Over the last decade influencer marketing has been considered to be one of the most effective ways to promote your brand both in domestic and international markets.
Almost every major brand comes to influencers with no hesitation, so it’s hard to imagine Youtube, Instagram (banned on the territory of Russian Federation) and even TikTok profiles without any ad integration now.
Profitable collaboration with influencers guarantees to build brand awareness quickly and increase audience loyalty and conversion easily.
However, any kind of collab with an influencer could cause huge expenses and risks as it’s a difficult task to find a fair blogger who doesn’t cheat.
Even the most successful influencers are faking their user engagement stats and use follow-botting from time to time. Not to mention large giveaways with 10.000 prizes. Some bloggers use follow-botting with no shame. That’s because the more followers you have, the more money you can ask for your integration.
So how to protect yourself in this situation and not take an unscrupulous influencer’s bait?
Let’s try to figure it out.
HOW TO PREVENT FRAUD AND SAVE YOUR MONEY?
Just a few years ago it wasn’t a big deal to identify dishonest influencers. Sometimes just checking followers count and real user engagement was enough, but now it has become harder. Earlier mentioned giveaways are temporarily boosting real statistics of audience engagement. Besides that it’s no longer an easy task to define whether it’s a bot or a human by profile bio and picture.
Nowadays mass following isn’t about anonymous bots as it used to be. It’s real people actively developing their profiles to earn money by following different bloggers and commercial accounts.
Also it could be giveaway participants waiting for results and afterwards they’ll unfollow the host and all his partners.
There are hundreds of popular services for follow-botting in Discord and viewbotting on Twitch TV and Youtube as well.
Diversity and affordability of such services have become a real headache for all advertisers, but even this can be solved!
Fortunately more services have been created in the past few years to do all the hard work for you, helping to expose influencers.
Besides the well-known trendHERO people have always used, Beyond Industries now advises brand new analytic tools for game publishers and game developers.
The predictive analytics service from Beyond Industries will show you up to 15 metrics of influencer before marketing company investing.
Up to 50 metrics of each user will be provided by our analytics service during the marketing campaign.
Beyond Industries provides products for building effective sales channels via gaming influencers and bloggers, thus increasing LTV and Retention in games for mobile devices, PC, consoles and Nintendo.
The service will help you check all the important metrics to choose the right influencer.
1) Demographic data of an audience (why would you need an influencer with 1.000.000 followers if 900.000 of them are, for example, from India and your product’s target market is Europe?)
2) Audience growth.
The number of followers must be increasing gradually. If an influencer provides you a diagram with a sharp growth of followers, then most definitely lately he hosted or participated in a giveaway or bought followers who are either going to remain as ghost followers or will unfollow him soon.
3) Audience engagement (influence rate) which Beyond Industries also predicts.
It is one of the most important metrics while working with influencers.
It shows you how loyal and engaged the influencer’s audience is.
Remember, not all influencers want to fraud you, but it’s absolutely normal and useful to check their profiles via the services we mentioned. Collaboration with influencers is a high-risk step, but it could be protected by following the simple advice we wrote above.
Forget about fortune-telling and stop wasting your resources – identify unscrupulous influencers at the very beginning before it’s too late.