Ladies, quit faking it. We know what’s real and what isn’t……… when it comes to social media accounts. Well, actually, Sortlist does. I don’t.
The company created a list of 320 accounts of the most famous names, the most followed and the most engaged with social media accounts. These lists came from sources such as Brandwatch, Social Blade, Plann, and 90 Min. It then categorized them into nine categories with 40 accounts falling into each. Using a social media auditing tool from Grin, Sortlist was able to discover the audience credibility of each account, giving them an idea of the percentage of followers that could be deemed to be suspicious.
It should be noted that these numbers are based on estimates and cannot give an exact number of fake followers for each account.
With all that methodology and caveats laid out the top of the faker’s list is Nicki Minaj!
Olivia Rodrigo has the lowest percentage of fake followers, with just 11%. Nicki Minaj, on the other hand, has 160.3 million followers, with 28% of them being suspicious accounts!
Bots or fake followers on Instagram are an issue and can cause a problem with commercial value and accurate representation. Social following can have a huge monetary value to celebrities and brands, who now employ top social media agencies to maximize their number of followers, but how many of these millions of following accounts belong to a real person?
The vast majority of Instagram accounts have at least one or two followers that come from suspicious accounts. These are often accounts that have very few followers but follow a large number of accounts. They are often bots and are not attached to a genuine Instagram user.
Sortlist wanted to find out which of the most followed brands and people are actually as influential as they seem and which are faking it until they make it.
Using a social auditing tool and by making a fake followers audit, we were able to discover the audience credibility rate of some of the most followed Instagram accounts as a percentage of their total followers. This gives us an idea of how many suspicious accounts or fake followers are following these accounts, however, it should be noted that this isn’t an exact science, so these numbers are estimates.
They did a similar breakdown for actors and actresses, reality TV stars, social media influencers, and sports stars.
