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Catfish Me Not Part 1
Instagram Influencer: Real or Fake?
Fake Instagram accounts are becoming quite the nuisance these days. We will get to why.
The term “Influencer” gets tossed around a lot and for good reason in most cases. There is A LOT, like a lot a lot, of money to be made if done correctly.
Ever watched the Bachelor or Bachelorette? Hilarious that I watch these seeing as I am happily taken and getting married in 8 months, but its entertaining TV nonetheless. So why am I bringing this show up? Nearly every contestant that ends up “mattering” and getting a lot of “face-time” on the show sees large follower influxes on their Instagram. What happens then? They suddenly turn into relevant, noteworthy people and the millions of people who followed them through the show now suddenly care about everything they post. In comes their prime money making opportunity.
Ok hold up. So what is an “influencer?” anyway? Well here we go.
An Instagram influencer is anyone who is getting paid in either dollars or product to promote a product, service or other pages. These individuals typically have a minimum of 20-50k followers, an email address in their Instagram bio (which means they are clearly open to be contacted by potential advertisers) and are extremely active in their social game. No posting once a week wont cut it for this one.
Influencer promotion, aka getting paid to post content on your Instagram, is the newest and most viable income source for these suddenly famous people we talked about.
Pump the breaks….there are things you should know before you throw money at some pages to promote your stuff.
Ok so what do you look for when you want to know if an Instagram Influencer is Real or Fake?
Here’s the fake part that as someone who would be reading this as a possible advertiser needs to be aware of
- How long has the page you are looking to promote on been active and how many followers do they have?
- How many followers are engaging on their content? The rough estimate we tell everyone to expect is 10% of the followers should be engaging in order to be considered an “active” page.
- How often are posts going up? Is the person running the page only posting once a week? Or is the page getting one to 2 new posts daily?
If any of the above bullet points apply to a page you are looking at working with I would proceed with one toe not two. Catfish me not.
If the page you are looking at working with is super inactive with posting content, getting little to no engagement on their posts, has been an account for 3 months yet has 2 million followers, then woah baby but something is amiss.
Real influencers have likely been working on growing their accounts for years to be where they are. Take the Bachelor and Bachelorette people into consideration. These are REAL people with Instagram’s long before they made it big with a few minutes on a TV show. Their popularity may have quadrupled since their 6 weeks of fame, but they are still a reputable source because of their qualification on the above points.
Check yourself before you wreck yourself is what I must tell you all.
Check back for part numero dos……[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]