How to use a paid solution to ensure your social following is high-quality and legitimate

Social media is large and complex. Roughly 2.3 billion social media users, of which 1.97 billion are active on mobile, interact and communicate on several channels, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. And with claimed returns 6.5 times the amount of every dollar spent, influencer marketing via social channels has become a veritable must for marketers, looking to take advantage of the great and unprecedented powers of persuasion wielded by online influencers. If a brand is to optimally position itself for marketing success, digital marketers must identify and engage with the right influencers and followers on a regular basis.

Yet, there is a real and frightening problem in the world of social media marketing. Companies, and even wannabee influencers desperate to appear more popular or successful online, are buying fake followers. In fact, there is an entire marketplace for the purchasing of false social media accounts, posts and tweets. Approximately 83 million Facebook accounts and over 20 million Twitter accounts are fake. And, according to Business Insider, eight percent of Instagram accounts are illegitimate.

Fake followers can inflate a brand or a person’s social numbers, which may seem great, but they ultimately decrease the engagement ratio within the utilized platforms. And, not only can the presence of fake followers, known or unknown to your client’s brand get their accounts flagged and even suspended, it can cripple their brand’s online image. Dramatically.

That’s why, for marketers seeking to remain on the straight and narrow and market their clients’ offerings in good conscience, the ability to sift through these illegitimate, suspicious and low-quality accounts can be a significant challenge.

But how can marketers identify fake followers and influencers? Determining whether a follower is actually a bot or has bought its following can be a real challenge. Luckily, there are paid solutions to help honest marketers like you determine which followers are real, and which are not.

Leaders is leading the war against fake, suspicious and low-quality social followers

Leaders Group provides a complete influencer marketing solution for any brand. An integral part of this solution includes the use of several algorithms to crawl any influencer’s audience. That way, any suspicious, low-quality or fake users can be successfully identified and weeded out, making the influencer’s following a true reflection of its brand positioning and engagement activities.

Leaders’ patent-pending algorithms sifts through and analyzes influencers’ audiences according to the following parameters:

• Last post date
• Overall following-to-follower ratio
• Overall interactions: the ratio of comments to likes
• The ratio of followers to posts
• Account name

Leaders’ smart system then allocates different valuations to each of the above data points, generating a list of what percent of a given influencer’s audience (from their public accounts) are believed to be suspicious, low-quality or potentially fake.

If, for example, an influencer with a super generic account name, such as Maya2455879988, has 2,000 followers but has only posted twice in the past six months, chances are that this influencer was either bought (from a dedicated platform) or is a bot (controlled by an automated program). The Leaders solution will immediately flag this influencer as suspicious, helping combat the fake follower problem, one influencer at a time.

Summary

The above paid solutions for identifying fake, suspicious or low-quality social media accounts can significantly improve any business’ social positioning, by allowing you to remove any followers that do not actively engage with your brand’s account. These solutions are comprehensive, data and analytics based, creating a richer, more knowledgeable portrait of your social following on various networks.