One of the biggest issues in influencer marketing is fake followers and engagements. Gone are the days where brands can take follower count and apparent engagement rate as a marker for a quality influencer. There are many ways for influencers to fake their numbers in an effort to appeal to more brands. But how can businesses spot the fraud and avoid hiring an influencer that actually lacks any influence? 

Keep reading to find out how you can determine if an influencer has a real audience or not, what’s normal behavior, and how to ensure your brand is protected when launching an influencer campaign.

What are bots?

Bot marketing has been around for quite some time and is easily accessible and low cost for anyone who’s looking to use them. From commenting on a post to following an account, these bots are able to do a variety of activities that will boost numbers for an influencer.

Bot accounts have been around for years, and many have simply followed random accounts in an effort to fly under the radar from social media platforms archiving their inactive profiles. Because of this, it’s nearly impossible to find any influencer with zero bot accounts in their audience. What is important is tracking how many of their followers are bot and spam accounts, and ensuring that number isn’t greater than 30%.

How to combat bots: For many influencers abusing bot marketing, it’s easy to tell. Head over to their followers and posts, and look for users with weirdly long names with a bunch of random numbers, or users commenting weird/ generic phrases on a post. You should also use a credibility tool like this one from Grin.Co to see what the credibility rating is for influencers to see how many inactive accounts they have listed as followers. If an influencer has under 65-70% credibility, we recommend passing on them. 70-85% credibility is ok to work with, but be sure to adjust your rate and offering accordingly. Anything over 85% is a great influencer to engage with.

What are engagement pods? 

An engagement pod is a group of users who have agreed to like and comment on each other’s social media posts in order to inflate their numbers. The people involved are not necessarily friends, but they share a common goal – getting more likes or comments on their own pictures/posts. 

Engagement pods pose as fake influencers, using their own accounts to lift up other influencer accounts and vice versa. While this is one step better from bots, since you’re at least dealing with real people here, this can harm your campaign, especially if you’re hyper-focused in one region and you’re working with an influencer who has an engagement pod with people from all over the world.

How to combat engagement pods: It’s pretty challenging to identify an engagement pod from the outside looking in. And while there’s no technology (yet) to discourage this behavior, you can either request audience data from influencers directly or use a software tool like Dyzio to vet their followers’ demographics. This will help determine if their followers fit the bill on the audience you’re looking to target for your campaign.

How can brands avoid influencer fraud?

Like everything on the internet, there’s an upside and a downside. The downside is that this happens often and is incredibly accessible to anyone and everyone. The upside is that it’s incredibly easy to spot when you’ve done it for a long time. That’s a benefit to working with an agency like Social HQ, which manually vets each influencers’ feed for influencer fraud, brand compatibility, and potential red flags that would put your brand in jeopardy. 

So whether you use the recommendations above or outsource to the pros, stay curious about your influencer partners and do your due diligence before signing any contracts with them. It’ll save you a lot of headaches and keep your budget working in your favor.

Want to learn more about what Social HQ can do for your brand? Book a discovery call with us to learn more about our influencer marketing capabilities and how it will work for your brand.