by Google
When looking for a suitable influencer for a marketing campaign, people are largely influenced by numbers, but numbers are not a 100% guarantee of a successful campaign. Influencer marketing has proven to be an effective way to reach potential customers, which has caused its rapid growth and popularity. Unfortunately, along with the new trend in marketing, an undesirable effect has also come: the emergence of untrustworthy influencers who have built their position on Instagram through fake followers. Therefore, if you are thinking about working with an influencer, it is important to avoid profiles with purchased followers and we will show you how.
WHO ARE UNTRUSTED INFLUENCERS?
Before we show you how to recognize an untrustworthy profile, it is important to have a clear idea of who they are. This phenomenon has become especially widespread on Instagram, where users have started buying followers. An untrustworthy influencer is a large Instagram user who appears to be a real influencer. They publish very high-quality posts that are not much different from real influencers. However, the main difference is that their audience is mostly made up of fake accounts and bots. In other words, they do not have an impact on a real audience and working with such an influencer would be a waste of money.
THE IMPACT OF UNTRUSTED INFLUENCERS ON A BRAND
Buying followers and pretending to be someone you are not on social media is simply a scam, and working with untrustworthy influencers can be very harmful to your brand. Such "influencers" can cost you a lot of money that you will never see again. At first glance, they will do a good job and fulfill the agreed terms, but since they are promoting your brand to an audience full of fake accounts and bots, your company will only gain more costs from this cooperation instead of increasing sales.
HOW TO IDENTIFY THEM?
Now that you understand what we mean by untrustworthy influencers and what damage they can do, let's get to the most important part, how to detect them. We have prepared tips for you on how to easily distinguish fake influencers from real ones.
1. FOCUS ON YOUR ENGAGEMENT RATE
Fake followers are inactive followers, often bots or fake accounts that do not respond in any way to the content created by the influencer. And since bots and fake accounts make up the majority of untrustworthy influencers’ audiences, their social media posts typically have unusually low engagement rates given their huge followings. If you find the number of likes and comments on a post suspiciously low given the number of followers, you may have reason to doubt the authenticity of the influencer’s audience. Engagement rate is the percentage of audience engagement with the creator’s content on social media. Simply put, it is the ratio of all comments + likes to the total number of followers. Engagement rate can be laboriously calculated using an equation, but it is much easier to use online platforms such as socialblade.com, where you can get basic information about profiles on selected social networks for free. For a simpler idea, we have prepared a calculation of the engagement rate of our last 3 posts on Instagram.
2. READ THE COMMENTS UNDER THE POSTS
By monitoring the engagement rate metric, you can detect untrustworthy profiles, but it is not a bulletproof tactic. Some influencers with fake followers artificially increase their engagement and so at first glance may seem like a suitable candidate for cooperation. How to detect such fraudsters? Go through the comments under the posts and read them carefully. Real followers usually write longer comments that are valuable and express their point. On the other hand, if you see general one-word comments under the post like "nice", "great" or a flood of smileys, these are most likely fake comments. Therefore, do not forget that it is not only the number of comments that matters, but also their quality.
3. VERIFY YOUR AUDIENCE
Another way that can significantly help you determine the authenticity of an influencer is to verify their audience. Click on the list of followers and scroll through it, if you notice that a large number of followers do not even have a profile photo, then it is time to pay more attention. Click through several accounts and see if the profile contains authentic photos of the user, or only generic photos from a photo bank or even no photos at all. If you have discovered many accounts in your list of followers that lack profile photos or credible content, you have probably come across a fake audience.
4. WATCH THE SPEED OF AUDIENCE GROWTH
Another sign of an untrustworthy profile is a sudden increase in followers. The skyrocketing increase in audience was probably caused by the purchase of bots or fake accounts that started following the influencer after he paid for them. However, the occasional sudden increase in followers does not necessarily mean that they are fake, on the contrary, it can be caused, for example, by the influencer's viral content, thanks to which he gained popularity. It is important to realize, however, that sudden and large increases in audience are rare for authentic influencers and more often we encounter a steady increase in followers with small deviations. Therefore, if you have come across an influencer who records a rather steady decrease in followers and from time to time suddenly gains several hundred followers in one day, be careful, it is probably a scammer.
Not only untrustworthy influencers, but also brands are eager for a rapid increase in followers. Recently, the phenomenon of Instagram competitions has spread in Slovakia, which guarantee brands a weekly increase in followers in the thousands to tens of thousands for a fee. Most of these are competitions with valuable prizes such as smartphones and cooperate with large influencers. You ask what's wrong with that?
If you participate in this type of competition as a brand, you will gain a lot of followers, but you will lose them just as quickly as you gain them. These followers started following your profile only to participate in the competition for valuable prizes and are not interested in your story, products or services. By entering a contest, you will attract a lot of inactive followers to your profile, who will simply leave over time. It is perfectly fine if you are interested in spreading brand awareness in the most effective way possible. However, think about whether accumulating inactive followers through various contests is meaningful for your brand. Instead of investing money in questionable practices, we would recommend that you focus on creating valuable content on social networks and working with a suitable influencer who will effectively and credibly communicate your brand to their audience.
Influencer marketing largely depends on the ability of influencers to ensure engagement in the campaign. For a brand-focused campaign to be successful, the influencer's followers should not just passively follow it, but ideally they should also be inspired and involved. After all, interaction will always be crucial in determining the success of a campaign. In this way, brands try to connect with the audience and generate real interest in their products or services, which is not possible if the audience consists of bots or fake accounts.
If you are interested in working with influencers, keep in mind that the selection process is very important. We have already covered the topic how to choose the right influencer in our previous article, which will definitely make the process of choosing an influencer easier for you. But keep in mind that social networks are full of untrustworthy influencers who are waiting for you to become a victim of their fraud. Therefore, include our tips on how to detect fake followers in the process of choosing an influencer. It may sound like a lot of work, but putting more effort into the selection process can protect you from scammers and lead to quality cooperation with influencers. We hope this article was helpful to you and if you have any questions, please feel free to contact us.
