Influencer Red Flags: How To Find The Best Influencer For Your Brand

Photo by Diggity Marketing

Looking for the perfect influencer to partner with? Look out for these top 3 red flags.

Selecting influencers for a campaign can feel a little bit like insta-stalking a date before you actually meet them (hey, we all do it), but it’s necessary to vet and select influencers who match your brand attitude before launching a campaign. Whether you’re using an influencer marketplace (that’s so 2019) or attempting an influencer campaign on your own, read some tips from the pros here at VizSense on how we vet and verify our influencers to curate the perfect campaign for every brand.

They Have a Ton Of Followers

Don’t be fooled by follower count! While it may be tempting to work with influencers who boast large followings, it’s not always the best move. Not only do they come with a high price tag, but their audience may only be following them for their bathing suit pictures in South Beach and not for their recommendations. It’s no secret that the more followers you have, the lower your engagement will be -- it’s simple math -- but if you see someone with thousands of followers and only getting 200 likes and 5 comments per post, that’s a major red flag. It’s not necessarily a bad thing to work with influencers with large followings, but high followings coupled with highly unengaged audiences leave your brand with content that seems disingenuous and your pockets with little to low return on investment.

So how do you find the perfect influencer that fits your brand and also has a highly engaged audience? At VizSense, we believe in the power of the nano and micro-influencer, or individuals with followings as low as 1,500 and up from there! These influencers allow companies to establish strong relationships between their brand and target consumers. Micro-influencers often engage with their audience on a daily basis and have established trust with their followers. Their audiences follow them for genuine product recommendations -- whether that be drink recommendations, fashion ideas, or skincare advice -- and because of this they know the type of recommendations their audience wants from them and hone their craft in that area of expertise.

In the end, we would rather partner with a nano influencer who has 1,000 extremely engaged followers over a macro influencer who has 500,000 and no real personal interaction or real niche. By using influencers with smaller audiences, we are able to tap into highly engaged, niche networks in local communities so that we know exactly who we are reaching!

Their Followers Seem Fake

Don’t judge a book by its cover! While doing your influencer seeding, you’ll not only need to ensure that your influencer fits the brand’s target consumer, but that their followers fit this target consumer too. Even if their feed may look perfect, pretty content will only get you so far. You’re going to have to dig a little deeper into who their audience really to ensure you are reaching the right people, or if you are even reaching real people at all.

With the demand for influencer marketing growing, the industry competition is getting fierce. Many content creators have taken to fraudulent ways to fabricate their follower count and post engagement to try to get ahead, and if you’re not looking for these spam followers, they can be easy to miss. From follow trains, giveaways, and engagement groups that falsify engagement by having other influencers comment on your posts for a small buy-in fee, to engagement apps that falsely increase followers, likes, and comments with bots, there are multitudes of tactics for influencers to try and mimic an increase in popularity.

Our simplest tip to look out for the false followers: reading the comments on their recent posts can give brands and marketers valuable insights on how they will perform for a potential campaign. If their comments seem fake, they probably are.

At VizSense, we always take audience verification to the next level. Our partnerships with the leading social media platforms allow our expert team to carefully vet and select influencers whose audiences will resonate most with the product and brand. Our proprietary technology -- such as bot and profile analysis tools -- coupled with our extensive first-party data enables our team to fully vet all influencers we partner with and ensure your brand is seeing real, organic interactions with the most relevant consumer audience for your brand, and not with a bot or someone who wouldn’t be interested in your product.

They Only Post Sponsored Content

Brands often make the assumption that influencers that have experience with posting sponsored content are a huge plus. This is not always the case. Influencers who value authenticity don’t see brand partnerships as just another source of income -- they see brand partnerships as an opportunity to educate their followers about a product or brand they love!

You don’t want an influencer who will accept just any brand partnership, regardless if they believe in the brand or not. Partner with influencers who actually enjoy your brand, and not just for the money or free product. If you go to an influencer’s profile and their saturation rate of sponsored content to regular content is high, they probably aren’t the best fit. Not to mention, some growing pages try to fake sponsored content to seem like they have experience with brands when in reality it's all a ruse.

Influencers that stay true to their personal brand will have a positive impact on their followers when they promote your brand.

As the influencer marketing industry continues to grow, we continue to adapt. Here at VizSense, we are passionate about our brands, our influencers, and how influencer marketing can transform and grow your company to the next level. To learn more about how influencer marketing can elevate your brand, download a case study here, or reach out to us at contact@vizsense.com. We hope to hear from you soon!