Influencers are using fake followers
A couple of months back there was news in the influencer marketing industry. Actor/rapper Badshah (Aditya Sisodia) was investigated by police for paying money to get fake followers and thus increasing likes on his music videos. Influencers and brands have been using the power of influencer marketing to increase their popularity and goodwill with their audience. But as the saying goes, there are two sides to a coin. So even though influencer marketing is an extremely powerful strategy nowadays, it has it's set of risks and drawbacks.
Now the question arises
What are fake followers and what is the reason behind influencers gaining fake followers?
There are people on social media who don't have any presence on the platform. The account they make is a ghost account, like with no profile picture or posts or followers. These types of social media accounts have no presence at all and it is possible that they even don't belong to a real person. Being an influencer is about having a legit audience, who follow your content, comment on it, and give you suggestions too. It is all about the engagement of the crowd. But at times influencers develop such an idea in their minds that having followers is everything. So these influencers contact agencies that provide them with fake followers. At times you must have noticed that suddenly in one day an influencer is gaining 10k followers. Now that can't happen in reality. So it means that the influencer has bought the followers. Another way of detecting if the influencer has fake followers or not is by seeing likes and comments on their posts. E.g. if an influencer has 10k followers, at least the influencer would be having 3-4k likes on their posts but if you see there only 400-500 likes and comments below 100.
Fake influencers
There are people on social media who seem like all the other influencers, like posting high-quality images. But these influencers mostly have an audience of fake followers and bots. these influencers cease to have a meaningful crowd and crowd engagement on their account. These types of influencers are known as fake influencers. At times these influencers are backed up by agencies, like creating a fake account in the name of a person who may or may not exist, further posting high-quality images, stock photos, or hire models for them. After that, they buy fake followers to make the fake account look like an influence account.
Signs of a fake follower
1. Unreal numbers
At times you would see that the follower to following ratio of certain accounts won't match. For example, the account would be following thousands of accounts but the account would be having exceptionally low followers. The genuine account holders won't be having this difference their followers to the following ratio would be equal or a little on either side. Mostly genuine influences have more followers than following.
2. Profiles
There are accounts on social media with empty, hidden, or copied profiles. The reason behind this is that people who make fake accounts don't work on making a profile. Either they copy it from somewhere or leave it empty and at times they hide the profile.
3. Spam comments
The evolution of Influencer marketing has been regular so as the evolution of fraud. Earlier we were able to identify a fake follow as if we don't get any likes or comments by the account. But nowadays bot account has pre-prepared comments that they post on the contents of Influencers. If an account is seen repeatedly posting a single comment like a good job, nice pic, etc that account may be fake.
In the end, influencer marketing is a boon to brands and influencers but with every boon comes a challenge, so the challenge of influencer fraud has to be dealt with to avoid losses.
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