$1.3 billion. That’s how much influencer marketing fraud will cost brands in 2019. Influencer fraud can do more than just financial damage to your brand. It can also weaken your brand’s reputation and affect its credibility. Fake influencers seem to be legit at first glance, but their biggest identifier is that their followers are almost entirely fake accounts or bots. It’s important to identify some of the key warning signs that you might be experiencing fraud.
Some warning signs of fraudulent activity are:
- Recently created accounts with tons of followers, but very little engagement
- Unusual spikes in followers or engagement soon after a post
- Generic comments that have nothing to do with the post
This is why more and more brands are shifting their focus away from influencers to ambassadors, who typically don’t have the same high follower count, but instead have a much more engaged audience. Brand ambassadors are real people who already love your brand and want to spread the word about your products or services to whoever will listen to them.
Ambassadors are experts on your brand, and rather than searching for them through databases or hiring agencies to find them for you, they’re often living right in your backyard. Your employees, interns, partners, and existing customers are already engaging with your brand on a daily basis and they make great ambassadors. And you already know they are credible people who post authentic content about your brand.
The numbers don’t lie — it’s time to make the shift away from focusing on follower count, and more on the things that actually drive results: organic content creation coming from real people your audience trusts.
