This is the right angle that all brands should take, as they are riding the Social Media Wave and tapping on the current trends to advertise and reach out to consumers.
However, more and more of these “influencers” are tarnishing the industry by buying their followers and their engagement.
While we are unable to accurately identify if people actually bought their followers or not, we are able to compile some tell-tale signs of bought followers. Once you see these signs in the “influencers” you’re engaging, you should be wary.
We understand that many PR firms and Marketing teams engage Influencers from time to time, and yes, one big factor for engaging that influencer is because he/she has a high following. That being said, we urge all brands to go through some thorough research before engaging Influencers. The numbers may look nice for your Post-Campaign Report, but if no sales come in, you will still have to answer to your superiors.
We urge all brands to really know who you’re engaging, especially if you’re paying a huge sum of money to engage them. Don’t waste your money. Track them today.
1. Sudden Spike in Followers Growth
For any active Instagram user, the trend for followers should be a slow and steady increase. There are only 2 reasons for a sudden spike in followers growth.
- Suggested User by Instagram
- Bought followers
If you happened to be a Suggested User, Instagram would have sent you a DM telling you that. Of course, your engagement should definitely go up as well. After studying many, many accounts, we found that the market rate for Average Engagement per post is 8-10% of your followers. Meaning, if you have 1000 followers, you should get around 80-100 likes on average. The percentage goes smaller as your followers grow, but it should hit no lower than 5%.
If you are not a Suggested User by Instagram, the only reason for this drastic increase in such a short time frame would be that you bought these followers.
That being said, before engaging any influencers, we’d suggest that brands track their Influencer’s statistics through StarNgage’s Analytics.
2. Extremely Low Local Followers Count
StarNgage is able to track out where your followers locations are. If you are a foodie based in Singapore, chances are, the majority of your followers should be from Singapore. Especially if your top hashtags are #sgfoodies #exsgcafes etc.
We’re currently seeing trends of influencers having their top followers from USA, China, and even Russia, with few followers from Singapore. This is another red flag. I’m not saying that influencers with more followers from USA and China bought these followers, it’s just something you should note down, even more so if they have other red flags popping up.
For example, for the statistic in the middle, this particular user has above 60k followers. This means that this user has approximately 11k Singapore followers, 5k Russian followers, and 5k Indonesian followers. For a Singaporean foodie, does this seem suspicious?
If you’re a brand based in Singapore, why would you want to target influencers who don’t have a strong Singaporean fan base? To maximise your marketing budget, your aim should be to target influencers whose follower base is strongest in Singapore. (i.e. picture on right)
3. Engagement Disproportionate
As mentioned in my first point, Average Engagement per post is 8-10% of your followers (drops to 5% if number becomes significantly larger). I’ve seen some influencers with 10k followers, but only 200 likes, which then begs the question, why so little? Compared to other influencers who have 1k followers and 200 likes, who would you trust more?
Once again, these are just some red flags for you, as a brand, to take note when engaging Influencers. If you want us to analyse your Influencer Campaign, drop us an email. We are more than happy to help, as we don’t want Marketing Teams and PR firms to waste money on these “influencers”.
4. Questionable followers
One more red flag that should set your alarms off – followers with neither a profile picture nor any posts. Here are some examples taken from an “influencer” whom we believe is buying followers.
If these are the kind of followers you are paying for, I’d say you are just wasting your money.
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