How Do I Get Fake TikTok Followers from Following My Company?

Social media has become a key part of modern marketing strategies—particularly for business-to-consumer (B2C) companies that need to generate mass-market appeal to remain top of mind.

While platforms like Facebook and Instagram once dominated, TikTok has quickly risen to the top—boasting 1 billion+ active users and ranking as the fifth most popular social network worldwide.

With this massive audience comes a challenge: fake TikTok followers. These fraudulent accounts can distort your metrics, lower engagement, and damage your brand credibility.

So how can you enjoy TikTok’s marketing potential while protecting your business from fake followers? We’re here to tell you.

Why Companies Are Turning to TikTok

With such a large user base, it’s little surprise that many companies (or at least their marketing departments) have started to look into using TikTok as a way to grow their reach online. Adding followers to a fast-growing social media platform can be a great way for a company to drive engagement with its brand and create easy success for its future marketing efforts.

TikTok, in particular, can be a great tool for businesses to reach highly engaged, even niche audiences. This is thanks to the TikTok algorithm that also shows users content they’re likely to enjoy. This means you not only reach your followers but also potential new customers with your creative content.

However, not all followers on social platforms like TikTok are good ones. In fact, there may be situations where more is really less (especially when you’re getting fake followers who interfere with your social media marketing)!

Your Followers Real or Fake?

Fake TikTok followers may be messing with your metrics.

Here’s a hypothetical story:

Jake, a marketing manager for a small pop culture brand, launches a TikTok campaign to boost awareness. Within weeks, his follower count explodes…but engagement plummets. Likes, shares, and comments drop sharply.

Jake’s new “fans” weren’t real people—they were fake. Instead of helping his reach, these fake accounts hurt his visibility by lowering engagement metrics.

What’s Behind TikTok’s Fake Followers?

Fake followers are typically made using bot accounts. These types of social media bots appear as followers who “view” or “like/upvote” your content, but they rarely leave quality comments.

Because TikTok’s algorithm favors content that sparks real interactions, an influx of fake followers can make your engagement rate appear lower than it truly is. Over time, this signals to TikTok that your content isn’t resonating, causing it to be shown to fewer genuine users.

So, while fake followers on TikTok accounts might boost your follower numbers temporarily, they undermine your brand’s long-term reach and credibility.

This is also common on other social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram.

Can TikTok Detect Fake Followers?

TikTok does attempt to identify and remove fake followers, but its detection systems are far from perfect. The platform regularly deletes millions of suspicious accounts, yet new TikTok fake followers continue to appear as fraudsters find ways to bypass automated filters.

Remember, many fake followers on TikTok are designed to mimic real user behavior, making them difficult for average fraud solutions to detect. Relying solely on TikTok’s detection systems could leave your account vulnerable to distorted metrics and reduced reach.

How Fake Followers Impact Your Marketing Efforts

In another version of Jake’s tale, instead of launching a brand-new TikTok account to feature his company’s products, he could have formed an agreement with a TikTok influencer to create a series of short product placements to share with their already-existing list of followers.

After looking at some of the TikTokkers on the platform, Jake decides to partner with one who, though relatively new, already has a considerable following and doesn’t seem to be asking for too much money. Instead, they’re willing to work on a cost-per-lead (CPL) basis where they get paid each time one of their followers fills out a form on Jake’s website after viewing a TikTok.

They get the leads but no conversion

Despite sending thousands of leads Jake’s way, none of those leads ever actually convert.

Here, Jake has fallen victim to the trap of form bots—automated programs often used in affiliate and lead generation fraud schemes that fill out forms like a person, but don’t convert since they’re just bots. The fraudster gets Jake’s advertising money while Jake gets left with nothing of value.

By the time Jake realizes something’s wrong, the “influencer” he had partnered with is long gone—their profile having been deleted and the bank account that processed the payments already closed out.

Competitors could be sabotaging your brand

Sometimes influencer fraud isn’t just a random act of opportunism from a thief looking to steal your marketing dollars, but a deliberate act of sabotage from a competing business that isn’t picky about how they undermine your business.

Competitors might send bot followers your way to actively reduce your overall engagement rate and cripple your social media strategy.

How to Check for Fake Followers on TikTok

“Bots keep following me on TikTok! What should I do?”

Here’s a quick rundown of how you can run a fake follower check on TikTok to weed out bot followers:

1. Using auditing tools

As we said before, TikTok’s ability to detect fake followers is lacking, but there are third-party tools you can use to check for bot accounts. For example, HypeAuditor is a free tool where users can plug in account names and get a quick report indicating the overall quality of the account and help you determine if it’s a bot.

2. Check the accounts one by one

Of course, checking each account manually one at a time is massively inefficient and doesn’t scale well at all as a fraud countermeasure. It might work if you were only dealing with a few hundred accounts, but bot followers come into your social media profiles with tens or hundreds of thousands of accounts at a time. 

Even if the report only took a minute to run, that would be hundreds of hours of labor (not counting the time you’d need to spend actually removing each account one by one).

3. Continuous Monitoring

Since fake accounts appear frequently, regular audits are essential. Clean up fake followers to protect engagement and maintain accurate metrics.

Protect Your Campaigns with Real-Time Fraud Detection

What can you do to protect your social media profiles from bot fraud? One thing you can do is leverage an ad fraud solution with real-time detection and social media integrations to check your traffic as it comes in to detect bots and hide your ads from fraudsters.

Ad fraud detection tools like Anura help you spot when unscrupulous affiliate marketing partners are forwarding form bots to your site—allowing you to proactively remove the fake leads generated and avoid paying the fraudster for the privilege.

Social media solution integrations help you spot when bot followers are infesting your social media profiles so you can report them and remove them from your accounts—cleaning up your follower list so you’re left with engaged (and thus, likely to convert to customers) followers.

Need help getting rid of fake TikTok followers and other fraudulent leads? Reach out to Anura to get started on cleaning up your social media profiles now!