Dig into the numbers, says industry watchdog
All-Star Game
Look, the Influencer Marketing Council sounds cooler than it actually is.
From the group's name, you might think that IMC meetings are the "glammest" thing ever. Imagine a cheapish hotel conference room out on the interstate, with watery coffee, stale muffins and bagels, and "fritzy" PowerPoint projectors.
DJ Khaled is the treasurer. Bella Hadid takes minutes. A contentious breakout session led by Tati and James Charles dissolves into angry, tear-soaked recriminations. Cristiano Ronaldo complains about the bagels.
Kardashians are sprinkled everywhere.
Down to Earth
Alas, the real-world IMC is a more prosaic affair. Celebrity fantasies aside, no one involved in marketing for the past decade expects influencers to self-regulate their community.
Founded in 2017, the IMC's raison d'etre was "to bring the industry together to provide clarity on the type of disclosure that works best for consumers, as individual companies and creators have struggled to define these guidelines."
Because in a marketplace where influence and engagement can be bought wholesale, how are marketers supposed to judge the fruit of their efforts?
The Takeaway
The IMC provides a figure that should give any online marketer the chills: "More than 11% of the engagement for influencer-sponsored posts on Instagram are generated by fraudulent accounts."
So, let's thank the slightly less glamorous folks at Clorox, Publicis Media, Initiative, Horizon Media, Saatchi & Saatchi Wellness, Haworth, Havas Media, Lippe Taylor, StubHub, Abrams Artists Agency and Captiv8: As leaders of the IMC, they've done the hard work of assembling "Fraud Best Practices and Guidelines," a guidebook for anyone looking for tips on spotting and shutting down fraud.
What's the skinny?
The main thrust of the advice entails a multifaceted, if cursory, examination of the numbers. Do you see spikes or troughs in the number of your influencer's followers? Does the influencer's follower count match his or her engagement activity? Does the engagement rate spike in unnatural ways? How does the influencer's view rate on YouTube compare with the influencer's follower count?
There's qualitative advice, too: Check on the grammar and overall quality of responses to the influencer's posts. Where are the followers located? And does that information provide an unwelcome contrast to where engagement activity originates?
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