• by Barbara Soltysinska , Columnist, July 16, 2018

Unilever’s rally cry to increase transparency and integrity in Influencer Marketing has escalated the conversation around influencer fraud and brand safety over the past few weeks. Here are seven ways brands can maintain the highest level of quality when working with influencers.

1. Low engagement rate vs follower base. 

If an influencer’s visible engagements such as likes, comments and shares appear to be low vs the number of people following them, then this can be a sign that a portion of their audience may not be authentic. Typical engagement rates vary by audience size, but you can use these numbers as a guide to help calculate healthy engagement rates: 10-20k averages 5%, 20-50k averages 4% and 50 – 500k averages 3%.

Average engagement rate and average engagement vs category are just two of the key measures alongside content quality, content frequency and number of followers that an automated verification system can be built to check before influencers are accepted onto your platform. 

2. Find clues in comments and hashtags.

Comments that are vague, encourage users to follow accounts or seem irrelevant to the content or the influencer can be signals from inauthentic followers. Hashtags by influencers or in comments sections that promote #like4likes #like4comment can also signal bot behavior as can bios with little effort or detail and accounts following more than they are followed.

3. Watch out for unnatural spikes in followers.

As most influencers know, building an engaged following is a marathon and not a sprint. Growth comes from great content, collaboration, consistency and commitment. Abnormal increases in an influencer’s following within a short space of time can be a sign of purchased followers.

4. Use human moderation. 

Perhaps ironically, one of the biggest weapons in battling bots is people. Campaign managers should ensure they know the influencers they are working with and have a good awareness of an influencer’s style, behavior and average engagement so they are able to spot anything unusual.

5. Study campaign performance post by post. 

Ensure you have the ability to dig into the detail on your campaign reports and don’t just accept an aggregated view of the campaign’s performance. Make sure you have access to results on the individual posts as that is where anomalies will be at their most obvious.

6. Don’t just select influencers by their reach. 

If the number of followers is the determining metric for influencers to unlock brand campaigns, it can over-emphasize the value placed on upon it by influencers. If the industry begins to value engagement over reach, then influencers can focus on their content, organic growth and engagement rather than their follower numbers. Buys may be based on Cost Per Engagement, Cost Per Content and Cost Per View, not just reach.

7. Set your terms and conditions up front. 

Like Unilever has, set out your stall before working with influencers. Be clear on your terms and conditions and your expectations of their actions regarding fraudulent behavior.