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Marketers are spending a lot of money on influencers nowadays. Around 19% of marketers will spend anywhere between one and ten thousand dollars on an influencer marketing. Another 18% will unbelievably spend between one hundred and five hundred thousand on their influencer campaigns over a year. Now, you have to admit, that’s a whole lot of money. But the problem is, not all influencers have the same reach, audience, or engagement. Some people have little to no influence in their niche but still have seemingly massive followings. Many of their followers are nothing more than paid bots. Those are what we call fake influencers. Today, we’re going to teach you how to spot them….
You’re talking to a person with a million followers. That great, right? You want someone that has a great reach and has influence over millions of people. You pay for them. They promote your content. However, nothing comes out of it. What gives? This happens when you forget to check the influencer’s follower-to-engagement ratio. If a person has a huge number of followers but only has dozen or so likes and comments on every post, there’s a good chance they’reprogrammed bots are mainly following them.
Some follower services will also allow you to pay for comments too. This makes your job harder because you can’t see whether the followers an influencer has are real or not at first glance. You need to do some more work. By that, we mean that you should ask them for specific numbers and evidence. You should reach out to the influencer and have a chat. Ask them to give you evidence like the top five locations of their followers, the average age, and gender information, for example. If these stats are all over the place, people don’t usually program bots to have consistent user information.
If you’re not satisfied with numbers, you can also discuss their previous work as influencers. People who do this for a living surely have a record of companies, businesses, and brands they’ve previously worked with. Don’t settle for followers. You need to know how good the influencer does their job. Ask them for references and then reach out to the businesses they’ve done work with. Their previous clients will tell you how successful their influencer campaigns were. This will help you determine whether or not the influencer is worth working with or not.
A person who spends their time building a following and advertising companies certainly has an account to check everything from impressions to audience reach. Their livelihood depends on how well their posts perform, so they take good care of them. If you’re looking to work with an influencer, you should ask them about their statistics. They can either send you the raw numbers in a CVS format or, again, take a screenshot of how their latest posts have been performing. If their posts are performing badly, you know their following is fake.
That’s how to spot fake influencers. It may seem simple on the surface, but it does require some footwork. Where to go from here? Use this knowledge when negotiating with the next influencer. Our recommendation is this: instead of chasing large influencers, concentrate on smaller ones in your niche. That’s because they have a more authentic connection with their highly-committed followers.
