How can you ensure that the engagement is real or if the followers are fake? An up-to-date issue within influencer marketing is what brands can do to quality assure influencers. In this blog post, we share three concrete tips on what to think about!
“The process to quality assure influencers can be a jungle and it might be difficult to manage by yourself. It’s important to remember that the recommendations mentioned in this blog post are all parts that we take into consideration and that most often give us an understanding about which influencers that are authentic and well-performing. However, there can always be exceptions – an influencer can perform well even if their statistics don’t rhyme with our guidelines. It’s all about previous experience and historic data – from there, the best you can do is to start from our recommendations and then find your way.”
– Emma Lundsten, Head of Operations & Customer Success at Cure Media
How do you audit an influencer?
It’s vitally important to audit influencers to see if they are legitimate and have real followers & engagement. Here are a few questions you need to ask yourself when auditing an influencer:
1. Where are the followers from and who are they?
This is a question you should know the answer to before you even consider to collaborate with an influencer. The fact that a profile’s followers should align with your target audience is the foundation for an influencer marketing investment to be successful. This, because you need to ensure that you reach your determined target audience through that influencer, but it’s also a critical question to ask in the process to assure quality. Therefore, take a look at where the followers are located geographically; Are they from countries or areas where the influencer has no relevant connection? If the answer is yes, be cautious.
You can also go into the details and look at the credibility of the profile’s followers. Do they have odd usernames, an empty account with no posts, or do they follow way more accounts than they have followers themselves? Watch out!
2. What does the engagement look like?
To look at the engagement is a great addition in the process to quality assure influencers. How is the quality of the engagement; What do the comments say and what kind of accounts posted them? Be observant if a lot of comments consist of similar words on foreign languages, without relevance to the content posted, or if they contain only emojis.
However, fake-engagement is not only comments on foreign languages by fake-followers nowadays. Unfortunately, it has become more and more common with fake-engagement from real accounts. Compared to the fake-comments description mentioned above. these comments often look quite credible – thus they might be hard to