These tips will help you identify fake influencers
Posted: Mon Jan 20, 2025 10:34 am
In the age of fake news, it is not uncommon for some influencers to deliberately buy their influence or at least to get some fake followers subscribed to them. That is why it is extremely important for brands and marketers to know how not to fall for a scam. Learn all about fake influencers in this post and use Kolsquare's credibility score to identify fake accounts.
Key points
Working with fake influencers can cause lasting damage to your brand's reputation:
Not only influencers, but you too can lose a lot of credibility and authenticity.
You will waste marketing budgets unnecessarily.
The reputation of your brand, as well as the entire influencer marketing industry, can be negatively impacted in the long term.
Kolsquare's credibility score indicates the degree of credibility and authenticity of influencers. Accordingly, you can trust the number from 0 (completely untrustworthy) to 100 (absolutely credible).
Despite the trend towards influencer marketing, cooperation between brands and influencers does not always have to be positive. Influencer marketing will undoubtedly continue to gain importance in 2023 , with many brands even directing their marketing efforts entirely to social media. But fake followers and fake influencers are a growing problem in the world of influencer marketing.
According to this, don’t rush into a new collaboration because you might be setting yourself up for a scam . So, how can you avoid these missteps and make sure you only collaborate with sincere influencers? First, understand with us what exactly it means when influencers have fake followers. Afterwards, we will give you tips on how to identify these types of influencers and how to avoid them accordingly.
In July 2022, we published an article on the Kolsquare blog that should help you identify fake influencers . In addition, we also reviewed the legal consequences of internet fraud.
What are fake followers?
Fake followers or fake influencers are people or social media accounts canadian ceo email database that artificially inflate their follower or engagement numbers to appear more popular or influential than they really are. Fake influencers may, for example, buy followers, use bots, or create fake accounts.
To avoid working with fake followers and influencers, brands and advertisers can use various tools and techniques to verify the authenticity of an influencer's followers. Read more about this topic in this post.
The drawbacks of influencer marketing: these are the consequences of working with fake influencers
The problem with this is that it makes brands and advertisers think they can reach a larger, more engaged audience than they actually are.
This can lead to wasted marketing budgets and ineffective campaigns . Let's say you yourself are not actively paying for followers, but are unwittingly partnering with influencers whose audience is partly purchased. Otherwise, if this has been part of your strategy so far and you have not yet been exposed, you should stop doing it immediately for ethical reasons.
You may also be thinking about how fake influencers can harm you if no one knows that you have paid for your audience in the spirit of “fake it ‘till you make it”. But dishonesty can (and will) have negative consequences just like in real life . Ultimately, you can have little or no ROI and a low or non-existent conversion rate by cooperating with fake influencers . Also, your engagement will most likely be on the floor, because even if you pay for comments, the profiles obviously do not belong to real, active users, but only feign interest. This also distorts your statistics, as you cannot rely on the demographics of your audience.
Key points
Working with fake influencers can cause lasting damage to your brand's reputation:
Not only influencers, but you too can lose a lot of credibility and authenticity.
You will waste marketing budgets unnecessarily.
The reputation of your brand, as well as the entire influencer marketing industry, can be negatively impacted in the long term.
Kolsquare's credibility score indicates the degree of credibility and authenticity of influencers. Accordingly, you can trust the number from 0 (completely untrustworthy) to 100 (absolutely credible).
Despite the trend towards influencer marketing, cooperation between brands and influencers does not always have to be positive. Influencer marketing will undoubtedly continue to gain importance in 2023 , with many brands even directing their marketing efforts entirely to social media. But fake followers and fake influencers are a growing problem in the world of influencer marketing.
According to this, don’t rush into a new collaboration because you might be setting yourself up for a scam . So, how can you avoid these missteps and make sure you only collaborate with sincere influencers? First, understand with us what exactly it means when influencers have fake followers. Afterwards, we will give you tips on how to identify these types of influencers and how to avoid them accordingly.
In July 2022, we published an article on the Kolsquare blog that should help you identify fake influencers . In addition, we also reviewed the legal consequences of internet fraud.
What are fake followers?
Fake followers or fake influencers are people or social media accounts canadian ceo email database that artificially inflate their follower or engagement numbers to appear more popular or influential than they really are. Fake influencers may, for example, buy followers, use bots, or create fake accounts.
To avoid working with fake followers and influencers, brands and advertisers can use various tools and techniques to verify the authenticity of an influencer's followers. Read more about this topic in this post.
The drawbacks of influencer marketing: these are the consequences of working with fake influencers
The problem with this is that it makes brands and advertisers think they can reach a larger, more engaged audience than they actually are.
This can lead to wasted marketing budgets and ineffective campaigns . Let's say you yourself are not actively paying for followers, but are unwittingly partnering with influencers whose audience is partly purchased. Otherwise, if this has been part of your strategy so far and you have not yet been exposed, you should stop doing it immediately for ethical reasons.
You may also be thinking about how fake influencers can harm you if no one knows that you have paid for your audience in the spirit of “fake it ‘till you make it”. But dishonesty can (and will) have negative consequences just like in real life . Ultimately, you can have little or no ROI and a low or non-existent conversion rate by cooperating with fake influencers . Also, your engagement will most likely be on the floor, because even if you pay for comments, the profiles obviously do not belong to real, active users, but only feign interest. This also distorts your statistics, as you cannot rely on the demographics of your audience.