When they choose influencers for influence marketing campaigns, brands tend to look for people with far-reaching reach. But if you only look at the number of followers of an influencer, you might not have the full story.
This is because some people, especially those who try to take advantage of their influence, might try to inflate some of these numbers by buying followers or asking robots to follow them. And if you pay for an influence marketing campaign, you want to make sure that you pay for someone who has influence over the real humans.
Small Business Trends recently met Buzzweb's Philip Kozyrev at the Influencer Marketing Days conference in Midtown New York. Buzzweb is an AI powered marketing platform that allows brands to find the most relevant influencers and lead successful marketing campaigns.
However, according to Kozyrev, the platform's ability to check the quality of its influencers is one of the things that distinguish Buzzweb. Buzzweb does not want brands to use its platform solely to find people who have a lot of fake followers, which will probably not lead to real results for the company.
But Kozyrev also says that it's something that brands can fend for themselves – even if they do not use a service or tool to check influencers for them.
"You should be careful," he says. "You should analyze the profile, look at the comments, just make sure these followers are people, not robots."
Working with influencers who have fake followers can hurt your business in ways other than not getting your message to so many real consumers. The goal of marketing influence is to reach people in authentic ways. And if influencers inflate their own numbers by buying followers, you can not work with someone who has really grown organically.
"We believe this should be genuine," says Kozyrev. "I mean, you should choose the influencers that are most relevant to your brand, the influencer who is genuine, has no bots or fake followers."