How can you tell if an influencer has fake followers?
Oh, influencers. They’re a fickle bunch. There are those whose posts boost your brand into the heavens, and there are those who take your money in return for a post to 50,000 bots.
If you have paid big bucks for an influencer only to see no real results, the reason could be of many… Wrong target audience, wrong influencer choice or the most likely… Fake followers.
Follower counts are often seen as the ultimate metric of an influencer’s worth. Investing in an influencer with a 100k count over one with a 50k seems like the obvious choice.
But not all 100k followings are built the same and if you’re paying big bucks to show your product to 99k robots, you’d be better off holding a cardboard sign outside for an hour.
Here’s five ways to tell if their fan count is fake.
1. Big followers, small engagements.
An influencer with followers in the thousands but likes and comments in the tens is a huge red flag. It is highly likely their followers were bought en masse. Unfortunately, this kind of fake account is few and far between.
Influencers are generally savvy enough to not just buy followers but buy likes and comments too.
Determining whether they’re the real deal requires a closer look.
Another easy way… The influencer now has “And others” selected rather than sharing the number of likes publicly.
2. High followers, low engagement rate.
Engagement rates tell us how many people interacted with a post after viewing it. It takes into consideration everyone who saw the post and how many of those interacted with it.
Engagement rates can be calculated in a few different ways but a simple mechanism for Instagram is: total engagements divided by reach or impressions, multiplied by 100.
For example, if Janie, a 50k influencer received 100 likes for a post but reached 10000 people.
Her engagement rate would be calculated by: (100 / 10000 x 100 = 1%). Buh-bow.
A good rate generally depends on how many followers the influencer has collected.
We use the following rule of thumb: If they’re under 10,000 followers, you can expect around 9%; if they’re around the 50k mark, expect around 6%; and if they’re 100k, you’re looking at around 4%. Scale accordingly (and roughly).
Spikes in follower counts can be good indicators of bought followers. Sometimes an influencer will earn a spike organically by having a post go viral but if you can see a spike but can’t attribute it to a hugely popular post… ba-bow. FAKE.
There are free tools such as Socialblade will chart an influencer’s growth so you can analyse whether they’ve had steady growth (organic) or if they went from zero to hero.
Analysing comments is one of the easiest ways to spot an influencer who’s buying engagements on the side.
Comments such as “cool pic!” or “love it” are dime a dozen, as are comments consisting solely of emojis.
The accounts that generally write those comments are commonly overseas, possess obscure usernames and have feeds that are largely nonsensical.
As a side note: if your influencer is a big dog on Twitter, you can use a tool such as KRED to analyse their mentions, replies, retweets and followers. It’ll analyse their account before spitting out an “Influencer” and “Outreach Score” (read: engagement score). The influencer score is out of a hundred and the outreach is out of ten.
5. Gut Feeling
Seems obvious but nosey around the influencers account, does it feel alive? Is it active? Look at their following, are the latest 50 real people?
