How To Spot A Fake Influencer

Influencer marketing is the most effective way to receive a high return on investment. Strategically selecting an influencer who will reach your target audience is imperative to the success of this marketing effort. Unfortunately, like any industry, there are always people who are not an authentic representation of influence.

On social media, influencers can misrepresent themselves with follower bases composed of fake accounts and bots. These profiles who purchase their followers to misrepresent their engagement are not effective influencers. As they don't have real influence.

At the surface, a purchased influencers’ profile appears to be legitimate with an eye-catching number of followers and professional-looking content. Some accounts that pay for followers do have some real authentic followers. Regardless the real followers make up a tiny percentage, meaning that fake influencers do not receive as much authentic engagement as their following suggests. To help your business avoid partnering with a phony influencer, here are a few tips to help you spot influencers with false followings.

Check Engagement

The most obvious way to see if someone has purchased their followers is to compare how many followers they have to how much engagement their posts get. Because the following base is fake accounts and bots, they do not engage with the “influencer’s” content. Meaning that fake influencers will not get as many likes or comments as their following would indicate. For example, if an account has 10, 000 but only gets 100 likes on a post, you can assume this person’s followers are not real people. Another indicator of engagement is views on videos. If someone has thousands of followers, they should be getting hundreds of views on their video content.

Assess the Relevance of Comments

Technology is always advancing, and people are still finding new ways to cheat the system. Once people started catching on to people buying their followers, it also started becoming more common to buy likes and comments to even the follower to engagement ratio. So, in addition to seeing if the account gets engagement, you must be cautious of the authenticity and relevance of that engagement. Do the comments on the post discuss or complement the content? If not, chances are the profile purchased their likes and comments.

Increasing & Decreasing Following & Followers

Some individuals may not be purchasing their followers. However, they engage in spam following random accounts to gain followers. They will follow as many accounts as they can at once, and after getting followed back from this exercise, they will go on an unfollowing spree. While these influencers have real accounts following them, they still are not real influencers. Their followers don’t care about the content. They follow back to grow and maintain their follower count.

When looking for influencers for your influencer marketing campaign, you want to ensure that their followers are genuinely interested in what they have to say. When they endorse your product, their followers will be responsive, resulting in conversions and sales as opposed to dismissing the post.

Leave It To Blitz

We understand that choosing the right influencer to partner with your brand is essential to your marketing strategy. With fake followers wasting approximately 1.3 billion dollars in influencer marketing funds, we want to ensure your company partners with an authentic influencer that guarantees a return on investment. Blitz Marketing has all the tools to spot fake influencers and select the right influencers to reach your business’s target market. To avoid wasting your time on these screening processes and your company’s marketing budget, leave it to the influencer marketing experts at Blitz to partner your brand with an authentic influencer!