If you are thinking of starting an influencer campaign to boost your business, you are probably wondering is influencer marketing worth it? The answer will depend on how you run your campaign.
Influencer marketing could be great for growing online customer acquisition. But it can also be a nightmare. It pays to work with influencers only if they are honest about the brand. If they share your values and enjoy your products.
It is useless to work with an influencer just because they have a lot of followers. Of course, the number of followers is important, but I have worked in campaigns with micro-influencers that only have 20K or 30K and the results have been successful.
A good influencer campaign is a powerful way to increase your engagement on social media, especially when applying special actions. Discount codes and raffles are excellent actions to boost your online presence and measure the effectiveness of an influencer at the same time.
What Do The Statistics Say?
According to the Digital Marketing Institute, 86% of women use social media for purchasing advice. Almost half of women made purchases due to influencer posts, especially on Facebook and Instagram, which are their preferred platforms. This is especially important if your brand wants to reach a female market.
Besides, influencer marketing is the fastest growing online customer acquisition method. More brands are trusting influencers to carry out their campaign. It seems like a good reason to start creating your influencers marketing strategy, doesn’t it?
Since influencer marketing is becoming more important than ever to build relationships with influencers, you must choose people who resonate with your business and create campaigns that are aligned with your values. Not all the influencers are relevant to your goals.
The influencing marketing is an effective strategy to increase social media engagement, push your sales and promote your products. However, before starting a marketing campaign with influencers you must know how to analyse an account and spot fake followers on Instagram. You can get the most of your influencer campaign analysing influencer’s followers.
Fake Followers And Consequences For Brands
The so-called fake followers are profiles that do not belong to a real person. They serve only to inflate the number of ‘followers’ of some celebrities and influence public opinion. Fake followers can make brands lose money, time, and effort. It is useless to have many followers if the interactions in the profile are low since it is interpreted that you are not reaching the total of profiles that follow you. But, currently, interactions are also for sale. You must be very skilled in selecting the profiles that will represent your brand on social media.
According to a study published by Business of Fashion, carried out by cybersecurity company Cheq and the University of Baltimore, advertisers lost about $ 1.5 billion last year. That represents almost 15% of the total invested in them. To reach this conclusion, the profile of 10,000 influencers was investigated and it was found that 25% of their followers were false.
Later, 800 marketing agencies were contacted and around 600 were found to have worked with one of them during the year. Taking into account that followers and false likes are quite cheap (about ten euros for a thousand followers and about six dollars for 250 likes on Instagram, and the figure is low if it is Twitter and Facebook) and that a not very famous influencer can earn on average between 200 and 500 euros, the profit is huge.
How To Spot Fake Followers?
Sometimes is difficult to detect fake followers because within these there are also quality ranges. Many are indeed empty accounts from publications or without a profile photo. However, there are fake accounts of high quality and they seem like real accounts. Some techniques can betray these fake followers. You can find out if a profile with many followers has paid for them. We discuss some techniques:
Localization: Sometimes fake followers have a localization which is not compatible with the influencer account. It doesn’t make sense that an account of a person from Edinburgh has a huge number of followers in India or China.
Follower rise: If an account shows a certain peak of follower rise, it is likely to be a purchase behind. Unless there has been a special action such as a raffle or event, these peaks of followers are usually suspicious.
Follow by follow: If you stop following the account and this also does ours, it means that it is a robot. These accounts are usually programmed for “follow by follow”.
Quality of profile content: Sometimes, we see how there are profiles that publish content of little use or relevance and very little work but have a lot of followers. Usually, when a person because has many followers, is one who takes care of how, how much and what communicates and accounts with these characteristics generally are bots.
Follower-to-follow ratio: Bots generally have a very high number of following, since the profile has been created for that purpose. However, the number of followers is zero or suspicious small.
Lack of content: Typically, these types of fake profiles do not have photos, have few or no posts, and the biography information is poor. However, some of them have many followers.
Use a software to detect fake accounts: There are programs, like Social Bro, Twitter Audit or Fake Follower Check that use artificial intelligence to detect if an influencer’s engagement is real; that is, if the number of followers, likes and comments follow a realistic proportion.
All the big brands work with software to detect the authenticity of their influencers. If you are managing a small account and you want to start a influencers marketing strategy, I highly recommend you use programs to verify the quality of engagement.
Conclusion
If you have clear goals for your influencer marketing strategy and you examine deeply the influencers you want to work with, you can get amazing results for your brand. In my experience, influencers work best in awareness campaigns, but they can also be useful in sales campaigns. As a rule, if the influencer is chosen well, it is effective. Are you ready to start your influencer marketing campaign?
[See related post: Instagram Influencer Marketing 2020 – Four Things You Need To Do]
[Images – Main image by Ryan McGuire from Pixabay; Influencer girl Photo by Ali Pazani from Pexels; other images from their respective websites and/or social platforms]
Journalist and marketer. I’ve worked in digital content strategy and marketing campaigns in LATAM and Europe. I also write about social media culture and Z Generation’s trends at thesocialmedia-life.com