Instagram is a lucrative business, and the popular photo-sharing site has revolutionized the way brands operate.
However, it was inevitable people would start cheating as soon as money became involved.
“If I was OK with letting people like this rob companies out of money and products — I would just stay hush over it. But this needs to be addressed on a large scale and dealt with,” American food blogger Nicki Sunderland wrote in an epic take-down this week.
The app first became popular because it allowed celebrities to connect with millions of fans in a personal way, sharing snaps they would previously have only sent friends.
Take Selena Gomez, for example, the most-followed individual on Instagram with a stunning 116 million followers. According to American advertising trade magazine Adweek, the 24-year-old’s endorsements are worth a whopping $724,000 each.
Instagram also paved the way for a new generation of stars known as “influencers” who have been able to grow their audiences en masse.
Think Kayla Itsines, the fitness queen from Adelaide, who famously grew her personal training business into a $46 million empire through Instagram.
It’s natural others would want a slice of the multimillion-dollar pie, but some people are so desperate for Instafame they’re corrupting the industry.
HOW AND WHY DO PEOPLE CHEAT?
Cheating is something travel photographer Lauren Bath feels very strongly about.
She’s Australia’s first professional Instagrammer, and she makes a living helping brands connect with her 463,000 hard-won followers.
“Cheating is bad, it’s black and white,” she told news.com.au.
“I’ve been very disheartened to see it in the past, especially by people who have a lot of potential. Every day I hear a new name of someone who’s done it.”
Engagement is everything for people who make their living through Instagram.
Targeted audiences are highly marketable, and companies will pay big bucks if they think a user’s endorsement of their product will be well-received.
The higher the engagement, the greater the payout, because companies assume highly-engaged followers will trust the opinion of the account holder.
There are two ways to cheat: buying followers, and undermining credibility.
Regarding the former, Ms Bath told news.com.au many accounts employ “bots”, which are programs set up to follow specific accounts or hashtags, and flood them with fake likes and comments in the hope of rapidly building an audience.
“Most people on Instagram, most decent people, when they get a like or a comment they’ll give a like or a comment, and maybe even follow back,” she said.
“That’s real engagement, and this is fake engagement.”
As an example, she said she recently posted a black and white photograph, only to have a bot post a generic comment that said: “Great colours!”
“It was totally fake,” she said.
Undermining credibility comes when she reveals some people are buying “revenge likes” — basically, paying for fake likes on someone’s account in a bid to undermine their integrity.
This is exactly what happened to Nicki Sunderland, who was forced to make her account private to stem the deluge of fake followers aimed at her account in the wake of her expose.
“Just deleted hundreds of fake followers,” she wrote in the article.
“If this keeps up, I will start exposing people who are buying followers and likes and stealing from their sponsors … after all, that makes you a criminal.”
Ms Bath said this behaviour has serious ramifications for the budding industry.
“If people keep doing this, and if clients keep working with people who are cheating, over time people are going to say the whole industry is corrupt, we’re just not going to work with influencers any more,” she told news.com.au.
HOW DO YOU CATCH THEM OUT?
So how do you find out if your favorite Instagrammer is a dirty, rotten cheats?
Social Blade is a statistics website that helps track growth across multiple social media platforms, including YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
Type your idol’s username in the search bar at the top, select the social media platform in the drop down menu to the side, and voila.
The ‘User Summary’ will give you a general idea of how their account is going, but all the juicy details are tucked away in the ‘Details Stats’ section.
Scroll down, and you’ll see three simple graphs at the bottom. It’s important that there’s consistency in terms of total followers, total following, and daily uploads.
“If someone is steadily gaining followers, but they’re not posting anything, that’s a fair indication they’re running a bot,” Ms Bath told news.com.au.
The second indication is when there are deep spikes and troughs, which shows when a user has bought followers for a specific period, and they’ve all dropped away.
“The thing I like about [Social Blade] is it has the history for the duration of your account, so it’s easy to spot. It’s in black and white, there’s no hiding it. Even if you change your history, it’s still there.
“I want to see steady growth over time. I believe influence takes time to grow.”
News.com.au has contacted Instagram for comment.
This article was originally published in news.com.au