Jason Simons
Aug 9, 2017 · 4 min read

How Computers Are Helping Us Catch the Instagram Celebrity Frauds

An article was recently published with a headline that will give any brand rep considering influencer marketing serious pause: “How to Become a Fake Instagram Star and Get Brands to Pay You.” The implications of that title alone are terrifying. The article describes how this marketing agency created an Instagram account, loaded it up with fake followers, likes and comments and then proceeded to secure endorsement deals from four different brands.

In an industry that is quickly becoming a 5–10 Billion dollar a year market this is incredibly concerning. Everyone is aware you can buy followers (we have all been laughing at people with 80K followers and 150 likes for years) but now there are literally vending machines in Japan that will add likes to your photos. More practically than traveling to Japan are online subscription services — you pay $24 a month and they add 1000 likes and 20 generic comments to every photo you post — up to four posts a day; You can choose if you want those likes delivered over an hour, four hours or a day.

Seeing this nobody could really blame you for feeling vindicated that you haven’t yet risked your brands money on this seemingly increasing risky marketing platform. Except this style of marketing isn’t going away, and with ad blockers + overexposure to ads your options of reaching your demographic are genuinely shrinking. So how do you determine the influencers who have spent incredible time and effort building a dedicated, engaged audience from the people who are being followed by fake accounts.

That’s where our program come in. The fake Instagram accounts are clever but our job at Talent Resources is to stay ahead of the curve and provide the best information to our brands. Due to this we’ve developed programs that take estimated fifteen minutes to run any account with the task of determining how much of the following and engagement is fake.

Here are the top three ways we can tell that an influencer is faking it:

  1. Follower’s Posting Engagement: Human beings post photos. Even if you “kind of” don’t use your Instagram after those initial three photos when you opened the account, eventually you break down and post that latest family celebration photo etc. Fake accounts don’t, there’s just too many for their “creators” to upkeep like that. Most fake accounts have a profile picture and one or two photos that were uploaded at the time of creation and that’s it. So when my program runs an account and gives me a graph like this one I pause: When 39% of followers have never posted and then an additional 33.5% have not posted recently we can make a very educated guess that a whopping 72.5% of their following is fake off the bat.

Vs a real influencer who’s chart will look more like this with 85% of their following having recently posted:

Further, our systems are now able to go into the LIKES and COMMENTS and sort through the people who are providing that engagement. If we see that 70% of the people who are liking an influencer’s post have never posted (or posted once) we can safely assume that influencer has purchased their likes and followings.

2. Following Too Many People:

The way bot systems work: I go ahead and create 10K bots. In order to make these bots look like real people I have to have them all follow each other. Then every person that signs up for my service I have to direct the bots to follow those people. What ends up happening is bots end up following a ton of people. When we run an influencer’s account we look at the percentage of people following over 2,000 people. If we see that a high percentage of an influencers followers are following 4,000 people we can identify them as bots (The chances of someone seeing your post out of the 4,000 posts in their feed makes these worthless.)

3. Engagement Happens Too Fast:

If it’s too good to be true it usually is…

Real engagement takes time, usually an account will reach its full “Like Potential” in 2–3 days after the post. Our program takes an influencer’s last ten photos and tells us how long it took for that photo to reach the average likes. If I see that their photos take an hour to get the 1.5k average likes that person is either using a fake subscription service or they are God. Even the most engaged accounts on Instagram take 48–72 hours to reach their full average.

In every major enterprise promising high reward there are going to be people want to skip the work and game the system. It’s unfortunate but it means that we have an important job here at Talent Resources to genuinely safeguard our clients decisions when it comes to this powerful ever developing marketing strategy. We take that responsibility very seriously and thats why we have developed and are ever refining our programs to dig deeper, not only to determine who’s audiences are genuine but what those audiences passionate about. Whats going to make them most likely to connect with your brands message. Because at the end of the day, thats what all this is about: connecting, whether its to your fun aunt or your consumers… we just want to be here to ensure you’re connecting with real people.

Jason Simons

Written by

Instagram.com/jasonnsimons

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