The fake Social Media Influencers and how to detect them
This gradual shift in digital marketing, combined with the growing dominance of social platforms, has led to the rise of social media influencers. But, anyone starting an influencer marketing campaign for its brand should be aware of fake social media influencers that are, unfortunately on the rise lately.
A few years ago, agencies and companies were scrambling to find social media experts. In many cases they were thinking of getting into this social media thing. They don’t understand it, so were often thinking of hiring some kid out of college. They do that Facebook thing, so they must know something. A lot of college grads who didn’t or couldn’t fit into a traditional agency roles found careers in social media. Today, the stakes are higher. And the “let’s hire some kid” mentality has matured to “let’s see if we can find someone who can work social media into an integrated marketing communication plan with measurable results.” The challenge is defining and then maximizing return on investment for social marketing. When we all agree on some standards for measurement and set some benchmarks to define success, social media will achieve its potential as the driving force of modern marketing.
In many ways, that day has already arrived. Big money can be found behind YouTube, Facebook and Instagram, which can drive respectful revenues that are fully measurable — it all really does sound like a holy grail of marketing. But with big fuss, always comes the bad side too. Fake social media influencers are everywhere around us and they are able to earn money too. But as long as you don’t have a mutual benefit regarding the money-value exchange, the business can’t be considered anything other but a fraud. Fake influencers use a variety of tactics to pad their follower and engagement numbers to make them appear larger than they are. Even as companies like Instagram take severe measures to shut down these bad third-party services, there are still millions out there hoping to attract your attention.
Fake social media influencers are extremely dangerous for the marketing world. They make your brand look bad and waste your precious marketing dollars and on the other side, they make customers become skeptical, not believing even the truthful information found on the internet. Marketing experts thus lose credibility and their goal to provide customers the goods and services that fit best to their needs becomes mission impossible. So, how can we inspect whether our influencer is real and credible? There are many ways to check the credibility and here are some of them:
There is such a thing as too many followers. If you have never heard of this influencer before, they should not have the same number of followers as e.g. Megan Fox. As many services allow buying followers the influencer who uses that approach basically has the fake followers. Those “buy followers” services use bots to artificially increase their followers by following other accounts and liking or commenting on posts based on relevant hashtags.
Consider what your potential influencer is doing to earn their follower count. Does it seem feasible that people would be interested in the content they share? For example, an account exclusively posts screenshots of other Instagram account profiles. It’s hard to believe that more than 3,500 people would find that fascinating. Besides bots, these services often create fake accounts to follow the influencer. There are also services that fake engagement. These services let people buy likes or comments so they appear legitimate and their posts seem popular. Some fake social media influencers even band together to create fake engagement groups. Multiple users work together to regularly comment on and like each other’s posts to make the accounts appear highly engaged. If it looks too good to be true, it often is.
Typical engagement numbers are between one and five percent of a user’s follower numbers, but if you put just a little bit of effort you can spot so many signs if the influencer is a fake one. If the comments sound very generic — applicable to a variety of posts, then it probably is a fake account. The posts should have the amazing quality. Unless they’re a celebrity who just joined the platform, there is no reason an influencer would have a massive following without the content to back it up. A genuine account will have a variety of posts, some of which are more popular than others. If a person is popular on one platform, it is probable that then it is the same case on some other platforms.
At the end, the true influencers act like real people. They have their own style, reputation and genuine content so that they won’t even accept to promote brands that are not related to their authenticity. After all, fake social media influencers are quite easy to spot and it is necessary to monitor all the signs mentioned above, same as listening to your inner feeling, because it is not worth with someone you cannot trust, especially when trusting them with your brand.
