Protect Your Brand Reputation Against Influencer Fraud

Influencers have taken social media marketing by storm, but the truth is that influencer marketing can make or break the business. Social media indeed is a place where audience directly engages with their favorite celebrity and people follow them to know more about them. It gives entrepreneurs a chance to choose right influencers with most number of followers and this surely boosts sale.

It is a fact that influencers with a large social media following and a recognizable brand name can persuade the followers to show interest in the campaign that they are running on their social media and this would eventually increase website traffic and conversions. For some time now influencer fraud is increasing due to a lot of factors that might go ignored but, should be taken care of to avoid fraudulent activities.

Before anything else let’s understand, what is Influencer Fraud?

Reputable influencers build their followers by investing many years and efforts through targeted content on social networking sites like YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. These influencers provide relevant information to audience in their unique way that will entice them to buy the product that is being endorsed. There should be a solid and authentic connection between the influencer and the audience because this eventually adds value to their marketing schemata.

Unfortunately, the influencer industry has also been introduced to frauds by public figures who want to create brand authentication but with shortcuts. Influencer marketing fraud has come up by the practice of buying followers in order to show a bigger number in “followers section” on social media profile or using bots to generate fake comments. According to studies, fraudulent influencers increase their engagement with brand’s social campaigns imposing as genuine influencer. And what normal people don’t know is that more than half of them are not genuine and that they are paying to influencer who has generated fake follower’s and fake comments.

How would you know if the influencer is fraud?

Entrepreneurs generally fall in the trap of fraud influencers but once you are tricked you will realize that you have wasted not only your hard earned money, but time as well. Here are few sign that can help you to track down fake influencers.

• Instant raise in number of Followers – Sometimes, the number of followers are increased overnight while there is no big event that could be the reason for it. If you get to track that there is sudden spike in followers then it could be the possibility that influencer might have bought new followers.
• Unmatched reactions to Followers – It is the easiest factor that could be tracked down. All you need to do is go to the profile page of the influencer and scroll down to recent post, if there is lesser number of followers and relatively higher number of comments then it might be because of auto generated comments. Conversely, if an influencer has a substantial number of followers with very few likes and comments. Then beware!!
• Comments Don’t Align With Posts – If you notice that comments that are posted on the comment box have no relevance with the post. For instance if influencer has posted a video of cute baby singing and the comment is on entirely different subject. This is a sure sign of fraudulent comments.

How To avoid getting trapped in influencer fraud

All you need to do is keep a hawk eye on influencer’s history which includes the active time on social media, the raise in the number of followers, comments & likes. What are the things the influencers is posting and what kind of reaction is received. Another most important thing is to track the performance of the other campaign the influencer is associated with.

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