How to Spot Social Media Influencer Fraud

Influencers are everywhere…on television commercials pushing certain brands, on the radio talking about products they use, and now on social media…which is probably the most impactful means of marketing nowadays.

What exactly is an influencer? It is an individual who has the power to affect purchase decisions of others because of his/her authority, knowledge, position or relationship with his/her audience. Influencers in social media are people who have built a reputation for their knowledge and expertise on a particular topic. They make regular posts about that topic on their preferred social media channels and generate large followings of enthusiastic engaged people who pay close attention to their views.

Brands love social media influencers because they can create trends and encourage their followers to buy products they promote. But influencer relationships are now being questioned due to the rise in influencer fraud – a dilemma that occurs when paid tastemakers use artificially inflated follower numbers to increase their asking rate for engaging their audience on behalf of a brand. While this used to be an isolated incident, it is now spreading rampantly throughout social media. According to a Points North Group study, up to 20% of mid-level influencers’ followers are likely fraudulent.

How to Spot Fake Influencers

Sniffing out fake Instagram influencers is sometimes an easy task – find a profile with two posts and a million fans and it’s definitely filled with Instagram fake followers. Other times, you have to consider the account as a whole and separate what looks real from what appears to be fake.

1) Followers to Following Ratio

Influencers typically follow 1-5% of their following. If the ratio is much higher than that, it could be due to cheap growth hacks. For example, some Instagram users will follow anyone and everyone to get a courtesy follow in return, then unfollow a bunch of people all at once.

2) Quality of Followers

Influencers with fake followers will have a bot-heavy followers list. If you look at their list and discover many of their followers have private accounts or no profile photos, chances are they’re from a paid service to boost engagement numbers.

3) Content to Followers Ratio

Most accounts with a few posts and a ton of followers is fake. Real influencers have been posting on some sort of reliable schedule for the past several months or years in order to earn their followers. True audiences aren’t easy to acquire–they only come from regularly engaging a targeted audience with quality posts over time.

4) Life of the Account

Look at the total time the account has been open, not just how much has been posted. If an account is brand new and has a huge follower base, that should be a warning sign. It is possible that an influencer gets a sudden spike of followers because of an Instagram feature, press coverage or a viral post. Dig a little deeper to find out if this is the case.

5) Quality of Engagement

Generic comments like, “Love this!” or “Epic!” are often from bots, not real fans. A telltale sign is when the comment doesn’t accurately reflect on the image, like, “Delicious!” for a picture that’s not food. Quality comments are personalized and more thorough, and the influencer will reply to a handful of them.

6) Additional Websites and Accounts

Influencers should have some type of non-Instagram presence, either through other social media accounts or a personal website. Search for them on Google, too. Their name should pop up somewhere, preferably in an article that ranks influencers or in an interview with them.

Instagram also has a built-in tool for verifying influencers. The “About This Account” feature is available on many accounts with large audiences.

7) Hashtag Use

Ever see posts with more hashtags than actual content? And really, who reads every single one of those hashtags? No one! Influencers with a loyal following don’t have to use hashtags in order to get attention. A couple of hashtags are normal, especially branded ones, but using 20 or more hashtags is a sign that that’s how they’re collecting their engagement instead of through a dedicated follower base – bots often search for photos with specific hashtags.

Conclusion

Social media’s power and popularity enable practically anyone to build a public-facing persona, grow a following, and serve as a pitch person for your brand and its content. And influencer marketing can be a rewarding strategy for your brand in terms of networking, reaching your audience, and making a profit. But make sure you carefully vet and select the influencers you want to work with. Build a loyal fan base by posting meaningful content related to your brand. Only then will followers know you are the real deal.

Online Reputation Management

It’s not just about resumes anymore…

When applying to college and potential jobs, experts now advise you take it a step further. Creating or updating a LinkedIn profile as well as examining your social media pages can save your reputation and make sure you are putting our best foot forward. It’s good practice to check a few times a year, and remove potentially embarrassing or damaging information. Removing information from the web doesn’t mean it’s gone forever — you should be ready to account for it — but at least you are taking control of the profile that everyone will see. You are updating your online persona to reflect who you are today.

Ann Yates, principal with the executive search firm Witt/Kieffer, explains, “In my work as a search consultant, there isn’t a week that goes by that I don’t speak with candidates for administrative jobs about a personal or career misstep they’ve made and how to handle it in the hiring process. Because so much information is available about job candidates today, search committees must think carefully about how it influences their decisions.”

“They are going to click on your profile,” says Alan Katzman, the chief executive of Social Assurity, a company that offers courses for high school students on how to shape their online images. Last year, Mr. Katzman’s company advised a high school senior in the Washington area to create a detailed LinkedIn profile and include a link on his application to Harvard. Soon after, LinkedIn notified the student that someone from Harvard had checked out his profile. Mr. Katzman says that high school students who use social media to showcase themselves may gain an edge with colleges. “No one has quantified the power of this,” Mr. Katzman told me recently. “But I maintain that it is very powerful.”

Vicky Rideout, a researcher who studies how teenagers use technology, says “Using LinkedIn on college applications, she says, “is yet another way for there to be a disparity between the haves and the have-nots.” A recent study from Kaplan Test Prep of about 400 college admissions officers reported that 40% said they had visited applicants’ social media pages, a fourfold increase since 2008.

Some high school students are establishing LinkedIn profiles to give the colleges that do look something they would like them to find. Students who naturally tailor posts for their peers on Instagram, Twitter or Facebook told me they used the professional network as a separate space to market their accomplishments to adults.

“I did not make a LinkedIn profile for my friends,” says Matthew Martratt, a 17-year-old high school senior in Marietta, Ga., who is an Eagle Scout and a member of his school’s marching band and organizes community service projects. “I made it to show people who don’t know who I am what I am about.”

Mr. Martratt, who took a LinkedIn course from Social Assurity, said he followed colleges to which he intended to apply on LinkedIn and Twitter and posted about them. “It’s like sending them an invitation to look at my profile,” he said. “When I get likes or notifications back, it shows that they are looking.”

LinkedIn has proven it’s the place to find and be found. The site has well over a million and a half student jobs and internships. And more than 9 in 10 companies use LinkedIn to recruit new hires.

Want to make your profile stand out?

Follow these top tips:

1) Upload an appropriate photo. Profiles with photos get 14x more views.

2) Write an informative but catchy profile headline.

This is a short, memorable professional slogan. It’s the one thing you want a recruiter, hiring manager, or future co-worker to know about you.

3) Make good use of the Summary statement.

Think of the Summary like the first few paragraphs of your best-written cover letter: Concise about your experience, qualifications, and goals. Describe what motivates you, what you’ve done and are skilled at, and what makes you unique. Be clear and confident!

4) Be smart about your experience.

List the jobs you’ve held and a brief description of what you were responsible for and what you accomplished. This section can be more or less detailed than your resume. What really matters is that you’re not leaving out critical details about your work history.

And don’t forget your volunteer activities. 20% of hiring managers in the U.S. say they’ve hired someone because of volunteer experience. It’s also a good profile addition because it reveals your passions and rounds you out as a human being.

5) Show your work.

You can now add real examples of your writing, analysis, design portfolios, or other work directly on your profile. Upload or link to rich media, documents, or presentations. This helps make your profile more visual and interesting, while demonstrating your value as an up-and-coming professional.

Fake Accounts on Social Media

Facebook admits to as many as 270 million fake or clone accounts

Have you ever had your friends tell you they received a new friend request from you? And then you think…wait, I didn’t send that! You’ve most likely been cloned on Facebook. And you’re not alone.

All these accounts belong to customers of a company named Devumi that has collected millions of dollars in a shadowy global marketplace for social media fraud. Devumi sells Twitter followers and retweets to celebrities, businesses and anyone who wants to appear more popular or exert influence online. Drawing on an estimated stock of at least 3.5 million automated accounts, the company has provided customers with more than 200 million Twitter followers, a New York Times investigation found.

Fake accounts, deployed by governments, criminals and entrepreneurs, now infest social media networks. By some calculations, as many as 48 million of Twitter’s reported active users — nearly 15 percent — are automated accounts designed to simulate real people.

In November, Facebook disclosed to investors that it had at least twice as many fake users as it previously estimated, indicating that up to 60 million automated accounts may roam the world’s largest social media platform. These fake accounts, known as bots, can help sway advertising audiences and reshape political debates. They can defraud businesses and ruin reputations.

Devumi’s founder, German Calas, denied that his company sold fake followers and said he knew nothing about social identities stolen from real users. “The allegations are false, and we do not have knowledge of any such activity,” Mr. Calas said in an email exchange in November.

The Times reviewed business and court records showing that Devumi has more than 200,000 customers, including reality television stars, professional athletes, comedians, TED speakers, pastors and models. In most cases, the records show, they purchased their own followers. In others, their employees, agents, public relations companies, family members or friends did the buying. For just pennies each — sometimes even less — Devumi offers Twitter followers, views on YouTube, and endorsements on LinkedIn, the professional-networking site.

“Social media is a virtual world that is filled with half bots, half real people,” said Rami Essaid, the founder of Distil Networks, a cybersecurity company that specializes in eradicating bot networks. “You can’t take any tweet at face value. And not everything is what it seems.”

Buying Bots

Most of Devumi’s best-known buyers are selling products, services or themselves on social media. Some claim to buy followers because they were curious about how it worked, or felt pressure to generate high follower counts for themselves or their customers. “Everyone does it,” said the actress Deirdre Lovejoy, a Devumi customer.

While some said they believed Devumi was supplying real potential fans or customers, others acknowledged that they knew or suspected they were getting fake accounts. Several said they regretted their purchases.

“It’s fraud,” said James Cracknell, a British rower and Olympic gold medalist who bought 50,000 followers from Devumi. “People who judge by how many likes or how many followers, it’s not a healthy thing.”

Several Devumi customers acknowledged that they bought bots because their careers had come to depend, in part, on the appearance of social media influence. “No one will take you seriously if you don’t have a noteworthy presence,” said Jason Schenker, an economist who specializes in economic forecasting and has purchased at least 260,000 followers.

Devumi also sells bots to reality television stars, who can parlay fame into endorsement and appearance fees. Sonja Morgan, a cast member on the Bravo show “The Real Housewives of New York City,” uses her Devumi-boosted Twitter feed to promote her fashion line, a shopping app and a website that sells personalized “video shout-outs.”

While Devumi sells millions of followers directly to celebrities and influencers, its customers also include marketing and public relations agencies, which buy followers for their own customers. Phil Pallen, a brand strategist based in Los Angeles, offers customers “growth & ad campaigns” on social media. At least a dozen times, company records show, Mr. Pallen has paid Devumi to deliver those results. Beginning in 2014, for example, he purchased tens of thousands of followers for Lori Greiner, the inventor and “Shark Tank” co-host.

Mr. Pallen at first denied buying those followers. After The Times contacted Ms. Greiner, Mr. Pallen said he had “experimented” with the company but “stopped using it long ago.” A lawyer for Ms. Greiner said she had asked him to stop after learning of the first purchases.

Still, records show, Mr. Pallen bought Ms. Greiner more Devumi followers in 2016.

Think you’ve been hacked? Check for this:

Your name, birthday, email or password has been changed
Someone sent out friend requests to people you don’t know
Messages have been sent from your account, but you didn’t write them
Posts are appearing on your timeline that you didn’t post

To secure your account:

Go to Settings – A new menu will pop up. Choose Security and Login, then Where You’re Logged in From. A list of all of the devices that you’ve logged into and their locations will pop up. If there is a login you don’t recognize, chances are you may have been hacked. If you see anything that isn’t you, click Not You? on the right side of the log. Then click Secure Account. Facebook will then walk you through the steps of securing your account after running a diagnostic on your account.

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