Social Media Truths Every Writer Needs to Understand

Fake audiences, bloated accounts, and bots

Welcome to our weekly column offering perspectives on lit mag publishing, with contributions from readers, writers and editors around the world.

---

We run Chill Subs, a database of over 3,000 literary magazines. Writers use it to filter magazines by everything from genre and response time to pay rates and acceptance stats. But you know what the most-used “sort by” filter is?

Social media followers.

That’s right. The number of followers a magazine has is the top thing people sort by. And honestly? That’s a problem.

It’s bad for writers. Bad for magazines. Bad for the entire literary ecosystem. Why? Because it encourages performative growth over actual engagement—and rewards bad actors in the process. It leads to what we call “fake audiences.” These are follower counts made up of bots or people who aren’t actually paying attention. They offer no value to you, your writing, or your goals.

“Followers” is the metric the internet loves to rank by, which has created a whole shadow economy around inflating those numbers. Publishing in a magazine with 100,000 disengaged followers won’t do as much for your career as landing a piece in a magazine with 1,000 real, passionate readers.

So how do you tell the difference?

To help answer that, I brought in Chill Subs’ social media manager, Shelby. She works closely with lit mags on this stuff every day. I’ll walk through how to spot fake audiences, and Shelby will break down how to analyze them.

We’re ranking these audiences from most to least sketchy, focusing mostly on Instagram since lit mags are fleeing X, and Threads and Bluesky aren’t there yet. That said, the same rules apply across most platforms.

Most dubious: Outright buying followers.

It's so much easier than you'd think. According to Forbes, 1 in 4 Instagram influencers purchased 15% of their total followers and every 3 in 4 influencers purchased over 10,000 followers. And why wouldn’t they? Look at this. You can buy 20,000 followers on Instagram for $100. That's peanuts. If you have money, you can even create and sell advertising with a fake influencer.

The thing is, every asshole who does this thinks they're the first asshole to do it. And worse, they think you're a sucker who'll believe it. The problem is, they're mostly right. Most people take a following at face value.

Of course, nobody wants to get caught doing this kind of thing. And once they buy all these followers they realize, "Doh! People will notice none of these people are engaging!" So plenty of companies have idiot-proofed fake engagement, too. Views, likes, comments, anything you need.

Nowhere is safe. And now that Substack is a thing, people are seeing subscribers as authority. And yes, emails can be bought too. Not to mention obtained in sketchy ways (more on that later).

If you are an editor or a writer trying to grow your platform, please don't be tempted by all of this. Yes, it is possible. But aside from being scummy, it's not a long-term strategy. None of these companies are maintaining these bought accounts. There are only four ways it ends for the person/entity that buys followers.

1. The person or entity eventually stops buying followers/engagement, those followers stop doing anything and you're left with a whale carcass of an audience.

2. The person or entity spends money forever like their account is on some sort of follower dialysis.

3. The person or entity’s account gets banned. Yeah these platforms don't like this. And lots of them will suspend or ban accounts if they catch it.

4. All of their bot buying tricks the algorithm into sending something far and wide, a few things go viral, real engagement floods in. They won! Turns out money really does buy happiness. (This is rare.)

The literary world is not immune to this temptation. At Chill Subs, we see it all of the time. A number of lit mags have huge followings populated by ghosts and bots. Spam content with no engagement. Massive followings being lauded without context. Our philosophy is to assume the best in folks. Fake audiences have become normalized through ignorance and apathy. But it isn’t OK. It erodes trust, tricks writers, and devalues genuine efforts of lit mags doing the work to gain real followers. So, I’ll turn it over to Shelby who’ll teach you how to look for these types of behaviors.

Hey! I’m Shelby, the aforementioned social media person at Chill Subs. Because of my job I have an outsized amount of knowledge on lit mag social media that only a tiny corner of the population give a crap about so you better believe I’m going to seize the moment to talk about it.

When accounts buy followers and engagement, they’re essentially hiring bots to pretend to be their friends.

Bots are automated computer programs created in bulk using software that generates fake profiles with random names. A single control system manages thousands of bots at once, and here’s some of the stuff they can do ranked by how easy it is for them to do it

● Follow accounts

● Like posts

● Watch videos

● Share & save content

● Leave generic comments

Yeah so like, everything on social media. Because of this, before collaborating with an account I run a little social media audit. Here’s what I look for:

Shares and saves - It's tough for bots to share things because they don’t have friends. Same with saves. People don’t pay attention to these metrics as much as likes/follows so accounts are less likely to purchase them. If there’s a healthy amount of shares and saves mixed in with likes I feel good about it.

Comments - Pay attention to the comments folks leave on a lit mag’s posts. Are there lots of these bad boys “🚀”? I’ll tell you what, there is a very specific subset of people that use this emoji unironically and they’re too busy ruining the world to read a lit mag.

Genuine, detailed comments that reference a post directly show people are paying attention to what gets published on an account and that they are in fact… people. Bots tend to overuse emojis and simple words like “awesome!” or “nice!”

Timing patterns - If a post gets an outrageous amount of engagement in the first hour and then very little after that, something is up. Natural engagement builds gradually; bought engagement comes in suspicious waves.

Who is engaging – When auditing an account, I look through who is engaging with the content. Bots are easy to recognize once you know what you’re looking for.

How to spot a bot

Very common example of a bot account

Profile picture:

- None

- AI generated

- Topless girl

Posts:

- None

- AI generated

- Topless girl

Followers:

- None

- AI generated

- Following way more people than are following them

- Other topless girls

Nobody is immune to these bot accounts. There are theories the internet is mostly bots anyway. But when you start to see too many following one account with poor engagement, something is up. Okay. Now that you know how to find these little buggers let’s get back to Ben…

Medium-dubious: Follow-for-follow campaigns. You’ve seen them: “Follow me and I’ll follow you! Drop your handle below!” On the surface, it sounds sweet (community, mutual support, etc.) But let’s be real. Nobody who actually believes in community growth is organizing these. They’re doing it because they’ve been told follower count = success. But if everyone’s just following each other to get followed back, no one’s actually paying attention to content. It’s a hollow metric.

That’s the loud version. The quiet version is when a lit mag follows thousands of accounts just to get follow-backs, then quietly unfollows a bunch to make their numbers look more impressive (so their follower count is higher than who they’re following). This can look like:

Following: 29,576 Followers: 30,328

If you see a magazine with a 1:1 follow ratio (Follows 30,000 people with 30,000 followers), cool, to each their own, but don’t make decisions based on it. Think about what that tells you about the magazine. Following people takes time. Time that could be spent presenting, promoting, and editing your work. Instead they are clicking a button 30,000 times in exchange for an empty number.

For real engagement, a healthy account usually has at least a 1:10 ratio (following 1000 people with 10,000 followers). Otherwise, you can end up with a magazine that has 50,000 followers and gets two likes per post. It doesn’t help them. And it sure doesn’t help you.

So back to Shel for some more details on what good engagement looks like.

Alrighty, it starts with having solid content. So what’s considered “solid” social media content?

- Directly inspires, educates, or entertains

- At least 90% of the post is providing value, if there is a marketing component its relevant and subtle

- Design is tasteful, somewhat cohesive and text is legible

- Quips are creative, unique, don’t use a million emojis and were clearly written by a human

Content like this is at the top of my lit mag social media green flag list and will naturally evoke my other biggest green flag - a high engagement rate.

An engagement rate is a metric that measures how actively users or followers interact with content on a platform.

Math sucks but figuring this out is pretty easy. Just divide the interactions (likes, comments, shares, clicks, etc.) by the total number of followers or subscribers, then multiply by 100 to get a percentage.

Engagement Rate = (Total Interactions ÷ Total Followers) × 100%

This calculation is necessary because raw numbers can be misleading.

For example: Let's say there are 2 magazines, and both average about 200 likes on their posts.

Now, imagine one of these magazines boasts a following of 50,000 and the other 2,000.

At first glance, you would be more impressed by the mag with 50,000 followers, right? But in reality, the more impressive one is actually the magazine with fewer followers that was still able to drum up that level of engagement. For this reason, it's better to measure engagement by a percentage, particularly because in our industry there are far more magazines with smaller, devout communities than big honking ones.

Here’s some examples of healthy engagement rates for different sized accounts:

Note: It's typical for an engagement rate to decrease as follower count increases but it shouldn’t dip below 1%.

500 followers

● Healthy engagement (3%): 15 interactions per post

○ Example: 10 likes + 4 comments + 1 share/save

1,000 followers

● Healthy engagement (2.5%): 25 interactions per post

○ Example: 18 likes + 5 comments + 2 shares/saves

5,000 followers

● Healthy engagement (2%): 100 interactions per post

○ Example: 75 likes + 15 comments + 10 shares/saves

Most lit mags live here. They tend to have super fans and engaging with these publications on socials is an excellent way to develop rapport with editors and fellow writers and get your name out there in the literary space.

10,000 followers

● Healthy engagement (1.8%): 180 interactions per post

○ Example: 130 likes + 35 comments + 15 shares/saves

25,000 followers

● Healthy engagement (1.5%): 375 interactions per post

○ Example: 280 likes + 65 comments + 30 shares/saves

These mags have managed to capture a fair bit of the industry and likely have a good reputation. If you can land a spot in one your chances of gaining new readership is pretty high, especially if they post about their writers work in a tasteful way. I did a writeup on what happens when a lit mag with a sizable social media following shares about their writers here.

50,000 followers

● Healthy engagement (1.3%): 650 interactions per post

○ Example: 480 likes + 120 comments + 50 shares/saves

100,000 followers

● Healthy engagement (1.1%): 1,100 interactions per post

○ Example: 800 likes + 200 comments + 100 shares/saves

Few lit mags live here, and when they do you want to be careful that they don’t have...

Semi-dubious: Artificially bloated audiences.

Contest bloating. Contest bloating is like regular bloating but with more farts. It's when a lit mag peddles loads of contests to gobble up as many emails/followers as possible. This can range from a little ick to a lot of ick. If a contest makes it clear before you enter it that by submitting, you’ll be added to their email list, alright. Honestly, there is no part of marketing that isn’t a little ick. But if they don’t say upfront you’re being added to a newsletter, fuck 'em. I will trade my email to enter some contests, but adding emails without permission is a sketchy practice.

You often see “contest bloat” in newsletter subscribers. So, for example, if a lit mag says they have ‘100,000 email subscribers,’ ask, “Where did they come from?” Often, those magazines run a lot of contests. This tactic is one of many tricks for getting sign-ups to a newsletter that marketers use. I don’t think it’s a bad thing when done well and for the right reasons, but you as a writer looking for readers have to understand that these followers are not here for you.

A much worse scenario here is when a lit mag uses any old submitter’s email without permission. They are either ignorant or a bad actor. This is happening so much more now because everyone has figured out what marketers have known for years — when you have emails, you own your audience (as opposed to socials). Unfortunately, that realization did not come with a handbook on how not to be an asshole.

If you start getting emails from a place you submitted to without them making it clear your email was being added to a list, unsubscribe and never submit again. This is not okay. Your email is the most direct form of communication someone can get (beyond your phone number). It’s important to protect it and question folks who got it through dubious means. Track your unsubscribes. If you request to be removed from a newsletter or magazine’s email list then they pop up again, email them to ask why. If they don’t have a good answer, it might be time to report them to Writers Beware or Lit Mag News.

Advertising bloat is pretty straightforward. It’s when a magazine (or any account, really) creates flashy, click-baity posts and then pays to shove them in front of as many people as possible. This isn’t always bad. Good advertising, done well, with genuinely strong content behind it, can help grow a healthy, engaged audience.

But that’s not usually how it goes.

Because here’s the thing: if you have enough money, you don’t need good content. You can just throw cash at the algorithm and rack up impressions. Your follower count will climb, but most of those followers won’t care about your magazine, won’t engage with your posts, and definitely won’t read the stories you publish. They saw an ad, clicked, followed, and disappeared.

Example: You’ll sometimes see a lit mag with 40,000 followers, but their actual posts get 10 likes and zero comments. Chances are, they paid to grow that audience—and didn’t check whether anyone was sticking around.

All three of these tactics can build strong audiences—if they’re used strategically. But too often, they’re used in a scattershot, desperate way: chasing clickbait virality, overpaying for ads that don’t match the actual content, or running vague contests with no transparency. The result? A bloated (and usually annoyed) audience that has zero interest in reading your work. Just big numbers, no real readers.

And that is the goal of most writers: readers, not followers.

Okay, let’s close this puppy out with a rapid fire of tough truths:

- A magazine with 500 followers that posts about your work in an attractive way will gain you more readers than a publication with 50,000 followers that doesn’t put any thought into how they are presenting their writers or their work.

- If an account has lots of engagement on posts that have nothing to do with writing/writers and hardly any on ones that do, for your purposes it's kinda useless.

- If a once-active magazine hasn’t posted in 3 months or more, this can signal they have gone defunct.

- The best way to find lit mags with high-performing social media accounts is to look at who other lit mags with high-performing social media accounts & famous writers are following and engaging with

- Accounts that don’t reply to comments are rude

So that's all about fake or useless audiences. When you spot them, the best course of action is to assume the best. It’s a squirrel eat squirrel world and that little number is, for some reason, how we judge one another’s worth on the internet. Many places are doing what they can without thinking how it impacts you, the writer. Enforce positive behaviors by rewarding authentic accounts with your likes, shares, love, and, most importantly, your writing. Ditch the rest.

A lot of folks might have read through that and thought, “Well, then what the fuck is anyone supposed to do to grow an audience?!” And here it is:

Consistently create useful content that is passably designed.

Engage and collaborate authentically.

Use marketing tricks sparingly and strategically.

Be early to the party and lucky as hell.

That’s it. Anyone who tells you differently is selling you something.

---