Four Easy Ways to Measure The Authenticity and Engagement Rates of Influencers on Instagram.

About two years ago, I spoke at the Pros and Content conference about the influencer industry. The next day after my panel, I found myself featured in an article that used a quote out of context and saw this dreaded headline:

When I rewatched the session posted online my full quote was was: “In terms of measurement, performance, and ROI, we shouldn’t treat influencers any different than a publishing or media partner. At the end of the day all of these people just want your money so it’s up to us to do more to ensure our money is being spent smarter.” What was funnier was that I ended up getting several messages from persons within the industry who reached out to me saying “I’m glad someone finally said what we’re all thinking” so I digress.

So while this headline is harsh, the principal still stands. Influencers, at the end of the day, are media channels. Media channels need to have regulations. Influencer marketing still lacks this so it’s up to us, as marketers, to create our own checks and balances.

In my most recent role, I hired a boutique comms agency to help me with identifying influencers to be a part of a large program that would stretch over the course of three months. I had a decently good budget for this and despite COVID-19 obstacles, felt good about the program. During the vetting process, the agency was identifying possible influencers that met my parameters and then I would go through and review them. A few of them stuck out to me for all of the wrong reasons. After I implemented some manual (almost archaic) methods to test for authenticity, I sent a note to my agency informing them I was rejecting a number of influencers for various reasons including: bot followers, bot likes, pod commenters, unexplainable video views to likes ratio etc.

Now if you read the above and are like… “Whoa, Nathan. How in the world did you discover this?” Let me fill you in on a few easy ways to guarantee authenticity of your potential influencers. Note that these are very manual processes but it’s a really easy way to check.

1. Go through their followers feed to check for bots.

The time commitment to this process really only works for micro influencers as you’re literally just sitting their scrolling but it’s a really easy way to spot the fakes. Generally fake accounts will look like the below and when you click on the profiles there will be a heavily skewed ratio of followers to follows.

2. Set a post notification on the influencer.

An easy way to check for bot likes is to set a post notification on an influencer which is the little alarm icon. This will then send a notification to your phone that they have posted an image to their feed. Once they post what you will want to do is revisit the post every 8 minutes to check on engagement for the first 30 or so minutes.

Yes, I know that’s a big ask but what you’ll see a lot of times are these numbers:

Minute 0–8: 22 Likes

Minute 9–16: 522 Likes

Minute 17–24: 538 Likes

A lot of influencers setup bots to not like or engage with the post until after 10 minutes so that the engagement isn’t flooded with likes in the first few minutes. So when you see big jumps in numbers in a short amount of time, that usually means they used bots.

Clearly if you setup a notification and they get 500 likes in the first 5 minutes but only average 600 likes per post there’s also something fishy there.

3. See who comments. Then check another photo and see who comments. Then check the commenter and see who comments.

You get the picture. A lot of influencers are using what’s commonly known as PODS. I wrote about this here. When you see the same influencers commenting on other influencers posts there’s a fine line between supporting each other and tricking the system to increase visibility to the content.

4. Ask for Insights from their stories for the past 30 days.

Simply ask the influencer to go into their Insights section and send you a screenshot of their last 30 days of impressions on their IG stories. While you can fake likes and you can use comment PODS, it’s really hard to fake views and impressions. Most influencers will gladly do this as part of the vetting process. You can see some of my stats below from my own channel! Note that the filters selected are Impressions and Last 30 Days.

Any thoughts on what I wrote? If you enjoyed this article or found it useful, please share it or throw me a like on whatever platform you found it on. I’ll keep writing more if there’s a good reason to :-)

Lastly, I am currently looking for my next gig or a consulting role! I am an accomplished marketing, communications and social media leader with focused experience in content creation, channel strategy and digital production. Please get in contact at natepoekert (at) gmail (dot) com.