Becoming an Influencer or working with Influences can be quite profitable. Fake influencers can lose you a lot of money if you don’t look for authenticity.
But how to spot fake influencers? And should you buy followers?
What are fake influencers?
Influencer marketing is a very popular form for businesses to get leads and make sales. While it can be a successful marketing campaign, many businesses only see big numbers and don’t do due diligence before working with an Influencer. There are estimated around 5-30% of accounts are fake.
These accounts have fake followers, fake engagement, or fake views on videos. The problem is everyone, from celebrities to business owners, and politicians are buying these follower bots. You can find countless social media companies that will promise to increase your follower count and engagement. The issue is the numbers swing drastically and make your brand unauthentic.
Should you buy Social Media followers?
It can take a long time to build followers organically on social media. Some feed only show posts that are currently “hot” and received a ton of engagement. It makes getting followers by simply posting good content less effective.
The real engagement is being suppressed by those who buy follower bots and likes, retweets, and vend comments. The accounts that do this aren’t necessarily illegal and are often not banned on social media networks with almost no consequences.
These bots reveal the true power of Influencers because if you buy enough followers, you might be able to earn more than you invest. The positive return of investment is the reason why many people buy them.
Some social media platforms are already taking action. Instagram has explicitly forbidden in the term of use to create fake accounts, so many bots or ghost accounts are regularly banned. If you bought followers, you might get a warning you may lose the follower you paid for, and worst, your account gets entirely suspended.
Also, big brands can tell if you have fake engagement and followers, so you most likely won’t get good brand deals. Real influencers try to get rid of their fake followers to increase their engagement rate and improve their attractiveness to potential brands.
Many people can tell if you have a high number of fake followers, especially when you have low engagement rates. That means that any potential follower might not want to engage with your post or click on links. But you only get leads from real people who buy through links.
The problem is that if you buy fake followers, you not only can get your account suspended you also can lose real engagement and brand deals. Often the sites you can buy bots from are very scammy, and your numbers increase for one day, and at the next, your bought followers are all gone.
While it is possible that you can buy real followers or use a follow or unfollow method, it still doesn’t benefit you as much as when getting a real follower that decided to take action because the person likes your content. Also, when you follow more people than you have followers, your profile can get penalized and marked as spam.
How to grow your Social media instead of buying followers?
One of the most important is consistency and quality content to grow your followers and increase your engagement. You need a plan and social media strategy on what content you want to provide and know what your targeted audience is.
Link your social media profiles on your website and write your company details with your logo in your profile. Try to encourage your followers to take some type of action like “Comment your opinion,” “Visit Now,” etc. Make frequent posts that are relevant to your audience and brand and match your mission and business values.
Also, monitor your progress and focus on 1-3 social media platforms first, and as you grow, you can expand your reach to more networks. You can use a tool like Socialoomph to schedule and track your posts and manage your social media profiles on one site.
To grow your following, you can also do social media ads and boost your engagement rates and get more views on your content. Another useful strategy is to work with other influencers to do content together and cross-promote each other.
How to spot fake influencers?
To find out of an influencer has fake followers and engagement, you can use some strategies to see their credibility.
1. The numbers are unusual
The real and genuine accounts have similar patterns when it comes to numbers of followers and engagement. For example, you can see if an account follows thousands of people, but their follower number is way lower.
While it doesn’t necessarily mean it is a botted account, it suggests that it only offers little value to the community.
Genuine influencers have more followers than accounts they follow. Also, the potential engagement rate is another factor you should look for. It can be suspicious when you see an influencer with 100.000 Followers but only with 1500-3000 likes and comment on an average post.
While an engagement rate of 1% is okay for many influencers depending on the niche, it may be a sign of fake followers when it is regularly below this. Also, higher isn’t necessarily better. It can also be a sign that influence uses artificial engagement techniques.
2. Many actions for a few days and then little other activity.
Often a bot that follows hundreds of thousands of people on the day of its creation. It may even share some content to look genuine on that day. But when it follows enough people, it stops and relies on people not checking their accounts to unfollow the fake accounts.
Genuine influencers have a relatively steady growth in follower number. This number may increase when they are recognized as influencers but most likely won’t have a massive increase of followers in a short time like fake accounts do.
3. Profil bio
The people who create fake accounts usually don’t put much effort into writing realistic-sounding bios and sometimes leave the bio section blank or with a minimum of details. Or they make their profile hidden.
But how genuine can an influencer be when he hides bio details?
A lack of profile pictures can also be a red flag, particularly on Instagram. In some cases, Instagram catfish by creating fake bios and uploading some else’s pictures or stock content.
4. Spam Comments
A smarter bot account can create comments to make them appear more genuine. The problem is these comments are generic and lack substance. For example, comments like “good picture” or “good job.”
While these comments are engagement, they have no value to a brand that hopes influencers can generate leads to their products.
Also, some accounts leave irrelevant spam comments to sell something. It can be poorly thought through and executed sales tactics. Or, in another case, more sinister comments that encourage you to leave contact information to steal your identity.
5. Use tools to check for fake influencers
There are plenty of tools like Hype Auditor that show a Quality audience score of an influencer. This way, you find the right influencer for your campaigns and get better results. The tool also lets you easily manage and track influencer campaigns.
