One of the best ways to grow your brand’s following and develop user-generated content is to partner with influencers. Although, before beginning a collaboration, brands should thoroughly research their influencers. Brands should be on the lookout for influencers with a fake audience.
Influencers are significant because of their enormous following and the faith that their followers place in the influencer. Having tens of thousands of followers isn’t out of the question in today’s world.
As surprising as it may seem, marketers should be aware that there are ways to buy phony followers or gain them for free in order to boost their following. In order to appear more popular and prominent on social media, some people purchase false followers.
When it comes to working with influencers, verifying the authenticity of an influencer’s followers is essential.
Who are Fake Influencers?
When it comes to identifying fake influencers, you need to know who they are first. As a result, you’ll be able to recognize the traits that set them apart from genuine influencers.
Fake influencers are people on social media who make it appear as though they are well-known figures in their respective fields. It’s hard to tell the difference between their photographs and those of a real influencer when they share them. But the main distinction is that they have a large number of fake accounts following them. In other words, they don’t have any genuine impact on the people they’re supposed to be reaching.
In many circumstances, a single fake influencer may represent the work of several people. Creating a phony account for a person who doesn’t exist is the most common way to do this. A model is usually used instead of the person. To make the person appear more influential, they will also buy fake followers and engagement.
How to Identify Fake Influencers?
Here’s what to look for to identify fake influencers:
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Incomplete profile
As these follower accounts are fake, the creators of these accounts put little effort into making them seem genuine. They might only enter the mandatory details to get the account going. The only extra step they would go to is adding a profile image, but the image is most likely from someone else’s profile.
The details such as banners, bio, etc. are often left empty. You can use these insights to identify fake followers in the follower base of any influencer.
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Follower-to-engagement ratio
The follower-to-engagement ratio is another metric that you can use to evaluate the authenticity of the influencer’s followers. If an influencer has bought fake followers to inflate his/her follower count, the engagement stats are going to be terribly low.
To perform a thorough evaluation, you must measure the engagement rate for each influencer. To measure engagement rate, divide the total number of interactions of a post by the total number of followers and multiply it by a hundred.
If the engagement rate is consistently low the influencer marketing candidate most likely has bought fake followers. Even if they didn’t, the low engagement rate doesn’t make him/her the right advocate to represent your brand as they won’t help you increase reach, engagement, or conversion.
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Engagement quality
Engagement quality is another important metric that you must analyze to evaluate the quality of engagement the influencer receives. To do so, you must analyze the comments posted by the influencer’s followers.
If they have genuine followers, the comments would more personal and descriptive. Although, if they have bought fake engagement along with fake followers the comments on their posts would mostly be generic. There will be generic comments such as “Love your work”, “That’s great!”, “Awesome”, “Love this look”, etc.
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Following and follower stats of followers
The fake accounts follow multiple social media accounts to seem genuine. Although, they don’t have any followers of their own. Hence, their follower-to-following ratio is a mess. They follow multiple known social media handles but don’t have any genuine followers following them.
This can be a great metric to analyze the authenticity of an influencer’s followers. Check how many followers the followers of any influencer has and the number of people they follow. If there is a great difference between the ration, it is most likely a fake account.
Although, make sure that you also take into account the new users on the platform. Those that have just joined a new social media platform might follow multiple accounts but usually don’t have a significant number of followers on their own.
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Follower growth rate
This metric is can be very helpful in determining whether an influencer has bought fake followers. If an influencer has bought fake followers their follower growth has a sudden spike in terms of new followers added.
You can track follower growth using a follower tracker such as FollowerAudit to identify such sudden increases in their followers. Once you have the date range that has a sudden increase in followers, check the content posted by the influencer in that date range. If the content posted in that time frame does not have enough interactions to support their claims of the sudden rise to fame, they most likely bought followers.
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Spammy usernames of followers
Fake follower accounts usually have spammy usernames. To access the influencer followers, dive into their comments sections and check the username of the followers that post comments.
You can also go to their list of Twitter followers and check look for accounts that have unusual usernames.
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Use a FollowerAudit Tool
Analyzing followers is easy when are in a few hundred or a couple thousand. Any more than that and it becomes difficult to do it manually. Influencers have thousands of followers if not millions.
In such cases, it’s best to use a third-party follower analytics tool such as FollowerAudit. Using such a tool you can automate the process of identifying fake followers of any influencer profile. You can also track their Twitter follower growth in real-time as well as analyze their entire follower base.
A follower tracker makes it much easier to identify the right influencer to represent your brand and increase revenue. It will also help you avoid influencer fraud.
Closing Thoughts
Many users now opt to buy fake followers rather than developing a follower base over time to get into collaborations with brands. Their authenticity and influence are greatly compromised by this.
Avoid partnering with fake influencers because you won’t get anything in return. From here, you should also keep a list of the fake influencers you’ve discovered. As a result, future campaigns won’t have to go through the same laborious research procedure.
You should keep a list of “blacklisted influencers,” together with their social media handles, reasons for blacklisting them, and other relevant details. So that you may readily reference your list before commencing a new influencer marketing campaign. ”
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