- Looking for influencers to help build your business?
Let me introduce you to California model
and influencer Alexa Ray @calibeachgirl310 and
travel photographer Amanda Smith @wanderinggirl.
Both women have a very huge, five digit
following on social media.
At the same time they have awesomely curated feeds
that can fit your brand, earlier this year
a protein drink company offered them
sponsorship deals to advertise their products.
Sounds like a good deal right?
The problem is both accounts are fake.
(trumpet music)
Want to give these ladies a chance, think again.
Influencer marketing, Mediakix, published a study
on fake accounts, they created two of these accounts
to run their pilot and research.
Using a local model to stand in as the lifestyle blogger
they generated an entire profile's worth
of content in a one day photo shoot.
For the second account, they used free stock photos
to reflect the Instagramer's travels.
They then purchased fake followers from different sites.
After reaching the minimum threshold of 10,000 followers,
they qualified to enter influencer networks
which opened the fake account's doors to branded deals.
What's crazy is that companies have started awarding
campaigns tho these fake influencers.
Fake Instagram accounts are a big, big problem
especially for advertisers, it's scary to think that
all that money they invested in these efforts
will be wasted and nothing will come back to the brand.
It's important for companies and marketers to do
a little do diligence to ensure that
what you see is really what you get.
It may be difficult, but not impossible.
They're several warning signs that you can use
to see if the influencers you're getting are phonies.
But first, you must organize and categorize
your influencers for easy reference.
If you want to manage influencer marketing with ease
check out my free and easy to use
influencer marketing template in the description below.
This will help you summarize and compile all the influencers
you'd want to tap into for your campaigns and what are
the next steps you'll need to make it a success.
You can download that for free in the description below.
If you're done with that, let's get started.
Warning sign number one, comments without replies.
If you see their accounts you might notice
repetitive comments, but when you open the profiles
of those who commented you'll either see no images posted
or just a hand full of content.
These may be bot accounts that are paid to comment.
Warning sign number two, large following,
but little engagement, if a user has a huge following
but there's little to no engagement on the photos
these followers are most likely bot.
As a rule of thumb, accounts garner at least 8-10%
as engagement from their followers.
If they fail to get that number, it tells you two things.
It's either bot or the content
is not appealing to the audience.
The later can be analyzed when you look at each post.
Warning sign number three, following lots of accounts.
When you see that an account is following large groups
of people versus the actual followers
of the page, they're most likely bots.
They're designed to follow and like posts automatically.
Warning sign number four, large following, new account.
When an account posted a few photos in a short time
and already has more then 10,000 followers
you need to get skeptical.
Influencers take their time to develop their huge following.
Use the profile history to assess
if the influencer is real or not.
If you're still unsure despite the warning signs,
do quick reverse image search.
Grab the image or post and search for the content on Google.
If the content is really from the influencer
search engines will be able to tell you
the origins of the photo.
At the same time, look for return links to that account.
If you want to learn more about influencer marketing
you can download my free complete guide to
influencer marketing in the description below.
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(happy music)