Influencer marketing… Don’t waste your time.
A handy guide to not wasting your money on influencers. And how to spot a fake account/influencer a mile off.
Anyone involved in marketing, be it for big brands, or smaller ones, is at some stage likely to receive a note (probably an auto-respond) from a so-called influencer.
At first you might go and look at their profile. “WOW! 75K! Imagine what they can do for our shoe box making company.” And, yeah, on the grand scheme of things most people know how hard it is to make friends and influence people in social media land. So those big figures can seem alluring as a nice ripe avocado.
Push your chubby finger deeper in through the glossy exterior and you may find yourself grubby and slimy from the harsh reality that these folk are nothing but a sham.
Yes, there are actually cheeky lads and lasses whose influence can be felt in marketing land. But these accounts cost masses of cash to engage with and, even then, don’t always work for a brand.
Thankfully, with a bit of practice, these ‘public figures’ are as easy to fake (and spot) as Gocci and Crissian Dior in a back street perfume emporium. And the press has started to draw attention to them and their antics.
The main point of marketing is to use a specific channel to engage an audience and persuade them that what you do or sell is something they need. So an influencer has to have a real audience, of genuinely engaged individuals of the right type of consumer for a specific brand. Otherwise they will never fulfil that promise. They will never sell your shoe boxes.
So how do you tell? How?
First up, you need to examine their followers. A nameless contact of ours (ok, it’s me, your writer) has tales to tell of how easy it is to buy followers. It’s very cheap and very quick (as in your account notifications will light up like Vegas for hours as hundreds and thousands of new followers join your ranks for as little as a handful of dollars).
The cheaper options will result in an ‘influencers’ follower lists looking a little wanting. Lots of followers will not have profile images. Lots of followers will also have unusual names with numbers in them; lotti.334 for example. And they will be lots of them. So spend a few minutes scrolling down the follower lists. If you see these popping up all the time (they will be very easy to spot) then our ‘public figure’ has bought them. They are fake followers. And by fake we mean useless, they are are not real people. They are accounts made by computers and used to simply boost the numbers of people who want to take your money.
Next step, if you really want to make sure, is to click on a few of these followers with the funny names. Instagram tried to stop fake accounts being made a while ago by deleting those which didn’t have images, or weren’t ‘active’. So now our cunning fake account farmers make the fake accounts with a few images on them. And the images are very odd. They just don’t look right. Now look at the account’s follower vs following ratio. If they’re following way more than are following them then, again, fake.
(This is sometimes the case for a real account—some of our personal accounts have this sort of ratio, but we’re friendless—we spend all our time making Minutemailer amazing.)
Continuing to use your intuition, head back to the ‘influencer’ and now scroll through some of their images. Using your own personal account and social media experiences and a dash of intuition. Rule of social media thumb states that an account post usually gets X% of likes and Y% of comments per post. If that ratio is fluctuating wildly through the feed then, yes, again, these are accounts who have bought and paid for engagement (which the fake account farmers can provide as a service). They’ll also be generic comments like: Nice post, or Great work. You can also perform due diligence on a fake follower through its images, which will also have some impressively random comments—the fake account farms do try to make their fake accounts real with fake comments from other fake accounts.
There are actually apps out there who reportedly run an audit on accounts and return with a percentage-likelihood on how fake an account and its followers are. However, run these tips through a few times and you’ll be able to spot ’em a mile off in seconds. And therefore save yourself a huge amount of time and money—use that for email marketing instead.
