Linqia, a top influencer marketing agency, published its fourth yearly report, ‘The State of Influencer Marketing 2020,’ for which it surveyed 192 marketers and discovered that 57% of marketers would increase their influencer marketing budgets in 2020.

The variety of social media influencers is also increasing — now users with differing levels of reach and followership are chosen by brands and qualified for marketing campaigns. 77% percent of marketers surveyed are interested in partnering with micro-influencers, while 64% wish to work with macro-influencers. One striking difference was in the desire to use nano-influencers, which was higher than the intent to work with celebrities (25% to 22%).

As far as the social media platform of choice, Instagram remains a leading influencer marketing platform. 

As influencer marketing becomes more popular, the choice of a relevant influencer becomes even more crucial for a campaign’s success. Yet, the primary requirement for a campaign to be a profit is that it picks genuine influencers to spread the brand’s message. 

Influencer marketing can be a waste of money if an influencer is chosen incorrectly. Yet, it can also result in adequate ROI; everything depends on the influencers qualified for the marketing campaign. This is why it’s vital to spot fake influencers before spending money on their services. 

How to spot a fake influencer

There are multiple ways to detect fake influencers – manual analysis of their social media profile, third-party tools with AI, and professional help of a social media expert along with artificial intelligence. 

InstaCheck is the example of an Instagram account audit run by a human expert with profound usage of AI and machine learning. Here’s how this Instagram account audit can help you to spot a fake Instagram influencer:

• It runs a total profile examination

• It analyses Instagram content

• It analyses an influencer’s captions

• It examines an influencer’s account engagement

Apart from the points above, you can also apply for InstaCheck of your own Instagram profile to build a better business profile and get your aesthetics, branding, and tone of voice examined along with getting relevant content ideas for your page. 

On the stage of the application, you will need to fill in your Instagram account information or insert an account link of an influencer you want to check. You will need to answer some questions from the questionnaire offered by a social media analyst who will run the audit. 

After some time, you will get a PDF report with a thorough explanation of yours or an influencer’s Instagram profile. If you have your own account analysed, you will also get exclusive recommendations on how you can enhance your Instagram account marketing. For an additional fee, you can also schedule a 30 minute Skype consultation with a social media expert and ask any questions directly. 

Manual influencer’s profile check

There are several signs that will help you spot a fake opinion leader manually without any services. You can run a manual influencers’ examination to get an initial picture of their authenticity. 

Sometimes, it’s sufficient to just quickly look at comments left under an influencer’s post to detect which of them are real and which ones are fake. For example, comments consisting of one word or emojis are typically left by bots. 

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Another way is to analyse the authenticity of an influencer is to check their engagement. Without any complex formulae, just look at the number of likes and comments in relation to the followership. If along with thousands of followers you see that an Instagrammer gets just dozens of likes and comments, it means that the followership consists of bots, fake or ghost accounts. If the number of likes is invisible due to the Instagram update implemented in 2019, you can use third-party tools to see how many likes an influencer gets per post. 

Besides, if you notice that new posts garner much more likes than those published a month ago, it might mean the account has been promoted non-organically. 

To check the authenticity of an influencer, manually analyse their audience who liked or commented on their posts. If there are many accounts with strange usernames and empty accounts without any content, these followers are bots. 

Communication between influencers and their audience plays a crucial role in influencers’ authenticity. Before working with an influencer, you need to make sure that they talk to their followers: reply to comments, publish stories with answers to their questions, and alike. If they do, replies to the audience’s comments should not be just ‘Thank you’, but have some sense and meaning.  

Yet another actionable way to check an influencer’s authenticity is to google their name and find their accounts on other social media. If you see that an influencer has Twitter, TikTok or YouTube with live followership, it will mean that their Instagram account is also genuine. By searching for them on search engines, you will also be able to find other relevant information about an influencer. 

Check what an influencer promotes and which brands sponsor their content on Instagram. To do so, find posts with hashtags like #spon, #sponsored or #ad and detect who an influencer partnered with before. Products that they promote should be relevant to their target audience. An influencer who respects followership and values the reputation would never push scam and questionable products to their followers. 

The bottom line

Finding the right influencer is a crucial point in any influencer marketing campaign. Before partnering with a social media influencer, you need to be 100% sure you’ve chosen the person whose target audience is relevant to your brand, who spreads messages that align with your business and your clients. Given that there are so many influencers on Instagram alone, sometimes, it’s challenging to choose a proper one to work with you. 

Luckily, there are tools that prove to be really useful when it comes to finding the best influencers for your campaign. To make sure you will get adequate ROI and increase your brand awareness with influencer marketing, apply for InstaCheck now to find which influencers are actually influential.