‘Fakefluencers alert’: Why brands should beware of fake social influencers

KUALA LUMPUR: Influencer marketing has become a superhot trend in marketing over the past few years. Thanks to smartphones, social media channels have revolutionised the way consumer behaviour is shaped.

Conventionally, brands had to mainly rely on TV or radio commercials, print ads or out-ofhome advertising to get noticed.

Today, the sky is the limit for brands that wish to reach out to their audience.

Apart from digital media, many brands today turn to social media influencers to market their products or services.

Thanks to the demand, it seems like everyone with a mobile phone and a ‘trending’ social media account can jump on the bandwagon to become the next social media celebrity to take a slice of brands’ marketing budgets.

The reality, however, isn’t that rosy.

While the number of followers is one of the many factors to determine if someone’s social media influence is worthy, there are many other elements to assess before calling someone an influencer.

But, it seems some are cheating their way onto the influencer marketing gravy train.

According to digital marketing expert Prashan Chitty, an influencer is quite simply someone who has the power to influence someone.

“You can’t be an influencer if you can’t influence your audience.”

Prashan said there are many fake social media influencers with a large number of followers but don’t have any power to influence them.

“This is because the followers are fake and don’t engage with the content. For example, there are some influencers with hundreds of thousands of followers but only a handful of people engage with their posts on social media.

“Chances are their followers are bots or the influencer is no longer relevant to his or her followers,” said Prashan who is also the founder of Xeno Entertainment and has managed social media influencers for brand marketing over the past decade.

For the uninitiated, a bot is a software programme that performs automated and predefined tasks.

While fake influencers can be a huge liability for brands, Prashan said not all authentic influencers are influential.

According to him, a real influencer should generate engaging content and not just be a pretty face. “Pretty-looking influencers generally sell less than a good content creator.

“Content creators who put thought into their content for social media have much higher engagement than someone with a pretty face holding a product.”

He said clients today are more aware of deceitful tricks fake influencers use to inflate their numbers to gain advertising revenue.

“The easy way is to ask influencers to provide their social media insights report to look into their followers’ demographic, geographical location and page engagement before considering them.”