In recent times, many brands have started to invest a major stake of their marketing spend in influencer marketing. While influencer marketing does get some amazing results it comes with its own set of pros and cons, with influencers fraud being one of them. Influencer fraud simply means working with a fake influencer which is not only a waste of your money but also damages your brand’s reputation.
If you want to leverage the power of influencer marketing to its fullest for your brand and avoid partnering with fake influencers then you must learn how to spot fake influencers. Well, we have got you covered with tips to ensure you can prevent influencer fraud at all costs.
3 Ways to Spot Fake Influencers:
- Abnormal Follower-to-Engagement Ratio
In order to appear more legitimate at first glance, fake influencers often consider purchasing followers. While followers can be bought, it’s common to discover a lack of engagement or poor quality engagement in such accounts especially in comparison to their inflated follower count.
The best way to check if the influencer is authentic is to check their engagement rate against their following size. Here’s a chart by Influencer.co’s for your reference:
- Lack of Quality Engagement
The engagement rate indicates the authenticity of the influencer. This count is not always foolproof. In many cases, you can find influencers who have bought fake engagements in order to increase their engagement rate.
To analyze this, you have to go and check the engagement manually. Go through a couple of posts and see if you notice irrelevant comments that are in no way connected to the post. Pay close attention to the comments on the post of the influencer. If you find a certain format that they use then they are most likely part of engagement pods.
Engagement pods came into existence after there was a need for organic engagement. These pods have people who have an agreement to engage in others’ posts and increase their engagement rates. An influencer who uses such engagement pods is definitely a big red flag that you can’t ignore!
- A Sudden Spike in Their Follower Count
Another sign that you need to be aware of is a sudden spike in the follower count. The bot accounts start following the page they get paid for.
An authentic influencer will have steady growth with a few deviations here and there. While an influencer who has a bot can be seen with a sudden increase in followers.
While some authentic influencers also have a sudden hike in their follower count which could be an outcome of their reel or post going viral. Virality doesn’t come easily to everyone. In most cases, after a certain time, the follower count will increase gradually with time.
Conclusion
Identifying such red flags in an influencer is your first step to avoid partnering with them! Once you’ve done that, make sure you maintain a record of these fake influencers, so you don’t waste time on them in the future. This simply helps you reduce the need to do research on them again in the future.
Do this work on your own manually or get software that does all of this for you! Yes, you do have software to reduce your burden and get the work done in a jiffy!
Sehaye, is one such platform that can help you do this. Get all the mundane manual work done for you. Sehaye will not just help you spot fake influencers but also give you access to some amazing influencers, show their stats that will help you choose the best influencers for your marketing campaign, etc.
Sehaye is the all-in-one influencer marketing tool that you definitely need! So, what are you waiting for? Go book your demo call now.
