Since the influencer marketing became a great discipline within marketing and since brands increasingly use it as a strategy that can provide a high ROI in their campaigns, a large number of frauds and false influencers have proliferated.
It’s a fact: not all the influencers we find on social media are authentic. Even only 40% of active content creators worldwide are free from various forms of fraud such as buying followers, paid comments, etc.
Keep in mind these ten keys to detect influencer fraud developed by the content marketing agency La Caja Company.
1. Automated bots.
Automated bots are a type of influencer marketing fraud. These bots are automated programs for liking, sharing, and commenting. These users typically use them to boost metrics on their own posts, to give the appearance of an active community. However, the engagement they provide is not real.
2. Buying followers.
It is perhaps the most used and known method since it has been shown that it is possible to buy followers for very little money. Fraud consists of buying a certain number of followers in order to make a profile appear to have a community with a large number of followers. It is important to bear in mind that the profiles that have purchased followers do not manage to obtain a good engagement rate. An Instagram profile with 100,000 followers, but with approximately 10-20 likes per post is a clear example of a fake profile.
3. Engagement groups.
Engagement groups are people who join in groups with the aim of exchanging likes, comments, and following. In this way, they create the illusion of having real interactions, and although they are real people and not bots, such interactions have no real value for the influencer. Let us remember that what makes an influential person relevant in social networks is their relationship with their community. Using this kind of groups is a trick that, although it is detected, is a reason to reduce the credibility of said influencer.
4. Reputation of the company.
Being the victim of a false influencer can have very serious consequences that go beyond financial loss. Hiring a fake influencer can hurt your company’s reputation and damage the trust of your target audience. And, if the audience finds out that the company has joined a false account, they could doubt the credibility of the products, services and the brand.
5. Ignorance on the part of the brand.
Influencer fraud has become a major risk factor for brands and companies that want to promote their products or services through influencers.
The main reason why brands “fall” in this type of fraud is the lack of knowledge in knowing how to recognize a fake influencer. To avoid this, it is recommended to request references about the influencer, research their audience, ask the professional for data and statistics, and use specialized tools to analyze the data of the profiles.
6. Look for signs that alarm a fraud.
If there is little relationship between the number of followers and the number of interactions in the influencer’s profile, set off the alarms. A authentic influencer engages with their audience through interactions, and this is evidenced through likes, comments, reproductions, shared posts, etc.
Although not all followers react or interact with each influencer’s post, the relationship between the number of followers and the interaction on the profile account reflects its authenticity. An average engagement ratio would be per 1,000 followers, between 40 and 50 likes or views per post.
7. Rapid increase in followers.
Building an active community takes time and a real influencer invests effort and resources to grow their presence. Perhaps going viral or having a sudden spike in popularity can boost how quickly your follower count grows, but this is not the norm. Fake influencer profiles don’t need to effortlessly build relationships or grow their accounts, but can see a rapid rise from follower purchases. For this reason, the accounts that have been created recently but that boast a high number of followers are mostly fake profiles.
8. The audience has nothing in common with the influencer.
The profile’s audience has nothing in common or the influencer is located in an area of the world that has nothing to do with their followers.
For example, an influencer who is from Spain, but with followers mainly in Russia or Saudi Arabia, etc., is almost always a fake account.
9. Verify the trajectory of the influencer.
Check your history to see how long you have been posting, check if you have profiles on other social networks and the number of followers you have on each of them. Also, you should research the brands you have previously worked with.
Another recommendation is to search for your username on Google, this also applies to micro-influencers. If you Google an influencer’s name and nothing comes up, suspect the worst.
10. Look for red flags on each social network.
We must take into account some specific signals of each social network that is used. If it is Instagram, pay attention to the quality of the photos, videos and stories. A fake profile will not invest in quality photos, will not maintain a feed with valuable content or use hashtags according to the theme.
If it is YouTube, it analyzes the number of views, the ratio between “likes” and “dislikes” of your videos, as well as the type of comments from your followers.
A video with a large number of views but few comments is likely to lend itself to fraud. These signals are valid on other social networks, such as Facebook, Twitter and TikTok.