What is Influencer Fraud and How Can You Avoid It?

Discover the dark side of the influencer industry: fraud and how to avoid it?

With the evolution of influencer marketing and influencers it was obvious that cheating had to show its ugly face! 🤥

The influencer marketing industry should reach a whopping 15 billion dollars by 2022, nevertheless, marketers are more and more vigilant about fraudulent influencers... 🚨

But what exactly is fraud on Instagram?

This scourge is more and more spotted, and we explain how :          

In the world of influence, fraud comes down to buying likes, comments, or even followers 💰 to gain credibility with brands.

The problem: if brands collaborate with these kinds of accounts, the engagement rate will be very low, their marketing goals will not be reached and consequently a lot of money will be lost. 📉

The different types of fraud are as follows:

👉 subscribers, likes, purchased comments

👉 bots: purchased services to automate comments

👉 community pods that support each other by sharing their photos on a group and everyone comments

This calls into question the authenticity and engagement rate of the influencer.

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How to detect and analyze these types of accounts?

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Measure the engagement rate 📊

⚠️Check the ratio of likes to comments.

For example: if the number of likes is disproportionate to the number of comments, or if the influencer has 100k subscribers but only 20 likes it's questionable! 🧐

A sudden increase in subscribers could also be a sign! Be careful to check that it is not related to a contest or a viral video that would have caused the buzz, but rather if the influencer for example has very little content and would have a strong growth of subscribers.  You can check this on Favikon, the evolution of subscribers and subscriptions to easily detect the pod or bots.

To do this, you need to analyze the subscribers to detect fake accounts: be attentive to the quality of the bio, the content, the number of "normal" followers.

Favikon allows the audience to see if the influencer has acquired fake subscribers, the percentage of suspicious subscribers, and the quality of the audience 👇

Analyse their content and followers 🔎

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Go into details, look at the type of post and the type of followers!

• Analyze the quality of the comments! If you repeatedly have comments that are similar such as "cool", "nice" it may mean that they are bots.

• Another sign of fraud is the same number of likes on multiple posts, which is impossible because an influencer’s content is varied and not everyone always likes what he shares!

• If he/she never posts content, he/she surely is a fake influencer because of a very low engagement rate

• The location of his subscribers: if the majority come from another country that doesn’t have the native language of the influencer, it's shady!

You can find the details on the Favikon platform 👀

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The follow and unfollow technique: people who will follow the content creator will follow him just for a story of subscribers or politeness.

Here is an example of curves, if the following change enormously it is suspicious.

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