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Why Even The World's Richest Men Have Fake Followers (And What Marketers Can Do About It)
Moving every few years as a kid, I had to learn to connect. I am a publicist and the Global PR Director for Asian tech company Juwai IQI.
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As I wrote about recently, social media influencers can be powerful marketing partners, but watch out for the fakes. Fake followers and engagement can cause your best-laid influencer marketing plans to go askew.
As a professional communicator who works with influencers, I know that nearly everyone on social media has some fake followers, but celebrities and business leaders seem to have more than the average person.
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Which celebrities have the most fakes? Well, a July report from fasthosts used the auditing tool HypeAuditor to find out. I also did a little digging of my own.
Forty percent of Kylie Jenner’s Instagram followers may be fake, according to the HypeAuditor report. Jenner’s sister Kendall had 157.6 million followers, but 37% of those may be fake.
And the report estimated that 34% of Kim Kardashian West’s 212.3 million followers are also fake.
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Other businesspeople also appear to have more fake followers than is seemly. Within five seconds of browsing Elon Musk’s (@elonmusk) Twitter account, I quickly found several that look like bots.
Bots often have nonsense names and profile descriptions. They seldom have a picture of a person as their profile photo and will often have no profile picture at all. In terms of posts, many bots will have very limited engagement and post very superficial or even seemingly random comments. They seldom have followers of their own.
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The first suspected bot I found following Elon Musk had no followers of its own and had been created only one or two days before. Despite being brand new, it was already following 31 accounts.
To find out more, I turned to SparkToro, a Twitter auditing tool. Sure enough, when I tested Musk’s account, SparkToro told me this probable bot was not Musk’s only fake Twitter follower. In fact, the tool estimated that almost 50% of them were fake.
The same bot that was following Musk was also following another tech billionaire: Bill Gates. And it was not the only bot following the Microsoft founder. SparkToro estimated that about 47% of Gates’ Twitter followers are fake.
Not every fake or low-interaction account is bought and paid for by the person they are following. However, I believe influencers should remove easily identifiable fakes to ensure their commercial value is accurately represented.
I lost my moral high ground when I examined my own Twitter account and found two disturbing facts. First, I only have a pitiful 328 followers. Second, 17% of them are fake.
SparkToro defines fake followers as accounts that are “unreachable and will not see the account’s tweets (either because they’re spam, bots, propaganda, or because they’re no longer active on Twitter).”
Many of the bots are inexplicable. One of the accounts following me was only active for two days in 2019 and has only tweeted a handful of photos, which turned out to feature a woman who is unknown to me.
Another of my Twitter followers hasn’t tweeted at all. Not even once.
In addition to me, however, that account also follows Pope Francis, Melania Trump’s archived official White House Twitter account, Robert Downey Jr. and a host of other accounts from the sports and entertainment industries. Does that make the Pope a friend of a friend?
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For marketers who work with influencers, the problem of fakes can be both real and costly. Cheq (via CBS News) estimated that brands would waste about $1.3 billion in 2019 due to influencer fraud.
I’m sure most influencers are honest and legitimate. They, too, are hurt when they have to compete with fake followers and bot accounts.
You know the popular saying: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
When it comes to social media marketing, when you think you “know for sure” how many loyal followers an influencer has, you are unlikely to get the results you expect.
Luckily, there are tools today that make it easy more info to evaluate influencers on their real levels of engagement and the demographics of the audiences that follow them. When brands find influencers that share their values and reach the right audience, that’s good for everyone.
Some that you might consider are Analisa.io, HypeAuditor, IZEAx Discovery, SocialBlade, SparkToro and TrendHERO.
To avoid the risks of paying to reach fake followers, marketers can focus on engagement instead. Engagement is just a measure of the average number of likes, comments and shares the influencer obtains on each post. I believe counting consumers who take concrete action is a better measure of success.
You may even find that influencers with smaller audiences deliver higher engagement at a more affordable price than those with more followers. By focusing on engagement rather than followers, you can potentially spend your marketing dollars more efficiently.
You can take the emphasis on hard results even further by exploring performance-based partnerships with influencers. Rather than getting paid per post, the influencer would be accountable for hitting pre-defined targets for metrics such as engagement or even sales.
By paying for results, you will be able to easily calculate the exact value of every campaign and compare the return on investment you earn from various influencers. Not all influencers are willing to accept performance-based models, but the industry may be headed in that direction.