‘I spent 8 hours liking shit photos on Instagram so I could get free soap’: Why fake influencers need to stop

I’ve never been enormously fond of Instagram. I’m much more at home on Facebook and Twitter; for all their faults I find them more engaging platforms, and as a blogger whose primary objective is to bring people to my website, the fact that I can actually link to it does help somewhat.

My feelings towards the ‘Gram come and go. Sometimes I have stuff to post, sometimes I just do stories, and then sometimes I hate Instagram and the whole influencer nonsense, and ignore it for weeks at a time. I very, very rarely do any kind of paid work over there because it’s stressful and quite frankly it’s easier not to.

The reason it’s so stressful is because when brands are paying you to create content, often they want you to guarantee a certain level of engagement which anyone that’s ever used Instagram authentically would know is entirely impossible.

What happens when you post an ad post and it doesn’t get the level of organic engagement desired?

(I.e. it doesn’t get likes and comments from people who follow you).

Well, normally you’re left begging followers, friends and colleagues to give you ‘sympathy engagement’; bullshit likes and comments that they wouldn’t otherwise have left. They have no intention of engaging with the brand further, they won’t buy whatever it is you’re selling; they are just doing it to help you out. That’s jolly nice of them but the begging is definitely not something I enjoy doing.

Now imagine this on a much larger scale.

Rather than people that follow you and know you, you’re asking a massive group of 500-1500 other ‘Instagram influencers’ to like your shit. In return, you promise to like theirs – whatever it may be – within an allotted timescale.

This used to be done via dropping the link in a Facebook thread or on Whatsapp. I tried one of these comment threads once – about four years ago – when an ad post was a casualty of the algorithms and flopped hard. It didn’t leave me feeling particularly good about myself and I got sore thumbs from liking all the crappy, blurry photos, so decided that it was a firm no from me. I’d rather just avoid paid content altogether and stick with the begging family/friends/colleagues if I need to.

Nowadays these ‘like threads’ are much less common, because Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram are linked, they know what you’re playing at and it’s within their gift to delete your cheating arse off of Instagram altogether. When a dodgy Instagrammer has lost their account, this is often the reason (even though they’ll tell you it’s for something else like mass reporting – ironically if mine goes down now, that probably will be the reason).

In an attempt to circumvent this, cheating influencers now use account tags.

I had no idea how these work, so I asked a knowledgable friend to describe them:

You tag an account in your picture called something like ‘mama support’ and it comes up in their tagged pics. Everyone who tags has to like all of the tagged photos for 24hrs and this can sometimes be about 500+. Some people will tag several of these accounts. Some accounts have thousands of followers, so you could end up having thousands of pictures to like.

Here’s an example.

PS sorry if your pic came up and everyone knows you’re a cheater now, it’s nowt personal. I’m just astounded that such nonsense exists, and is so brazen and out there.

It’s got to the point where it’s become almost normalised just to cheat and it’s massively skewed what PRs expect too. If you don’t have 600 likes on every picture, you’re just not good enough.

To gain followers, you can join a ‘loop’.

I know this because I get several messages each week in my spam folder asking me to join. Follow loops on Instagram are basically groups where you follow everyone and they follow you. You can pay to join as a ‘ghost’ where you don’t have to follow people (hence all the spammy messages). It’s no different than just buying followers, just with more effort on your part.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter how they do it; what matters is that getting fake followers and engagement is against the Instagram Community Guidelines and, if people are charging companies and promising them genuine engagement then it’s fraud.

The weirdest thing is that, often, they’re just doing it for free stuff worth a few pounds; most people just wouldn’t bother to go through all that effort. There are apps like Tribe which will pay them for posts though, and they don’t seem to give a toss how ridiculously obvious the cheating is. PR companies are aware, but they don’t seem bothered. They’d seemingly rather use ‘influencers’ with ridiculously high faked engagement, than real ones with much lower but real engagement.

As long as they can show that they’ve got their likes, why should they care about proving a return on investment, after all?

Well they should care, because it’s putting the industry, and their jobs at risk.

To illustrate, I will tell a little story.

I recently shared a review post about a not inexpensive a gadget I’d tried. It didn’t go crazy viral or anything, but as a result, about ten people went out and bought it using my affiliate links.

You might not think this is much, given how many followers I have, but my goal is to write reviews that make it to Google where interested people trickle in over time, and the post can make affiliate sales in a passive manner rather than me pushing my social audience to buy things all the time. HOWEVER the point I’m getting at here is that the company that sent it to me seemed shocked that I’d actually got any conversions at all, because they’re not used to it.

They’re not used to getting a return on the freebies they send out.

That’s mad. What kind of marketing strategy is that? An insane one, that’s what.

It doesn’t make sense, and what it means is that soon, the bubble is going to burst and there will be no influencer marketing budgets. There will be no blogger freebies for genuine, useful reviews. The cheating Instagrammers, with their fake engagement, and zero chance of building brand awareness or making sales will kill the industry entirely.

How you can tell an Instagrammer has fake engagement

So how can you tell a fake Instagrammer? Well, once you have spotted some it is really very easy. You can follow the tagged accounts, look at their tabs and make it into a hobby. Here are some tips…

• The photos aren’t that great and/or the content is dull. They’ve often got weird pastel filters over them to detract from the fact that the actual picture isn’t that good. I mean, my Instagram isn’t exactly Pulitzer Prize winning stuff but I’m not trying to pretend to get more interaction than Lizzo. The captions aren’t exactly riveting, either.
• The likes are insane. We’re talking 10-20% engagement in some cases. Most average non-celebrity people with over 10k followers are pretty chuffed with anything over 3%. 20% is fucking off the charts; even a new baby or engagement announcement wouldn’t get that organically, let alone a boring blurry product shot with a two line caption about where to buy it.
• They gain the likes over a really short period of time. We watched one such Instagrammer publish a new grid post, and within 30 minutes it had gained a heady 12 likes. Within the next half hour, it was pushing 500. Almost like a timed thread had opened, or something. Often the likes will be hidden for the first few hours. We see you, we see you.
• There are loads of really inane comments – more than you’d expect on a normal picture, because normal people don’t usually leave comments on pictures of deodorant. The comments will all say ‘lovely hun xxx’ and ‘this looks great xxx’ because those people have copied and pasted the same exact comment 500 times on other posts.
• Their video content (reels) will have a similar number of views to likes/comments, or sometimes even fewer, as if no one is actually watching them.
• They follow loads of people. 7,500 is the absolute maximum you can follow on Instagram and probably means they’ve follow looped their way there.
• They have tagged a shit load of accounts in their pictures. If you’re looking for examples, find one of these accounts and go to the ‘tagged’ section. Every ‘Influencer’ there is a liar liar pants on fire.

For those that don’t pull this shit, seeing these people who you know for a fact are ‘gaming the system’ and getting paid for things that you could do better, and more honestly, while PRs tell you that your engagement rate just isn’t high enough is really disheartening.

I spoke undercover to some of the Instagrammers wrapped up in this shitty scheme*

*I actually did, but mostly they just talked about how they’d had to give it up because it got embarrassing after a while and there’s no way to stop the cheating without revealing to everyone that you were a fraud. Once you’ve faked engagement, it becomes extremely obvious when you don’t do it. Anyway, below is what I imagine they would say.

Sally, 24 of Wigan, was persuaded to become a #MummyGrammer by her friend Maddy.

“I originally wanted to become a Twitter grifter, but my friend Maddy said that was only for the over 35s and I should get onto the InstaMummy bandwagon. It started off quite innocently, with a few likes here and there. Soon, I was making my thumbs bleed with the speed I was liking people’s uninspirational shit. Now, I spent between 8-10 hours a day feeding my habit. My dream is to be sent a free dishwasher”

Melanie, 28, used to be an office manager. She went on maternity leave and decided that free stuff was appealing, so decided to become an influencer, even though she had really never influenced anyone before.

“I was spending between 3 and 6 hours a day liking and commenting on blurry photos of someone’s disinterested child, so that I could get my hit of 413 likes on a photo of my kid opening a toy and grimacing. Instagram banned me but it was too late – I was lost to the cause. I needed more and more tat. I got a new account, follow-looped my way to the big time and started over again. It was only when I got my calculator out that I realised that a shift at Sainsburys would have earned me more money per hour than my daily liking spree and I wouldn’t have all my family and friends think I was a tool.”

And Jessy, 26, used to be a ‘small business owner’ before becoming an ‘influencer’.

“Originally I was a Juice Plus seller, but I wasn’t doing very well. I thought the best way to sell more Juice Plus would be to gain more followers, so I joined a follow loop and got 25,000 accounts following me in a matter of weeks. Obviously I still made no sales because none of them ever saw my feed. But I did start getting offered free washing powder, and it kind of snowballed from there.”

In summary

If you’re an ‘influencer’ and you’re faking your engagement through pods and loops, you aren’t an influencer. You’re influencing no one if the only people who interact with your content are people who do so because you interact with theirs. That’s literally not what influencing is.

As a blogger in an ever-increasingly competitive world, I can see how tempting it might be to get caught up in these schemes, but it’s not on. All those who start their Instagram accounts with this in mind from the start should be bloody well ashamed of themselves.

As well as being against Instagram Community Guidelines, the fake engagement and massively over the top stats make a mockery of everything that content creators – the talented photographers and writers who take time and care over their output – do. The fake Instagrammers are directly responsible for many brands giving up on ‘influencer marketing’ altogether because the return is so poor, and they don’t dig deeper and realise it’s because they’re choosing the wrong people based on their dodgy stats alone, meanwhile overlooking real passionate content creators with audiences that would resonate with their brand.

My advice for those caught up in it would be to give up while you can and find something else that you enjoy doing and that can’t be taken away from you (why not try a blog?! I know it’s, like, hard work and not as cool, but honestly, it’s not bad) or you could find yourself in a few years with a glaring hole in your CV and nothing at all to show for it at all.

TL;DR: Fucking pack it in.