If the masses will receive your brand, it’s understandable if they charter an influencer with thousands and thousands of followers to promote your brand and product. However, if among those thousands of followers the majority are of bots, then your investment is nothing but a mere wastage of cash.
This problem of fake followers is nothing new, but people usually don’t talk about it. Ever since the platform of social media was used to influence the customers, many users have taken a significant advantage from the bots. However, now that Instagram is planning to take action regarding this, this might be a little concerning for many that the majority of the brands are still paying a huge amount of cash to the influencers to increase the demand and worth of your brand with exaggerated followings.
Points North Group recently conducted research indicating that Aquaphor and Ritz-Carlton were two of the giant brands with the highest number of fake followers for the posts they were sponsoring through influencers.
1) HOW TO KNOW YOUR INSTAGRAM FOLLOWERS ARE FAKE?
There are times when it is quite easy to predict that your following circle is comprised of fake accounts – but there are times when a little more research and perception is required to circumvent the partnering with fake Instagram influencer fan bases.
To give you a little information about this, I have jotted down a few of the techniques through which you can easily find out if your follower is fake or not.
- Check out each follower individually. When their post was updated the last time? If the post was quite a long ago, it means that your follower’s account is dead as a whistle. However, if the numbers are high, the chances of fake followers are also high.
- If their comment doesn’t make any sense or written in a gibberish form, there’s a possibility that a bot wrote it, and not a human.
- There are plenty of tools out there who check if your followers are real or not easily by infiltrating the handle.
- Those types of accounts are also fake which doesn’t have any displayed picture, followers, or any posts, etc.
- Accounts with weird usernames comprising of periods underscores and numbers are also said to be fake accounts.
- There are times when fake followers are not brought in by an influencer. Always remember this.
2) PROBLEM WITH FAKE INFLUENCERS:
When a brand manager with zero experience observes a social media account loaded with a large number of followers, thousands of likes, and consisting of video views – they will think that it was them that brought so many influencers, and probably generate a large number of dollars. But did they achieve something? Not really, I suppose.
The social post which an influencer will work on will show if it’s renowned – after all, the band of fake followers is easily utilized into the commenting and liking at a particular number of posts published per day on the website. However, this process will not generate any awareness of the brand and sales numbers will not improve.
Conclusion:
The harsh reality is that plenty of brands need to be a little careful when they are reaching out to the influencers. And these days, there are plenty of things other than bots that might disrupt their business. Buzzfeed has indicated that a paid service has been launched with a name called Fuelgram that automatically comments and likes your posts using multiple accounts. The comments are usually performance-oriented, with a lot of emojis being used in those comments.
Having said that, influencers are only powerful when people give them the authority to trust them. Eventually, brands will be able to determine that they are paying a lot of cash for something that is fake and may disrupt their business.
Alternatively, brands can save thousands of dollars by engaging more with the customers and designate efforts to make sure that they are marketing their channel to the real people, people who are loyal towards them.
