The cryptocurrency boom in recent years and tight restrictions on advertising have created a huge demand for influencer marketing. This has also created an opportunity for fauxfluencers (fake influencers who have gamed the system) to take advantage of projects that need to reach new audiences.
Unfortunately, top-line metrics (followers and engagement) don’t accurately portray an account’s true influence. After auditing 429,956 Twitter accounts, it’s clear that many influencers only have a fraction of the influence they claim.
The biggest problem Project Owners and VCs face is effectively tracking campaign results, relying heavily on Tweet engagement to judge success. But when you can’t tell if the engagement is genuine or coordinated by the influencer, success becomes impossible to measure.
Here are three easy ways to tell if the influencer you want to hire is legit or a fauxfluencer trying to cheat their way through your marketing budget.
Read comments on their last 10-20+ Tweets. You will be looking for answers that are the same or very similar to each other, low quality answers (eg great post, I love your posts, this is great).
Accounts using coordinated engagement rely on you only looking at surface-level metrics (likes, replies, and retweets). They know that proper due diligence takes time and most won’t do it.
If you’re planning to spend thousands of dollars on a few tweets, it’s absolutely worth your time. While your campaign may get a lot of engagement, very little of that engagement will be qualified leads.
If you don’t see any big red flags in the replies, it’s time to start looking back at the last few months (or years) of tweets. You don’t need to keep checking all the answers. Instead, look for a sudden and sustained increase in engagement.
One of the best things about Twitter is that any Tweet can go viral, regardless of your follower count. What is rare is to see a majority of tweets that suddenly get a lot of engagement.
Even large accounts with legitimate followers will often see sporadic engagement, with only a few tweets receiving a large number of replies.
Many influencers will simply buy followers to increase their numbers without creating coordinated engagement campaigns (they are expensive). This results in more normal engagement numbers. These influencers will use the number of followers to increase their prices and bet that you haven’t done your due diligence.
When auditing their followers, look for accounts with the same profile picture (dead giveaway), accounts created at the same time, and accounts with a small number of followers.
10 or less followers is a strong signal that the account is fake. If you’re seeing this consistently when auditing their followers, you can be sure the influencer is gaming the system.
We don’t blame you. It’s high time and exactly what these fauxfluencers are hoping for. Do not worry. We’ve got you covered. We just published our Engagement Quality Scores and added the Suspicious Follower Score to user profile pages.
You can create your own lists of influencers you’re vetting and quickly see who’s getting real engagement from real followers and who’s gaming the system. Instead of spending days researching dozens of influencers, you can know in minutes who to hire.
