Of late, marketers have started to re-assess their influencer marketing strategies and investments. The increasing popularity and demand of influencers has brought along a new challenge for marketers- the menace of fake followers.
A spokesperson from a leading D2C brand shared that they pulled the plug on influencer marketing spends earlier this year, took a step back, and approached it with a different strategy. “We had a product launch coming up and wanted to build maximum awareness, hence we decided to go with macro influencers because of their massive follower base,” he said.
Soon the brand started to see that in case of some of these ‘macro’ influencers, the reach was touching just 10,000 to 50,000 views, with barely any other engagement. “As marketers, it was no rocket science for us to figure out that this is a clear case of fake followers,” he added.
This case can be backed up by recent reports about the massive surge in fake followers amongst a range of creators. Influencer marketing platform KlugKlug’s analysis revealed that more than 50% Instagram profiles in India have fake followers. And this is not a small number, but a whopping 60%.
Experts from influencer marketing companies suggest that because of the rate at which the creator economy is growing, more and more creators are getting competitive to an extent that they are buying fake followers to gain brands’ attention. According to media reports, this trend is the most prevalent amongst beauty and fashion influencers.
A spokesperson from another D2C brand working in the beauty and fashion industry agrees that this indeed is a growing trend and that the brand has changed the parameters that are used to assess influencers. “If you go by just the number of followers, you are sure to lose money. We in fact had a huge fallout with an influencer on this issue, after which we decided to onboard an influencer marketing agency to look into this for us,” she added.
The trend of fake followers has existed since the pre-Covid days, adds Magicbricks’ Prasun Kumar. “Pre-Covid, the marketing orientation was also very different and there was a lot of increase in influencer marketing investments or the way marketers were driving it. It was more of a status quo. But the problem of fake followers was there back then as well and marketers were very well aware,” he added.
And the trend has just kept growing since then. In fact, India is reportedly the largest supplier and buyer of fake followers currently. An industry observer told exchange4media that without the right tools or parameters in place, brands can lose more than half of their money to fake followers. “Fake followers tend to hit brands’ spends on influencer campaigns to an extent of 50-60%,” he mentioned.
Kumar seconds the point about availability of right tools and points out that in the pre-Covid times, martech wasn’t as developed and there wasn’t as much knowledge about the right kind of tools to know where the money is going when it came to influencer marketing. “Today you have a plethora of tools, and a lot of these tools are driven by AI where it is very much possible to separate milk from water to a large extent. And therefore, the scrutiny is far more now,” he said.
Fighting the menace
As an angel investor in many new-age D2C brands, the only advice Deep Bajaj, co-founder of Sirona, shares with founders is that the number of influencers one works with is not important, what matters is how effective they are in terms of driving reach or revenue for the brand. “To ensure we are working with the right influencers for our brand, there are a couple of metrics we use to estimate their impact. Most important of these metrics is engagement rate,” he added.
Bajaj also highlighted that there are many free tools that a brand can use to find out the engagement rate of an influencer. “An engaged audience indicates good content and also real followers. Reach is another indicator that helps you understand how well the influencer's content travels. Lastly, ensure that the influencer target audience aligns with your brand TG (demographics and male/female ratio).”
Bold Care’s Rajat Jadhav also echoed a similar voice in a recent interview with exchange4media where he mentioned that the brand chooses to collaborate with only those influencers whose content have a significant reach, instead of going just by the number of followers. “Based on our strategy of doing things, we choose not to collaborate with micro or nano influencers. We work with mega influencers with a certain amount of engagement,” he said.
Apart from the said ways, there are several influencer marketing firms and agencies that are on the rise and provide services like to keep checks and balances in place when it comes to influencer collaborations. Experts suggest that giving the job to those who know the in and out, eventually is the best way to dodge the menace that the fake follower trend brings with itself.
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