When it comes to advertising, brand awareness, or influencer marketing, everyone has a kind of faith in celebrity. But the question is – Is it really fruitful for the brand? Does it actually subject the hefty fees spent on them well?
Now you must be wondering if there is a way to figure out which celebrity would be the right fit. To be honest, there are not many ways to figure out a celebrity’s reach. However, you can get a rough idea of a celebrity’s reach and influence through their box office receipts or music sales only if they are an actor or musician.
But what about others?
Even for celebrities, the box office receipts or sales won’t give you a clearly quantifiable metric to compare different celebrities against. There you might need a little more perfect and the static way to measure their popularity. That’s where social media is helpful. Social media networks like Instagram, Twitter etc., can give you a quite good idea of a celebrity’s reach and influence. The more followers they have on social media, the more popular they are in general, right?
Not really! You should know that to boost their social media image and make themselves look more attractive to potential brand partners, some of them have also started buying followers. Don’t you wanna know which of your favourite celebrities are aiding themselves with fake followers?
And, does it really impact if the influencer one gets engaged with for brand promotion has fake followers?
Yes, and it is important for you to know that your celebrity partner doesn’t have fake followers because it can affect your business. It can differ the graph of what you expect from your celebrity’s popularity and what you actually get.
Why is it important to know if your celebrity has fake followers?
Now after reading the article, you may have a question about why it all even matters. A celebrity is popular either way so why mess with this? You are right. In the case of world-famous celebrities like Taylor Swift, Smith, or Leonardo DiCaprio, you are right. But what if you can not afford to pay them and look for some small influencers? They might be small with names but their reach to the audience can take your brand to heights.
Their popularity is described by the number of social media followers they have. This is why you need to know if your brand celebrity has fake news followers. Brand partnership with a celebrity with fake followers can affect your sales graph. Also, their social media following dictates how much they’ll charge you but other than that it also plays a major role in what you expect them to deliver.
Your influence campaign and brand success rely on the target audience of celebrities. If they contain fake followers, your campaign or brand would come to your audience as inauthentic which can make you say goodbye to all the benefits of brand partnership. This is why you need to spot a celebrity with fake followers. Wondering how to do this? Here comes the answer.
How to spot a celebrity with fake followers?
You may be wondering why this task is so difficult and not appropriate for you. But no, this is not that much difficult. All you have to do is to look out for some factors.
Engagement Rate
Engagement rate plays an important role in a social media business. In fact, it matters more than the number of social media followers. Let’s say you have thousands of followers but not even a hundred people like or comment on your post, it shows that your engagement rate is very low and your audience doesn’t take interest in your content. This is why it is necessary for you to make your choice based on both the size of the audience and the engagement rate equally.
This is the same thing you have to look out for when spotting someone with fake followers. Buying followers doesn’t always get them the same size of likes and comments. The larger the gap between engagement and followers of a celebrity, the more they are likely to have fake followers.
Likes-Comments Ratio
If you are an active user on social media and have a good knowledge of influencer marketing, you must be aware of the service of purchasing likes. As observing the huge difference between engagement rate and audience size has become a very popular way to spot someone with fake followers, influencers have also started buying likes to balance this equation. It helps their engagement rate look attractive as well.
It makes it a little bit difficult to spot someone with fake followers. This is why a number of comments can be helpful. If someone has thousands of likes on its individual posts but not even a handful of comments, it can be a warning sign. For example, a post with 1000 likes and 5 comments can raise some serious red flags.
Inauthentic followers
Not only looking at the number of followers work. You should also keep an eye on the profiles of the followers of celebrities. You can see an apparent difference between a real and fake profile that is created with the sole purpose of boosting engagement rates or follower count. How will you differentiate between real and fake followers?
It’s very simple. If you see an account that follows countless profiles but doesn’t have followers of his own, it can be a warning sign. Other than this, a generic profile picture and a random username that looks more computer-generated also raise some red flags. It signifies that the profile is created absentmindedly with a sole purpose.
Attention! You should not always confuse fake followers with purchased followers. If you see a celebrity’s account with a follower’s name constantly popping up in their follower’s list, they might have a fake followers problem. Some accounts follow celebrities without getting paid to do so. Typically, they can post spam links to their own sites or their related ones.
Even non-famous celebrities are getting targeted for this problem. This is why low engagement rates and a huge number of followers don’t always mean that a celebrity is paying for an audience or likes.
Sudden Spikes in Followers or Likes Count
Another factor to determine fake followers you have to keep an eye on is sudden spikes in the number of followers and likes. Achieving a high-rated social media profile or building a huge fan following is a slow process that takes place step by step. But if you see a profile with a sudden increase in followers or likes counts over a night or a day, it can be a warning sign for you. But in order to find this out, you have to observe a profile constantly which seems meaningless.
To solve this problem, there are some tools available known as social media audits. These tools can provide you with historical data on audience size and engagement rate of a profile. If you are willing to spend some money, you can take the help of these tools to analyze followers or likes count and observe a spike in followers. This will absolutely help you spot a celebrity with fake followers.
