How To Spot Fake Instagram Followers And Engagement

As soon as people realized a social media following could bring paid partnerships, fake followers, likes, and comments have been a prevalent tactic to garner brand attention. It’s an epidemic that plagues influencers of all sizes. A nano influencer might buy a few thousand followers to bump themselves up to the next influencer tier, or a mid-tier influencer might buy likes and comments to counteract decreasing engagement rates. 

 The onslaught of fake followers, likes, comments, and views is a major issue for obvious reasons. Influencers with fake followings and/or engagement are making fraudulent claims about their audience reach, which can hurt the brands that invest in influencer marketing. This year, cyber-security firm Cheq estimates brands will lose $1.3 billion marketing to fake followers. This leads to poor return on investment for influencer marketing campaigns and a general distrust of influencer marketing.

 Keep your brand from wasting money on influencers with fraudulent followings by following our guide to spotting fake engagement:

Keep An Eye On Follower Spikes

It is natural for follower numbers to grow gradually for most people. Unless someone gains a massive following overnight after appearing on a TV show or movie, most followings will increase at a steady rate. If someone’s following is jumping drastically then plateauing, you can be pretty certain that they are purchasing followers.

As brands have gotten wise to these huge following jumps, some fake follower companies now offer “drip” followers, where you can gain thousands of followers but split them up over time so it seems like a natural, steady follower gain. Because of this, there are a few other indicators to look for on an influencer’s profile. 

Track Engagement Rates

A lot of wannabe influencers stop at purchasing fake followers, which makes it painfully apparent when their engagement rates do not match up with their follower count, since these bot followers don’t actually interact or engage with content. 

 Industry standards for engagement rates are currently around 1% to 3%. Smaller influencers tend to have higher engagement rates, while larger influencers may have lower rates. If someone has an engagement rate of 6% then, you can assume that they have an authentic and engaged audience. However, if an influencer has an engagement rate of 0.5%, you may be dealing with someone who has purchased followers. 

Look For Patterns

Now that brands have gotten savvier and look beyond just follower numbers, users have in return started purchasing likes and comments to falsely bolster their engagement rates and keep the ruse up.

If you find an account that consistently gets the same number of likes, give or take a few, or always has 100 comments on each post, no matter what the photo is, they might be purchasing engagement.

For normal social media users, it is common for some posts to do better than others. Maybe they share a “filler” post, or share a photo at a time when fewer people are on the platform; for whatever reason, most users recognize that not every post will be a massive hit. So if you come across a profile where every post is getting the same number of likes and comments, you should be wary. 

Check The Follower Accounts

If you are suspicious about an influencer’s following, take a look at the followers. There are a few ways to identify a bot account:

• Their username has dozens of numbers, or a random combination of letters

• There is no profile photo

• They have few followers, but follow thousands of accounts

• They have few (or even zero) posts

• If they do have posts, they are all stock photos

Now, almost everyone has a small percentage of bot followers, so don’t fret if you find one or two following an influencer you’re considering working with, but if you notice a pattern of these suspicious profiles, they were probably purchased. 

Analyze The Quality Of Engagement

Because comments are the highest form of engagement (since they take more effort than liking or sharing a post) they are extremely valuable. So if you find an influencer profile with hundreds of comments on each post, that’s a positive sign. However, you should take a moment to browse through these comments and check for their quality. Everyone gets a few spam comments here and there, but if there is a trend of one word comments like “Wow!” and “Awesome!” that can signal inauthentic engagement.

Holiday Content That Works

As we make our way into the heart of the holiday season, you are no doubt also in the midst of contracting and coordinating campaigns. Wondering what makes for a successful holiday campaign?

Here are a few of our favorite 2018 holiday campaigns from Socialyte talent to give you some insight on top-performing holiday content:

Multi-Blogger Programs

Coordinating a multi-blogger campaign is a common strategy, but bringing those influencers together for a single shoot is a great way to increase engagement, making it beneficial for both the brand and the influencers involved, as they can cross-promote each other as well as the featured product.

Aim For Authenticity

When creating branded content, there is a fine balance between showcasing the promoted item and veering too far into the staged photo realm. Candid shots that display the featured product in a natural environment hit that sweet spot. Encourage captions to focus on personal stories and anecdotes to further drive that authentic feeling home.

Think Beyond Just Christmas

Between now and the start of 2020, there are plenty of holidays to celebrate! Thanksgiving, Black Friday, New Year’s Eve, and more are great opportunities to highlight your brand and mix up the content from the typical Christmas-centered fare.

Let Each Influencer’s Creativity Shine

You’ll no doubt have creative guidelines for your campaign, as the number one goal is to let the featured product shine. However, you shouldn’t be afraid to let each influencer create the content that works best for his or her audience. 

Even though these three influencers promoted the same product line, each influencer put her own spin on the styling, creative direction, filtering, and so on.

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Want to ensure you receive the best influencer content? Read more of our tips for content guidelines here.

Planning Your Influencer Content Strategy

Influencer marketing is an effective digital marketing tool, but it is also a big investment. Make the most of your next campaign by creating a clear influencer content strategy so you can receive the best influencer content possible.

Select The Right Influencers

The first part of any influencer campaign is choosing what influencers you are going to work with. Based on your KPIs and budget, there are different categories of influencers to consider, but beyond sizing, you will want to consider the influencer’s content categories, location, aesthetic, and other factors.

Research the influencers you hope to work with, not just based on demographics and engagement numbers, but also so you have a general idea of the type of content they create. If you are looking for catalogue-worthy imagery, an influencer who only posts iPhone photos may not be the best bet.

Lay Out Clear Guidelines

A lot of brands are unsure about what exactly they are looking for in influencer content and leave the content guidelines vague, only for them to dislike the content that the influencer does end up creating. Avoid this frustration by being clear with what you are looking for from the start.

A good campaign brief should lay out key talking points, visual guidelines, and other important details. If your product has a prominent label, note that the label must be visible in all photos. If you want the influencer to be in the photo instead of a still product shot, specify this. 

Provide Examples

Have examples from previous campaigns that you absolutely loved? Share them! Providing influencers with concrete examples of the type of content you are looking for is the easiest way for all parties to get on the same page. Call out specifics of why you like a particular image, too; is it how the product is photographed? Is it the authentic caption? The more clarity you can provide, the better idea the influencer has of what you are looking for. 

Give Plenty Of Time

Nobody likes feeling rushed on a project. The more you can plan ahead and provide ample time to contract influencers and receive content, the better. Not only will the contracted influencers have time to think about and execute an amazing concept for the campaign, but you will also have plenty of time to make any edits or request reshoots, if necessary. 

Know When To Be Flexible

Of course, there is such a thing as being too particular, so know when to be flexible on content guidelines, too. An influencer partnership should be a two-way street, and if an influencer feels like your guidelines don’t fit with their content and style, or if they have ideas about what they think will work well with their audience, take these notes into consideration.

This goes for reshoot requests as well. If an influencer completely disregards your content guidelines and delivers a draft that has nothing to do with the campaign, you should request a reshoot (though hopefully if you are using these guidelines, your campaign direction will be clear). However, if there is a minor flaw in a photo, consider letting it go if it does not have an impact on the overall effectiveness of the content.

What Type Of Influencer Should You Work With?

Selecting the right type of influencer to work with can make or break a campaign’s success. It’s easy enough to think that contracting a celebrity influencer with millions of followers will get your brand the most exposure, but there are many other factors to consider when selecting influencers.

Depending on your brand’s KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and goals, working with a group of micro-influencers might actually be more beneficial. Here are a few of the most common KPIs we see amongst brands and the types of influencers best suited to meet those goals:

If your goal is brand awareness, work with…celebrity influencers

If high campaign reach and exposure are the numbers you care about, there’s no better way to hit those benchmarks than with celebrity and macro influencers. Typically a macro influencer is defined as having over 500,000 followers.

As strange as it may seem, influencers with larger followings don’t always have the strongest engagement rates (industry standard for macro influencers is around 1-2%, while smaller influencers have higher rates) but an uber-popular influencer or celebrity toting your product will do wonders for exposing your brand to new audiences.

When working with influencers of this size, you’ll need to prepare to put a large budget behind securing just one influencer, so be sure to consider engagement rates, brand alignment, and audience demographics when choosing which macro influencer to work with.

If your goal is sales, work with…micro and mid-tier influencers paired with amplification

Micro (10,000 - 100,000 followers) and mid-tier (100,000 - 500,000) influencers are known to build strong relationships with their followers. These are the influencers that consumers turn to when making purchasing decisions because they’ve formed trust with their audiences.

By combining these posts with targeted amplification, we can optimize programs for link clicks and promote sales conversions with highly targeted customers.

If your goal is engagement, work with…micro and nano influencers

Micro and nano (1,000 - 10,000 followers) influencers may have smaller reaches, but their followers are typically very engaged. If your campaign is focused on generating comments, DM interactions, and conversations, you may want to partner with micro and nano influencers.

Because they have smaller followings, you may need to contract a larger number of influencers (and prepare a large budget for a wide-reaching and heavy lift campaign) to have a large impact on consumers.

If your goal is content, work with…creators

Influencer campaigns are a form of digital advertising, so it makes sense that your brand may want influencer-created content for your own use. Maybe you’ll use the photos influencers create on your own social media channels or website. Maybe you’ll use their videos for an ad campaign. Whatever the case may be, if owning content is your goal, you’ll want to work with true creators.

Consider the content that the influencer create and how well it aligns with your brand’s voice and aesthetic. Beyond numbers and demographics, you’ll really want to find influencers who are a good match stylistically.

When contracting influencers to use their content on your platforms, remember that this may increase their fee. Additionally, you will want to clearly lay out where their content will be used and for how long.

When To Gift Influencers

Since influencer marketing has surged in popularity, there’s been a healthy debate about whether influencer gifting is valuable. Some argue that gifting is an important way to spread brand awareness, while others would rather spend their marketing budgets on guaranteeing influencer posts, but the truth is there is a time and place for gifting influencers.

Here are the benefits and setbacks to influencer gifting campaigns so you can determine if gifting is the right move for your brand:

Pros of Gifted Campaigns

Less costly than a paid campaign: This is the most obvious benefit to gifting influencers. If your brand does not have a lot of budget to devote to influencer marketing, shipping out press packages is a less expensive option. Even if you splurge on fancy packaging, the cost of shipping and materials will be far less than contracting influencers to post.

Builds organic relationships: When influencers received gifted products without any expectations of posting, they’ll oftentimes feel more comfortable posting about said product. More importantly, gifting is a great way to allow influencers to test out the product and determine on their own if they like what they’ve received. This is incredibly beneficial for new beauty brands or anything that an individual can test out firsthand, because it gets the product directly into the hands of the influencer.

Cons of Gifted Campaigns

No guarantees: When gifting influencers, you are leaving a lot up to fate. Gifting rarely includes contracting influencers, and without any formal agreements in place, there are no promises that the influencers you are gifting will post about—or even use—your product.

Can’t control the narrative: With that being said, you also cannot control how an influencer may speak about your product. Whether they use the wrong hashtag, create subpar content, or even speak negatively about your product, once the item is sent, you have zero control over how it is talked about as no contract is required without payment. This is a large obstacle for luxury brands, especially, who want maximum control over how their brand is represented.

Hard to work with bigger influencers: Gifting is most effective when targeted toward micro influencers, who will be more appreciative of a free gift and likely to post. Influencers with larger followings, however, likely have more paid partnerships under their belt and are savvier to the intentions behind gifting, so odds are they’ll hold out for paid deals and won’t give away valuable tagging for free. However, if your brand features high-value items like designer clothing or furniture, or if the influencer in question is a natural fan, bigger influencers may be willing to give a shoutout.

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The bottom line: gifting is a more cost-effective option and a great way to build natural relationships with nano and micro influencers, but there are no guarantees regarding the quality of the content created, or even that gifted influencers will post at all.

Should You Be Advertising On TikTok?

Whenever a new social media app grows in popularity, brands are quick to ask, “Should we invest in marketing on this platform?” For every Instagram success story, there are dozens of apps that fizzle out quickly, but one trending app that we think will only continue to grow is TikTok. Beyond just popularlizing Kombucha Girl or dancing cat videos, TikTok is increasingly becoming a new space for brands to advertise.

We’re breaking down what TikTok is, who is using the app, and the types of brands that should consider adding TikTok to their social media strategy in 2020.

What is TikTok?

TikTok describes itself as “the leading destination for short-form mobile video”. Most commonly compared to defunct video app Vine, TikTok allows users to upload short, 15-second clips to their feed, usually featuring music from the app’s vast library of songs. Similar to Snapchat and Instagram Stories, users can add fun filters and effects to their videos.

There is a tremendous ability to “go viral” on the platform since the app’s home feed prioritizes popular videos. Trends, memes, and challenges rule the platform.

Who is on the platform?

TikTok is most popular amongst Gen Z audiences, with 41% of active users between the ages of 16 and 24. It also has a female-skewing audience, making the app a big draw for fashion and beauty brands in particular.

How can brands market on TikTok?

As with any popular social media platform, brands are excited to find ways to advertise on the app. Currently, there are a few different ways that brands can advertise on TikTok:

In-Feed Ads: Just like ads can cut between stories on Snapchat and Instagram, brands can create in-feed ads that run in between TikTok posts.

Hashtag Challenge: Brands can sponsor a Hashtag Challenge to encourage users to create content, usually around some sort of dance or stunt. Chipotle recently hosted a #GuacDance challenge in celebration of National Avocado Day and saw over 250,000 video submissions on TikTok.

Brand Takeover: Another way brands can activate on the app is to take over the TikTok homepage. Your brand’s logo and call to action appear as soon as users open the app, as Grubhub tried out recently.

Branded Stickers & Filters: Similar to other social media apps, brands can also create custom stickers and filters around a certain event or product.

Influencer Marketing: TikTok influencers are growing in popularity and brands are taking notice, partnering with popular users on sponsored content.

What types of brands will succeed on the app?

Because the majority of TikTok users are in their teens and early twenties, high price items like luxury goods probably won’t succeed on the platform. Likewise, products aimed towards older consumers should not expect a strong return on investment advertising on the app.

Lower price items in categories that are important to teens, like food, beauty, fashion, and entertainment, will find greater success on TikTok. If your brand is targeting the Gen Z audience, you should highly consider focusing advertising efforts on TikTok.

CGI Influencers: Why They Became Successful And Why They Won’t Last

CGI. What is it? How do we use it? Why is it relevant in influencer marketing? Computer Generated Imagery has been around for decades. We all remember the Atari game Pong, or the mobile-friendly Snake which came preloaded on every early-aughts Nokia cell phone. Nowadays, CGI takes form in highly produced video like Avatar or Black Panther and has even extended its reach to social media. 

The popularity of CGI influencers is hard to miss. From Lil’ Miquela to the new-and-improved Colonel Sanders on KFC’s account (a genius move on Wieden + Kennedy’s part), they’re nearly ubiquitous.

The rise of CGI influencers comes from shock factor. We’re sixteen years into the business of influencers: Myspace and Wordpress launched in 2003. People became attached to influencers based on their personalities and their senses of style - it was fully original and every standout influencer was unique.

The days of original style of bloggers is long gone: Bryan Boy, Man Repeller, Fashion Toast, Karla’s Kloset, Sea of Shoes all had exceedingly unique points of view and carved out their own version of success due to their eye-catching style. Most started as bloggers, and as our digital attention spans decreased along with content length, so did their focus. From WordPress to Instagram to Twitter to Snapchat - content length was shortened and there’s no doubt we’ve been attracted to shorter-form digestible content in order to consume more.

Now that ‘influencer’ is a legitimate job description, you’ll find young, ambitious internet stars on every corner of SoHo shooting near-identical imagery to each other. Filters are ubiquitous, captions are short, personality is lacking. Authentic audiences are coming harder and harder to find because there’s not much unique or eye-catching about this new type of content.

Enter the CGI influencer. They’re unique, offer shock value, provide a sense of camaraderie for outsiders looking in. Companies like Brud, the one who produces Lil’ Miquela, have started developing entire rosters of animated influencers to drive shock value and awareness (a great PR move, frankly).

Just as with anything that shocks, the CGI influencer will remain an intriguing fad and will end there. The draw of real influencers will remain for personality, for something unique, for a fresh perspective. The standout new influencers who offer that (Officially Quigley, Jera Bean, Orion Vanessa) will win in the long run for offering something that CGI can’t: a human perspective, a connection with readers, and a compelling reason to seek them out, again and again, like a digital best friend with great advice.

Why Female Influencers Are Killing The Game

The wage gap is no secret. For every dollar that a man makes, in the US, a woman makes $0.85. That gap becomes deeper (and darker - literally and figuratively) when we take into account the woman’s race. Intersectional feminism has never been more quantified.

When it comes to influencer marketing, though, we have been able to turn that wage gap standard on its head. Women influencers are consistently more successful, make more money, and in higher demand than men. Why?

Our team tells our clients that women consume and shop differently than men. It’s commonly cited that women control 70-80% of household spending. They buy for themselves, their household, children, male partners, pets, and parents. By hitting multiple target markets via marketing to women only, a brand is maximizing their potential for ROI as they reach 3-4x the intended target market.

This is backed up by the evidence we see in our influencer campaigns. Women influencers get better reception amongst their female audiences than men do with male audiences - controlling for size, we see higher click through rates, engagements, and conversion rates across the board.

Influencer marketing is one of the few industries where women command more dollars than their male peers. A tangential industry, one that’s not to be ignored here, is modeling. Women models consistently make more than men in their prime years. When income is based on body & appearance, women become the breadwinners. Influencers are an example of this in that their appearance (and their content) is the moneymaker; The rise of plastic surgery among the Instagram crowd is a result.

Combine a heavy focus on appearance with an appeal to the people who control the expendable income of most of the US’s consumer market, and you’re bound to find cashflow for women. Not only are these influencers running small businesses as simultaneous models, salespeople, stylists, art directors, and writers, but they’re also pursuing a gap in the market that traditional advertising was never able to: controlling your own media on your own platform and tracking sales of consumer-facing products... Now that’s entrepreneurial genius.

How To Price Out Your Influencer Programs

There are seemingly endless ways that influencers can price out their content. It’s no mystery that they’re making good money and there’s no real way to standardize payout. So how to you plan out your influencer campaigns?

Influencers charge depending on a number of different factors, some of which include follower numbers, engagement rate, influencer demand, interest in the product, brand alignment, or, quite frankly, an interest in doing work at any given time (influencers need time off too!). Further, per campaign, rates will also fluctuate based on total number of deliverables, which social channel(s) they’ll be posting on, usage rights, any exclusivities requested, creative control, and timeline.

As a general guideline, expect rates to land somewhere in the $12-25 CPM (cost per thousand followers) range. Further, as a trend, smaller influencers tend to have higher CPMs and larger influencers tend to have smaller ones due to an economy of scale (i.e. for someone with 10,000 followers you might pay $200 at a $20 CPM, but someone at 1,000,000 you might pay $15,000 at a $15 CPM). You'll get better value with a larger influencer because of this, but it'll limit overall number of pieces of content (assuming there are budget restrictions), and larger influencers can be more particular contractually due to their experience and overall demand within the industry.

These are ballparks and should not be quoted (as of course these rates are up to each individual), but can serve as a good general guideline to pricing structures for your managed campaign. To apply this to a conservative example at, say, $100,000, you should expect to reach about 5 million followers, in whatever way you'd like to divide that up: whether that's between 16 micro-influencers with 6 posts each (at 50,000 followers each on average), or with a handful of macro-influencers.

Ellen Kim x Amazon The Drop

Influencer posts on social media are obviously a huge part of digital marketing these days, with brands spending massive budgets on influencer campaigns and partnerships. One way to bring an influencer partnership to the next level is to collaborate with them on a product or collection. With a product that is created in partnership with the influencer, both parties have more invested in the success of the product, and the relationship is much more natural anyway!

That’s why we are huge fans of Amazon’s new program, The Drop, where they partner with influencers for custom capsule collections that are only available for 30 hours. Socialyte’s very own Ellen Kim released her collection with The Drop recently, and thanks to plenty of teasers beforehand, the collection sold out within an hour of going live. In fact, it was so successful that they held a second order for 5 of the most popular styles.

Here’s what Ellen had to say about why partnering with Amazon was the perfect fit and what she thinks makes for a successful influencer collaboration:

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Tell us about the pieces you created for your collection with The Drop and what that design process was like. 

I wanted to create a collection that was approachable, comfortable and easy to wear year-round. Many of my pieces were inspired by boho vibes but I wanted to elevate the designs by adding in subtle details like tassels and trims. My collection is designed to be worn every day, whether you're working, getting lunch with friends, running errands, or having a date night. The design process was really fun. I got to bring to life pieces that I always wanted in my closet. 

Why was Amazon the perfect partner to team up with?

Accessibility!! I would say most people shop on Amazon at some capacity and since it was also available all around the world I loved that anyone could own a piece of my collection. Amazon is one of the biggest online retailers in the world and it was a dream to work with a brand that truly believes in influencers and trusts us completely. The resources they have are endless and I knew that they would only deliver the best quality designs and pieces for me and my readers. It was my first time creating a collection, I had the exact vision of what I wanted and Amazon brought it to life. I couldn't be more happy.

How has releasing a capsule collection allowed you to interact with and engage your followers more?

I would say for the most part that has remained the same. Whether I'm working with a brand or not, I answer every single DM every night. I love talking with my readers and answering any question they have is also part of the job. I get to not only know them better but understand what they love! 

A lot of influencers launch capsule collections, but not all of them are successful. What do you think makes for a successful influencer collaboration?

I think it's about understanding your readers completely. I knew a lot of my readers were in their late 20's-30's, working professionals, moms or soon to be moms, some were in college, so I wanted to make sure my collection spoke to all women. I also focused on flattering shapes for my pieces to make sure these pieces were flattering as possible with elevated details.

What's your favorite piece from your collection?

That's so hard to say! I love them all equally but I will say I had the most fun creating the big balloon sleeve top. It's was the most fashion-forward piece in the collection but at such a great price point. It allowed people to try the trend without breaking the bank!