Influencer marketing is officially on the rise, but be careful with it! If you make the same mistake that other brands are making, you could waste a boatload of time and money.
Last month, we spoke to you about the value of influencer marketing. We explained what an influencer is, and why a marketing strategy should include a plan for engaging them in order to be truly robust.
(To put it simply, it’s because they have enormous… well… influence.)
But in a rapidly-moving age of technological advancement and connectivity, the subject of influencer outreach is not a simple one. Aside from the obvious considerations, like whom to target and how to engage, there are also issues of credibility to keep in mind.
Brands are making a fundamental mistake when it comes to assessing the power of influencers. They’re vastly overestimating their true reach, and as a result, wasting the energy and resources committed to appealing to them.
It’s intuitive to look at a person’s social media profile to assess their influence. If they have 100,000 followers on Twitter, and even more on Instagram, it should be safe to assume that they’re an influencer, yes? Would it not make sense to pay a small fee to have them broadcast your product over their social media channel? After all, that’s 100,000 people or more who’ll see your product!
This kind of thinking, while seemingly intuitive, is landing brands in hot water.
These days, you can buy 1,000 likes for one dollar. There was a time when you could tell who had a legitimate following based on their audience’s engagement with their content, but service providers have evolved beyond that, offering likes and comments for small fees as well.
This means that it’s possible to come across a seemingly active profile on Twitter with 100,000 followers that doesn’t actually influence people. If you commit time and money to engaging with the profile’s owner, you’ll be wasting your marketing budget broadcasting your product to a list of non-buyers.
The social media space is filling up with these faux influencers, fleecing good brands by claiming to have social outreach worth paying for. It’s a real problem, and in the age of influencers, it’s only going to get worse.
So how do we arm ourselves against faux influencers and ensure that our marketing budget is going where it should?
There are many free online tools to check if an “influencer” has fake followers. That’s a good place to start. The most important thing to do, however, is check out their online presence.
Ask yourself these questions before deciding if they should be a target for your influencer outreach plan:Is there real conversation taking place in the comments sections of their blog posts, videos or social media updates?Does their audience routinely buy products?Do they appear on multiple channels (e.g., podcast, video, blog, etc.)?Does their profile describe them as a “social media influencer”? Be wary if it does.
Influencer marketing is on the rise, and for good reason. Get on board with it, but please make sure you aren’t being fleeced by fake profiles.
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