It’s been proven that social media has the power to be a useful tool for advertising for companies. A big part of this is due to influencers who use products and then feature them on their own channels. Companies that find a social media influencer that likes their products can increase their brand recognition which will likely lead to more sales.
Social Media Influencer
According to chief communications director at Been Verified, Justin Lavelle, a social media influencer can be a celebrity, blogger or industry expert. Typically, a social media influencer will review your products (either by writing about them or doing an instructional video) for payment or free products.
Social media influencers can come from any number of social platforms, including: Twitter, YouTube and Instagram.
Social Media Mis-fluencers
One problem with the popularity of social media influencers is that you can’t trust everyone on the internet and there are fake social media influencers. In this instance, there are social media users that will buy followers, comments and likes in order to appear more popular than they are. This means that even though a social media account has hundreds or thousands of followers it doesn’t mean that they actually have any influence over those followers.
Here are three ways to spot a fake social media influencer.
- The person isn’t active across social platforms. A genuine social media influencer has active accounts across multiple platforms.
- Engagement with followers. When you view a potential influencer’s social media platforms, you shouldn’t find a lot of non-engaging comments (think emojis or comments from the same person on every photo). Likewise, a sudden spike in engagement (or followers) is a red flag.
- Calculate their engagement rate. This is the percentage of likes, comments and/or shares compared to a user’s total number of followers.
Fore more social media tips, read about the key trends that happened in 2018.