Marketing and advertising via blogs and social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram and whatnot is pretty much a norm these days, and those who knows the trick of the trade are commonly aware that it is the most effective and cost-saving way to reach targeted audiences and get results almost instantly.

Most brands and PR agency tends to engage social media influencers whose social media platforms have high following numbers, thinking that engaging them will bring alot of revenue and of course, will look rather lovely on the report presentations.

Ironically, not all social media influencers have genuine followers and more often than not, PR agencies that manages advertising campaigns are cheated into engaging ‘influencers’ with fake followers. Yes, people. In case you are not aware (or choose to keep a blind eye to this), followers can be bought. Sometimes, social media influencers ‘invested’ in buying already established fanpages/ social media accounts like IG and Twitter and renamed these accounts later as their own. Some will buy fake followers for their existing accounts to boost up the numbers of their followers on social media accounts. Why do these ‘influencers’ do such unscrupulous thing?

Why, elementary my dear readers. They do this not because they merely wanted to give the world the impression that there are famous, but mainly because ignorant PR agencies and brands are constantly associating the number of followers with fame and therefore will engage these influencers to represent their brands or campaigns.

This got to stop. First it is hurting the social media industry in whole where genuine influencers who can actually reach out to targeted audiences but refused to jump into the bandwagon and buy followers be undermined. Second, it is hurting the brands they are representing and brands are actually paying them for nothing. Third, real influencers will be labeled the same as the fakes, which is really unfair.

Brutal truth that many tend to close their eyes to is that these cheaters in influencers clothing wants nothing more than to score paid postings, invites to events, sponsorships, free travel, product reviews and all sorts of benefit that they could milk out of those brands. And I’ll have you know that plenty started blogging and stuff strictly for the sake of freeloading. Engaging these type of influencers is probably still justifiable if their contents are good but to be honest, most are not and can barely construct proper setences and some are even worst; they plagiarized the contents from others sites.

Now, in all honesty, engaging porn stars for advertising purposes is even better and might give you more worth for your money. At least their followers are genuine as they don’t have a need to buy followers or fans in comparison to some of these self-proclaimed influencers.

So, how to detect influencers with fake followers? Well, there are plenty of ways, but so far the easiest way to study an influencer’s engagements and whatnot and detect fake followers is via SocialBlade. And if you do a lil bit homework or Google it, you’ll realized that there are plenty of sites out there offers fake followers tracking service. You might want to look it up before engaging any influencers and protect your brand and interest.

The whole write up may sound harsh but seriously, what is the point of engaging ‘influencers’ with hundred thousands of followers but the end of the day their engagement are not organic and does not reflect the number of followers and comments that are left are generic comments that are generated from bots? Isn’t that just a waste of time, effort and money?