Four Easy Ways to Identify Fake Influencers on Instagram.

Tips to navigate the rocky road of influencer marketing and how to spot the fame-hungry cheaters.

Welp.

It’s the end of 2017 and it appears that not only is influencer marketing not going away (so many of us marketers said the bubble would burst this year), it appears that brands are spending more on influencer marketing on Instagram. As more and more CMO’s are asking, “Why aren’t we doing influencer marketing?”, you may find yourself scrambling to align with influencers. I’ve written a few articles in the past (here and here) on the subject that provide advice on how to approach influencer marketing and I haven’t seen articles on how to identify “fake influencers.”

There are so many young Instagrammers out there who so strongly desire Instafame that they’re implementing very shrewd paid and organic tactics to boost their follower and engagement numbers. Below are four ways to identify the Instacheaters:

Red Flag: High “Following” Numbers

Influencers are real people. They really are! They have their own friends and generally follow only the people they know or brands they love just like everyone else.

One of the most frequently used tactics in the influencer game has been the Follow/Unfollow Bot. Instagram claims to have sniffed out and shut down the companies that did this but hundreds more have popped up. Go to Google and type in “follow bot instagram” and see what pops up. Here’s how it works:

Pay a weekly or monthly subscription (typically around $50/month).
The program takes a hold of your instagram account and begins to follow instagram accounts. (you can even set up targeting so it only follows accounts that may be interested in your content). It follows roughly around 1,000 accounts at one time.
The program automatically unfollows the accounts it followed after 3–4 days.

Instagram users are more drawn to follow someone after they’ve been followed by that account so this really is a shrewd tactic. Instagrammers have been known to see increases in their follower numbers in the hundreds per day. If you see an influencer who is following more than 1,000 people, you should be weary of them using a follow/unfollow bot.

Why this is important: You want to align with influencers who have built their audience organically because they produce great content.

Red Flag: Obsessive 4AM Likes and Comments

It’s 4am and you’re wide awake for no reason so you open up Instagram. You click on who’s liked your photos and then click on the “Following” tab to see if anyone else is awake. Oddly enough, you see an influencer that you follow liking photos every 10 seconds. At 7am you wake up and click the “Following” tab again and see the same influencer commenting “Wow!” on about 10 different photos.

Welcome to the Sick, Sad World (Daria reference anyone?) of Like/Comment Bots.

Similar to the Follow/Unfollow Bot (and often times combined together to create one Super Instacheater), this program works around the clock to grab the attention of potential followers and also does it in ways that you probably wouldn’t notice. Until now! (cue dramatic music). Shrewd instagrammers, can set up the bots to like photos using specific hashtags so they auto-comment “so beautiful” on a photo with the tag #travelphotography and not on a photo of a burning building.

How to identify: Look for influencers liking photos around the clock but are liking strange photos of teenage girls posting photos of Justin Bieber that live in North Dakota.

Red Flag: High Likes / Low Comments

Generally speaking, comments should represent around 1% to 3% of the number of likes that a photo gets. Real influencers have highly engaged audiences that are following them so if an influencer is getting around 500 likes on a photo, they should have at least five comments from their followers on the photo as well but typically they’ll have more.

So what does it mean if an influencer has 500+ likes on a photo but has no comments? They’re likely using a (you guessed it) LIKE BOT. This bot can be set up one of two ways:

You can manually have it add X number of likes per photo (sometimes as little as $1.00 for 500 likes) when you choose.
You can setup a monthly service where every photo you post on instagram will have X number of likes delivered when you post.
You can also setup auto comments (which is creepy AF).

How to identify: If you are skeptical of an influencer, set up a notification to go off when they post. Check the photo every so often to see their engagement. This will allow you to see A) how their organic engagement is and if there’s an abnormal spike and, B) if they start off with an abnormal amount of likes quickly.

Red Flag: High Post Engagement / Low Story Views

Before working with any influencer, you should ask them to send you screen grabs of their performance in both stories and tile posts. Why? If someone has 50,000 followers and is getting 1,500 likes per photo and 30 comments but has only 800 views on their instagram stories, that’s a huge red flag.

With the new partnership feature on instagram, some influencers can actually allow brands direct access to their insights and stats on a post. This is a hugely valuable feature for brands who are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on influencer marketing.