Fake Engagement vs. Real Influence: How to Spot the Difference in 2025

A couple of years back, I used to see plenty of profiles with hundreds of thousands of followers and hardly any engagement. Lately, I’ve been coming across a bunch of posts that get plenty of likes, yet the comments seem to add nothing of value. For example, the comments tend to be very generic, such as “beautiful” or “amazing” or only include emojis, which could apply to any content.

For brands that only look at the numbers, these comments will count toward high engagement rates, indicating that the influencer is potentially a good match. But upon closer examination, it’s clear that they’re a type of fake engagement. 

This has made the influencer marketing landscape extremely tricky to navigate, requiring brands and agencies to go through a thorough vetting process. In this post, I break down some of the red flags of fake engagement and how to identify authentic influence and avoid this type of performance trap. Let’s get started.

The Dangers of Fake Engagement

Stats on fake influencers indicate that influencer engagement metrics can be off by 55%. In fact, at least 30% of influencers are potentially buying engagements. This explains why over 50% of influencers are unable to engage less than 25% of their audience.

These numbers are alarming because they mean there’s a high risk of brands partnering with influencers who can’t reach or engage a real audience. 

If someone has to misrepresent their engagement rate, it means they likely don’t have enough influence on real people. So instead of trying to reach your target audience, you could end up reaching bots and fake profiles. In other words, you’re not reaching people who can buy your products.

Since your messaging isn’t reaching a human audience, your marketing dollars go to waste. Some reports even suggest that marketers are losing 36% of their influencer marketing budget on fake engagements.

Additionally, someone who’s willing to misrepresent their performance is likely not an ideal partner for your brand. It means they’re dishonest and untrustworthy, so partnering with them could be a huge mistake. Considering the lengths they would go to fake their engagement rates, there’s no knowing what they’d be willing to do to further trick you.

Red Flags Indicating Fake Engagement

Now that you have a clear idea how fake engagements can affect your influencer partnerships, let’s find out how to detect them. Here are the top red flags that indicate that an influencer’s engagements aren’t what they seem.

Sudden Engagement Spikes

Authentic influencers tend to build up their engagement brick by brick (or post by post). This takes time, unless they manage to create a viral piece of content that exponentially bumps up engagements overnight. 

For example, the following influencer got over 19k likes for her Chappel Roan-inspired makeup look. This is a lot higher compared to the few hundred likes she usually gets from her 5k followers. But if you dig deeper into the comments, you can see that people are genuinely engaging with the post, as most of the comments are relevant to the makeup look and her resemblance to the artist. 

That means the engagement spike resulted from the post gaining virality.

But if someone sees a sudden engagement spike that can’t be attributed to a viral post, it’s a good indicator that they bought those engagements. Go through their posts over time and see how their engagements have grown. Take a closer look at posts that seem to see higher engagement rates than usual. 

Can it be attributed to virality? Or did they get a press mention recently? Perhaps they even had a recent shoutout from a big brand that resulted in the engagement spike. If you manage to rule out all these factors, there’s a good chance the influencer bought those engagements.

In some cases, sudden spikes in engagement may also occur when an influencer runs a giveaway contest. Since these contests often require participants to like and engage with the post, they’ll usually result in higher engagement rates than usual. 

Although the influencer isn’t intentionally “faking” their engagement in this scenario, it still distorts their overall engagement rates. So be on the lookout for engagement spikes resulting from giveaways.

Emoji-Only Comments

One of the most obvious indicators of fake engagement is a comment section filled only with emojis. Do actual human beings leave emoji-only comments? Yes. But there’s a difference between a handful of comments like this and an entire comment section filled with them.

Emoji comments are vague and don’t require the commenter to engage in a meaningful conversation. Yet they still count toward your overall engagement numbers. So it’s one of the easiest ways to bump up engagements through bots, fake profiles, and engagement pods. In particular, you might see a bunch of similar emojis throughout the comment section. Hearts, heart eyes, and fire emojis are especially common.

Spammy Phrase Repetition

Sometimes, fake influencers will put in the extra effort to generate comments that seem more genuine. They’ll use fake profiles or participate in engagement pods that leave comments that aren’t just emojis. But even when this happens, the comments will still be very vague and repetitive.

Look out for spammy and generic phrases repeated over and over again – “gorgeous,” “lovely,” “love it,” etc., with a bunch of emojis. These comments are vague enough so they can fit with different kinds of posts. And they don’t add anything valuable to the conversation. So they’re another easy way to spot when an influencer is faking their engagement.

Fake Engagement Case Examples

There aren’t a lot of famous cases of influencer fraud involving big brands. This makes sense because even if they did have a bad experience with fake influencers, most of these brands would want to keep it hush-hush, as it affects their brand reputation. 

However, I came across a few cases of marketers on Reddit sharing their own experiences with fake engagement. So let’s take a look at these case examples.

Case 1: Brand A Experiences Low Engagement with Influencers Having 200k+ Followers

One marketer reported how their client collaborated with an influencer having over 200k followers, aligning with the brand’s target audience. The influencer created a regular post mentioning the client’s brand, which only got 9 likes and 1 comment. Meanwhile, the Collab Reel she created generated 16 likes while receiving 1.9k views.

Additionally, the influencer’s live broadcast only attracted 30 attendees and generated 0 real-time interactions. These low engagement numbers were a sharp contrast to the engagements that the influencer typically gets for her personal posts. 

Some Reddit users explained that brand collab posts typically see lower engagement than normal, but agreed that the numbers were unusually low. While you can expect significantly lower interactions for sponsored content, the sharp contrast is a clear indicator that the influencer somehow bumped up her numbers artificially. And this became clear when she actually had to create sponsored content for her brand partners.

Case 2: SaaS Brand Avoids Partnering with Fake Tech Influencer

Another marketer on Reddit was luckier than the first because they took the time to dig deeper into their potential influencer partner before agreeing to work with them. The influencer quoted $10,000 for a partnership. But instead of jumping the gun, the company decided to do more research and contacted multiple influencers to get real numbers.

Through this research process, the company looked at 50 tech influencer accounts and found that many of them were faking their numbers. Here’s what they found:

• Out of those 50 accounts, 44 of them received lots of emoji comments from the same accounts. Remember what I said earlier about these comments?
• Only four accounts saw authentic comments from real people.
• Most of the influencers were unable to prove that they could help to generate actual sales.

Case 3: Fashion Influencer with 25k Followers Drives 0 Sales

In the post about the fake tech influencer, another marketer who worked in fashion shared their experience working with an influencer who has 25k followers. The influencer created a 10-second Reel promoting their summer sale and charged $600. It generated 1,500 views and comments from other influencers, clearly indicating that the influencer was involved in engagement pods.

This paid promotion ended up generating 0 sales, which resulted in a waste of marketing dollars for the brand.

Tips for Finding Authentic Influence

The above case examples clearly show just how harmful working with a fake influencer can be for your business. While these cases highlighted the financial loss, there’s also a risk of ruining your brand reputation if you end up working with an untrustworthy influencer. With that said, let’s look at some practical tips to help you find authentic influence. 

Prioritize Engagement Quality

As you can see, engagement rate is easy to fake. So although you may have formerly prioritized it during your influencer search process, it doesn’t tell you if the engagement is authentic. So you need to take a closer look at the quality of engagements that an influencer receives.

For starters, take the time to go through the comments and assess them for depth. Are people leaving comments relevant to the content of the post? Are they engaging in meaningful discussions about the topic at hand? Better yet, are they asking questions and showing purchase intent? 

These are some key factors that will help you determine if an influencer is managing to drive real engagements. Take a look at the following post where an influencer shares her experience eating at a famous restaurant. You can see that a lot of the comments are actively engaging in the conversation, with people sharing their own experiences, while others ask relevant questions.

Additionally, saves and shares can also give you an idea of whether people are authentically engaging with the content. These metrics indicate that users find value in the influencer’s content and want to save it for later or share it with their friends.

Don’t Mistake Verified for Vetted

Previously, the verified badge was only given out to accounts that were notable and trustworthy. While some platforms like Instagram and X now offer paid subscription plans to get the verified badge, there are still many accounts that are verified because of their notability and credibility. So it’s easy to assume that someone who’s verified will likely be influential enough to drive authentic engagement.

Let’s admit it – that blue checkmark does look good and credible. However, just because someone has a verified badge doesn’t mean they won’t fake their engagement. It also doesn’t mean that they’re driving meaningful and authentic conversations through their content.

It’s important to make a clear distinction between “verified” and “vetted” if you’re going to weed out influencers with fake engagement. This means ensuring that even your verified influencers go through a thorough vetting process to ensure that they’re driving real engagement.

Use Historical Performance Data

With brands being more vigilant about influencer fraud, fake influencers are also adapting. Instead of simply buying engagements, they’re now meticulous enough to bump up their numbers across several weeks instead of at the last minute. So someone who’s just looking at the influencer’s engagement rates over the past several weeks won’t be able to tell if those numbers are artificially amplified.

Instead, take the time to go through the influencer’s historical performance data. See how their engagement rates have changed over time – at least over the past six months or preferably over the past year. 

This will help you identify patterns that could indicate an organic growth in engagement (gradual increases over time) vs. a possibility of fake engagement (sudden spikes).  

You can use Influencity’s influencer analytics tools to get a comprehensive look at their historical performance data. You can easily visualize changes in engagement rates and other performance metrics over time. The dashboard even breaks down the types of engagement activities so you can see just how many comments they’re getting as opposed to views and likes.

Weed Out Fake Engagement to Drive Influencer Marketing Success

Real influence is about driving meaningful conversations that ultimately lead to action. That’s why brands and agencies need to carefully vet potential influencers and weed out those who are faking engagement. Make the most of the tips I shared above to differentiate between fake engagement and real influence.