
After further research and media reports, additional influencers are also taken into account. A list of hundred leading Swiss Instagram influencers was provided to us by Le Guide Noir, a company specialised in influencer analytics. Through this analysis, the approximately 7 million unique followers of 115 Swiss Instagram influencers are inspected (in total roughly 8.5 million followers, as some followers follow more than one Swiss influencer). This analysis therefore seeks to quantify the ratio of fake followers of a large number of Swiss influencers by employing a standard statistical learning technique. Whatever the reason for the emergence of fake followers, up to date there has been no thorough, quantitative analysis of the scale of this phenomenon. These can be bought on various websites such as, with prices normally varying between 5 and 15 $ per 1000 followers. Since a while, reports have been emerging about inadequate practices among influencers such as purchasing “fake” followers, e.g. bots (see our definition in 3). However, influencer marketing probably is an effective strategy only if the followers are genuine. Illustrative examples of Swiss Instagram influencers: This rather unprecedented generation of influencers predominantly operate on social media platforms like Instagram where an influencer’s follower pool pertains as his or her main resource. Nowadays, companies increasingly concentrate on everyday consumers that can have just as large an impact. In the past, brands have focused on celebrities and popular bloggers to promote their products and services. Influencer marketing can be defined as a form of marketing that identifies individuals with influence over potential customers. Also, influencers with high ratios of fake followers seem to form a distinct cluster which stands apart from influencers with a “normal” base rate of fake followers. The results show that fake followers are indeed a widespread phenomenon, as almost a third of approximately 7 million classified accounts appear to be fake – on average, the surveyed influencers have around 30% fake followers. It does that by training and employing a statistical model that has sufficient precision to reliably distinguish a fake from a real follower. This journalistic investigation therefore sets out to quantify the amount of fake followers in a representative sample of Swiss Instagram influencers. However, we know of no systematic study that actually tried to thouroughly quantify the phenomenon. There have been quite some reports about high numbers of fake followers in the emerging influencer marketing business.

hashtag_list - List of hashtags to go through.(Please be aware of Instagram's daily limits for likes and comments to avoid getting banned.) In config.py change the chromedriver_path to the local path of where your ChromeDriver executable file is locatedĬhromedriver_path = "C:/local/path/to/chromedriver.exe"Īdjustments you can make in config.py to tweak the bot to your liking.
Instagram bot detector download#
Instagram bot detector install#


An Instagram bot written in Python using Selenium on Google Chrome.
