growth around when the post was made.

  Here is the historical growth chart for @dascentral_soelden over the time period of @miss.everywhere’s mention. You can see on December 14, they only grew by 9 followers. Source: Socialblade.com

  Now, with her 580,000+ followers and a whopping 16,000+ likes on this post, we should expect to see a sizable (or at least measurable) increase in the followers for @dascentral_soelden. However, on December 14, @dascentral_soelden only received 9 new followers, to go from 3,098 to 3,107. In fact, the daily average for their follower growth is only 9, so that’s not a meaningful increase for their account. Curious. I thought at least her chatty friend @hb_889e7d72 would have followed the hotel.

  Getting Fooled

  Don’t feel bad if you were initially fooled by these supposed invincible Influencers. For example, @miss.everywhere is convincing enough that Forbes featured her as one of 6 Female Travel Photographers You Need To Follow On Instagram in 2017.39 In that article, four out of the six appear legitimate. Of course, the other two, who are likely fake, can also now use that publicity as leverage, because it makes them appear bona fide. There are thousands of articles of this nature on the Internet, ranging from Top Fashion Instagrammers to How [These Guys] Got Rich on Instagram, and so on.

  I don’t entirely blame the research team at Forbes. Not many people know how to audit an Influencer by looking up historical growth data. But I do hope in the future writers use these tools, and others, to do more thorough research. There are also few brands with marketing teams savvy enough to know about these problems or understand the technology enough to discern any wrongdoing.

  One marketer who does realize it’s a rotten game out there is Kellogg’s social media lead, Joseph Harper. In an article on Digiday, Harper said, “We don’t buy social media ads based on reach anymore, because it can be easily faked … Some of the agencies helping us to manage Influencers have started small but grown quickly, so they don’t kno
w how to deal with big clients.”40 Ouch. That’s the nice PR way of warning other brands that hiring an Influencer agency doesn’t necessarily protect you from getting conned, because many agencies are no better at separating Influencer fact from fiction.

  Now, granted, @miss.everywhere takes pretty photos. However, taking a pretty photo is no longer a differentiator. Everyone seems to take pretty photos nowadays. Hey, I’m a professional photographer and I freely admit this. Saying someone has really nice photos is barely a factor in choosing an Influencer because it’s a given. It’s necessary, but not sufficient. So, what is the differentiator? Let’s look at engagement for the following photos.

  This unstaged photo had over 9,000 likes and over 110 comments.

  This gem had over 20,000 likes and over 920 comments. This is quite a bit more engagement than her average posts. I mean, it’s a nice looking bottle of lotion, if that’s your thing. But personally, I’m a bit dubious that so many people could be stirred enough by this post to like and comment.

  This fatuous pose has over 13,000 likes and over 300 comments. Art is subjective, of course, but I think most people would agree that this is a more likable and commentable photo than a product shot of a bottle of lotion, which got almost twice as many likes and three times as many comments.

  In addition to the conspicuous product placement, it appears she may be using one of the many automated services (such as Jarvee) that give automated responses to comments. There are hundreds of responses with similar emoticons. It’s also generally believed that the Instagram algorithm is more likely to share a post when the original creator responds promptly to comments. Note: If you use Instagram on the web, you can see comments in a different order than on the app and you can see how the script dumps a ton of these auto-responders at once.