Marketing your business on Instagram can be tricky. One of the best and most common resources out there is the use of Social Media Influencers. Influencers can offer your business great ways to expand its audience and create innovative user-generated content. However, not all Influencers are as powerful and popular as they claim, and it is important to properly vet each one before going into business with them.

A Social Media Influencer is somebody with a high follower count who has a trusting audience that values his or her opinions.  Usually, the Influencer you are after is someone who is associated with the product you are trying to market as well as living in the city you are marketing to. A small-to-medium size restaurant, for instance, would look for a “Foodie-type” Influencer. These kinds of Influencers’ followers look to him or her for their reviews of certain restaurants and often use them as a reliable source when debating where to go eat next.

In 2018, Influencers can have anywhere between 15 thousand to over a 100 thousand followers. When used properly, they can be great tools to getting your product into the minds of people you wouldn’t normally reach.

However, as previously mentioned, don’t believe all the hype. Not all Influencers have the popularity that they claim. It is very easy to purchase “Fake Followers” or even to cultivate them for free. By “Fake Follower”, I mean someone who doesn’t follow the Influencer because of who he is or what he’s selling, but rather because he was purchased or cultivated in another way, rendering him completely useless to you when marketing you brand or product.

To use the same previous example of a small-to-medium size restaurant, if they were looking to market their restaurant to locals, and their local Influencer’s followers were mostly “Fake”, there’s a good chance those followers live somewhere in Asia or Europe and thus are highly unlikely to ever visit this restaurant.

So if your brand is looking for Influencers, checking for “Fake Followers” is of utmost importance.

Here are three key things to look for when checking for such Followers:

1)      Look closely at who their Followers are. Head over to the Influencer’s Instagram page and click on some of their Followers’ profiles. Things to look out for are Followers with no posts themselves, those with no profile pictures and those who post tons of “spammy” comments. Check where their Followers are located.  If they aren’t in the same country, high chance they have been purchased. They are also highly likely to be following a lot of accounts but have little to no followers themselves.

2)      Unfortunately, Likes can be bought too. If they’re buying Followers AND Likes, it can be a little tricky to figure out what’s genuine and what’s not. It is a good idea to use common sense here.  Take a look at the content posted and the Influencer themselves, and use your judgment and gut to figure out if it makes sense for the post to have as many Likes as it does. If you’re suspicious, or something feels off, your gut is probably telling you something. Be wary.

3)      Look for a low engagement rate. The average engagement rate on Instagram is around the 3% mark. Therefore, if your Influencer has 15,000 Followers, the engagement on each post should be around 450, give or take the content quality of each picture posted. Anything lower should be considered suspicious. Instagram accounts that have a disproportionate amount of engagement compared to Followers have probably purchased “Fake Followers”.

If you’ve done the first two steps and you are still just unsure, there are other steps you can take. You can contact an agency like ours, Eleven Waves, and we can audit the Influencer accounts ourselves and send you a full report. We also have a solid list of trusted Influencers that we use ourselves, and we can help introduce you and walk you through the process.