Any successful travel, tourism, and hospitality business know that the power of marketing is key to success in today’s world. Connecting with an online influencer can capture the attention of your target market, but how to be sure that he/she is not a Fake influencer?
Influencer marketing isn’t something new, see our article from 2019. In the last years, the influencer market grow extensively, and with it, the number of fake/imposter influencers.
How to protect your business from getting into an influencer trap?
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What kind of influencer is useless for your business?
- an influencer who is not in the same niche as your business, or who does not address your potential customer
- an influencer with a low ER (engagement rate)
- a fake influencer
How to calculate the ER?
Engagement rates are the currency of the social media marketing industry.
Sure, vanity metrics like followers and impressions count for something. But engagement metrics like the number of likes and comments give your social media performance perspective.
The engagement rate is calculated as total engagement divided by total followers, multiplied by 100
You can calculate it manually post by post, or just find an app to calculate it for you, like Hype auditor
How to understand the numbers?
Less than 1% = low engagement rate.
Between 1% and 3.5% = average/good engagement rate.
Between 3.5% and 6% = high engagement rate (We recommend working with influencers with a hight engagement or above)
Above 6% = very high engagement rate.
What is a fake influencer?
A fake influencer is somebody who gets his/her followers, likes and comments in a suspicious way.
The one who bought his/her followers
This kind of influencer will look like a good choice, as they will have many followers. The problem is that these followers are fake, which means they are not interested in the influencer’s content. If you promote your brand with this influencer, despite having many followers, you will get no views.
Is doing paid advertisements the same as buying followers?
Well in theory this is new followers which you got with the help of money investment. But this kind of followers isn’t fake, as in your advertisement campaign you will target your dream customer, and Facebook/Instagram will show your ad to real people.
The one who used follow/unfollow methods to gain followers
The follow/unfollow method will have a similar effect to that of bought followers, they can be more accurate with the target audience. Often these followers just follow back, because they like to get attention. But they will rarely engage with the influencer’s account.
The one who participates in engagement threads
Engagement threads are private groups usually on Facebook, Telegram, or Instagram. It unifies multiple Instagram users, sometimes in a similar niche, sometimes not. The idea is that everybody shares a link to their new post in a chat, and all the users of the chat give it a like and/or comment.
This influencer will have many likes and/or comments on their posts. The problem is that the posts of these users are usually seen only by the other participants of the thread because only they engage with the post. Which makes it not really visible to others. Also, Instagram is hunting this kind of activity and shadowban this kind of user for 14-30 days.
Two ways to spot the fake influencer
- Use Hype auditor to check their account, this app will provide you with detailed information about each account from the first day it was created.
- Analyze it manually
- The influencer who bought his followers will have many followers with strange names with numbers, or sometimes without images. Or these users will have only 1 or even no posts, be followed by a few ppl, and follow much more
- The follow/unfollow is not possible to catch, only if you check his/her account from time to time and spot the difference in the number of accounts he/she follows, or use an app like Hype auditor, this app can automatically provide you with a report special dedicated to a follow unfollow tendencies of an account
- The influencer who participates in engagement threads will have a similar number of likes on all posts (because there’s a special number of people in the tread chat) and usually will have very similar comments, for example, all the comments are with 5 words or don’t means anything. Like “Thank you for sharing, amazing!”
Equipped with this information you can easily spot the wrong influencers, and only work with the best ones.
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