You may have heard that fake influencer follower fraud will cost companies $1.3B in 2019. To get insights into the numbers of fake followers among Australia's top influencers on Instagram - we compiled a new study and analysed Australia's TOP 125 most followed accounts across 5 most popular categories, such as beauty, travel, health & fitness, lifestyle, and food.
We wanted to know what influencer category has the largest proportions of fake, bots or inactive followers. And what is the percent of genuine audience / real people.
We analysed influencer Instagram accounts using Persollo AI-powered Analytics and got some very useful insights we would like to share with you.
The first of which is very important:
More than 25% of Australia’s top influencers audiences on Instagram is fake.
Insights By Categories
Beauty Bloggers: Analysing instagram accounts of popular Australian beauty bloggers, we found that many of the most followed influencers - those with fan counts between 200k and 1M - have more than 25% percent of fake followers.
Food Bloggers: 22% of audience of the most followed food bloggers in Australia (those with follower counts between 200K and 1M) is mass followers, bots and suspicious accounts.
Travel Bloggers: According to our study, 28% of audience of the travel influencers in Australia (from 200k to 1M followers) is fake and bots.
Fitness & Health Bloggers: More than 17% of the health and fitness influencers followers were found to be fake or mass followers/bots.
Lifestyle Bloggers: We defined that many of the most followed lifestyle creators have more than 35% percent of fake followers.
Please have in mind that every public instagram account has fake followers (for celebrity accounts, 10-15% is normal). However, if the % of fake followers goes above 10-15% - that is where marketers need to be careful with investing big money into such partnerships.
This study results are important for brands to help invest in partnerships with the influencers whose audience are real people, who can make meaningful actions on their ads. Checking influencers for fake followers also helps brands to protect reputation and authenticity, to get the best ROI, run a successful influencer marketing campaign and produce long-term results.
How to Identify Influencer with Fake Followers?
Use Persollo AI-Powered Analytics. With Persollo not only do you get fake followers insights, you also get data about their Audience of Value (AoV) and Audience Quality Score (AQS), ER (by single post and also check all engagement data for any Instagram account), audience geography, brand safety metrics (adult content, inappropriate words) and much more!
Persollo gives you all the necessary data to ensure you're only working with the best in your sphere!
To check any Instagram account for fake followers go here: https://persollo.com/post-analyzer