Fake it ‘Til You Make it (Or Don’t) Part 3: The Illusion of Influence

Fake followers

In June, Unilever CMO Keith Weed said: “At Unilever, we believe influencers are an important way to reach consumers and grow our brands. Their power comes from a deep, authentic and direct connection with people, but certain practices like buying followers can easily undermine these relationships.”

The firm announced that it would not work with people who buy fake followers.

I spoke to Nick Taylor, Product Marketing Manager for Brandwatch’s Audiences (a tool that can help brands find influencers small and large). He told me he’d heard from clients how ubiquitous fake followers are within the influencer marketing field. “The biggest culprits are the ‘professional influencer’ types – people whose main thing is influencer marketing – who try to build a presence on social with the aim of making a living from it,” he said. “But minor celebrities, actors, musicians are guilty of it too.”

Buying fake followers is easy, and it’s easy to see how tempting the practice might be to a wannabe influencer looking to boost their worth. After all, a high follower count is often enough to entice a marketing team to engage in talks about possible partnerships. That said, the market appears to be wising up to the questionable value of having a large follower count, and it’s not always good – especially if many of those followers are fake.

Buying followers leaves the same kind of sour taste as video game companies who include “pay to win” mechanisms in their games. It feels unfair and undemocratic, perhaps even against the shared values of the internet.

There is some progress being made when it comes to inflated follower counts, though. Twitter recently removed a significant amount of locked accounts from the platform, meaning follower counts are now more representative of the number of real users who pay attention to that account. Twitter’s Vijaya Gadde writes:

“Follower counts are a visible feature, and we want everyone to have confidence that the numbers are meaningful and accurate… This specific update is focused on followers because it is one of the most visible features on our service and often associated with account credibility.”

Other ways one might go about creating illusion of influence

Even if your followers are real, there are plenty of ways to appear more influential than you actually are.

1. Paying writers to list you as a notable personality alongside more ‘genuine’ influencers in respected publications is one way. You can also do the same for your business.

2. Meanwhile, writing for free on fairly open platforms like the Huffington Post’s old blog system makes it easy for anyone with a keyboard to paint themself as a thought leader. Free content suits publishers for the extra visits bought in by unpaid contributors, and those contributors benefit from further exposure. Whether their content, often driven by self-aggrandizing motives, benefits the reader is up for interpretation.

3. Boosting perceptions of your own talent by using other people’s content is not uncommon on the internet, even among the social media elite. One influential photographer with 100k followers recently apologized for using stock photos on his Instagram page.

4. You could also form alliances with other influencers and continuously big each other up – not necessarily a dodgy thing to do, but questionable. You may have experienced clubs of influencers relentlessly retweeting each other in what is, if you’ll pardon the phraseology here, effectively a digital circle jerk that elevates their reach to new audience members. This might not seem too bad in social spheres like parenting bloggers, but when it comes to vast networks of “influencers” tweeting particular political messages things feel a bit murkier.

5. Another easy approach is to inflate your credentials in your bio. One author might purport to be the Founder of an up and coming (fictional) business with a vague af mission statement and scant contact details on the website. Potential followers who don’t do their homework could easily buy  into the image of them as a successful entrepreneur.

6. Influence doesn’t need to be on a big scale, either. Vice writer Roisin Kiberd interviewed a guy who used Instagram to tell the story of a life lived in luxury with private jets and fancy watches, despite the living on a deceitfully modest salary. His reasoning? Likes and female attention. “The budget return leg trips offer a service perfect for our Catfish age, where it’s all too easy to fake your own pictures: they go one step further by faking a real experience,” writes Kiberd.

Growing distrust

Now we’ve dragged you through the muddy waters of the influencer dark arts, you might want to go and wash your face. Stick around – there’s a brighter side.

While negative stories around influencers are becoming something of a trend recently, alongside it both consumers and brands are becoming more wary of the influencers they trust either with their opinions or their social spend.

There’s a line between an Instagram account that’s a genuine presentation of a person and their interests and a thinly veiled profit making mechanism, and we’re all learning to recognise it.