Influencer marketing has been around for a long time and when done right, is a highly effective way to expand brand reach, drive sales, and increase customer loyalty. However, every coin has a flip side. Influencer marketing has the potential to help brands grow and expand their consumer base. It’s a very lucrative business for influencers. This prosperity has also attracted scammers, fraudsters, and people looking to make a quick buck as well. Influencer fraud is very much a real part of influencer marketing. It’s more than likely here to stay, and that’s why having a free fake followers checker, content approval and influencer fraud prevention is key for your business.

What is influencer fraud?

Influencers with a large following, real or fake can earn a lot of money. If they can manipulate the numbers, they can make even more. Unfortunately, no one is immune to influencer fraud, but there are ways to identify potentially problematic accounts.

In some cases, there can be obvious red flags that point at fake followers and likes, but more often than not, you need to do some digging to really see if the influencer is legit or if they are a scammer.

What are fake followers?

Fake followers are empty accounts with no real people behind them. When a company pays an influencer based on either false attribution of purchases or fake followers for advertising, that money is essentially going down the drain. 

The problem is when businesses choose the wrong influencer who has an audience that is either too small, or is largely comprised of fake followers. When influencers pad their follower numbers with fake (often purchased) accounts, that is a form of influencer fraud.

Influencer fraud costs companies around 15% of their marketing budget every year, and it becomes an even bigger problem when marketing teams don’t spend the time to properly vet an influencer. 

Influencer fraud prevention : fake followers checker

How do you know that a creator isn’t buying followers? How do you know if their audience is genuine?

Anyone can purchase packages of “followers” to inflate their numbers. Several platforms also offer packages to purchase likes, and even story views. Unless you monitor someone’s account on a daily basis, you won’t even notice that they’ve used this type of services.

Avoid hiring anyone with a sudden spike in followers. This usually is a clear sign that something unusual is happening. If you are unsure about the way in which to track counts over time, VoxFeed can help you along. Similar to SEO software that tracks blogs, pages, and links over time, there are similar tools to help you track influencers.

Apart from that, here are a few elements that can give you clues about a creator’s authenticity:

1. Engagement rate (ER) – It’s a potential warning sign when someone has a large following but low participation. Real audiences generate likes and comments. Still, it’s not uncommon for users with lots of followers to have a low ER.
2. Sudden peaks in followers – Another trick to detect fake followers on Instagram is the sudden peak in followers. A healthy profile has periods of increase as well as loss in followers, but always at a stable pace.
3. Location of their audience – An audience’s location should be in a fairly close radius of the creator’s location (and language). Beware of the creators who have lots of followers in countries that have nothing to do with them. For example, an audience in Russia or Thailand when the creator is in Mexico is suspicious.
4. Review the data – VoxFeed has developed features that can help you detect alert signals. Our software gives you profile analysis and participation metrics.

Using fake followers checker technology, VoxFeed provides information on how authentic a creator’s audience is.  VoxFeed evaluates the authenticity of an audience based on various criteria. These include number and type of followers, account privacy, registration date, and use of geotags.