Influencer fraud Archives

The Lord of the Influencer Marketing: Artificial Intelligence

I have watched a lot of science-fiction movies about artificial intelligence, and many of them introduced artificial intelligence as a villain, like Hal 9000 in the 2001 Space Odyssey. For influencer marketing, artificial intelligence is not a negative figure, but rather a hero. If you are curious, I invite you to read the full article about AI’s role in influencer marketing.

Beyond the AI hype

In the first place, if you ask what artificial intelligence is, then Wikipedia will answer you that AI is intelligence demonstrated by machines, unlike the natural intelligence displayed by humans and animals. Plus, there is a lot of hype around AI, and most discussions about artificial intelligence concluded with hysteria.

People assume that AI even replaces human in specific processes as AI can accelerate procedures. Moreover, it is crystal clear for everybody that AI can process data at a level impossible for human capabilities. Nevertheless, in Influencer marketing, human interaction is an essential part of the work, because it is a human-to-human process, while AI alone cannot provide that.

How Artificial Intelligence Can Be Transformed Into Influencer Marketing?

In the Search of Right Influencer

Digital marketing is extremely noisy, therefore, brands need content that will resonate in the digital world. One of the biggest obstacles to this is finding the right influencers and it is not expected from marketers to be Sherlock Holmes in the searching process. The number of followers should not be the most important priority when choosing influencers, it is not possible to identify an influencer’s potential only based on their follower count.

Marketers need to consider other factors such as the engagement level. Additionally, collaborating with an influencer who has a similar culture to the brands is likewise important. Here AI comes to our aid.

Let’s look at how

AI can analyze various data from an influencer’s social media profile. This goes into the scope of Natural Language Processing (NLP). Natural language processing is a form of AI that’s focused on analyzing, understanding, and using written or spoken human languages.

Conveying messages is tremendously important for Influencer Marketing, and of course, creating messages needed words. So, NLP has a powerful role in analyzing. NLP has the capacity to deal with unstructured data on social media. It analyses the content of influencer posts and generates interests, industries, demographics, and brand associations from them. Influencer platforms use these classifications in discovery search engines.

With that, Brand marketers can identify who the key influencers are in growth areas and can gain better insights about influencers. Likewise, marketers can determine what types of content will resonate with social media followers.

Catch Fraudulent Influencers If You Can

Brands pay influencers who have significant followers on top social media platforms to promote their products and reach a relevant audience. Using social media bots for increasing followers count and creating fake engagement metrics makes it difficult to determine the credibility of influencers. Influencers can buy fake followers and pay for bots to like or comment on their posts that can mislead brands.

According to a report from Cheq, fraudulent activity is costing advertisers $1.3 billion in 2019. Fraud figures not only prevent the product from reaching the target audience but also causes brands to spend money without getting any tangible results. AI can help brands analyze and identify computer-generated influencers, social media bots, which is a real threat for brands.

The Creation of Content

ML (Machine Learning) technologies can analyze millions of online images and videos within a few seconds. ML algorithms collect more intricate data according to the automatic identification of images and videos. Moreover, ML/AI technologies can analyze comment sentiment. It allows identifying whether the expressed opinion is positive or negative and deciding which posts have a positive attitude, positive feedback, and which one vice versa. It helps the brand to identify which type of content is most likely to get positive responses by the target audience.

Predicting ROI

AI allows marketers to closely observe an influencer’s performance and assists track and analyze every piece of content, various engagement metrics. Therefore, it can calculate the ROI of the campaigns and understand whether it has had an impact on your revenue. Where an influencer’s success is irregular, calculating the ROI of an influencer marketing campaign and forecasting results are vital.

Analyzing influencers is difficult without AI because every creator is different. If marketers want to get top-level insights in the data dump, only a machine/AI can deal with the mass amounts of big data.

Eternal Sunshine of the Keepface AI Tool

Brands cannot resist the power of AI on running successful influencer marketing. As I mentioned above, AI can support brands from various aspects. Keepface, which implements the latest innovations in its tool, certainly could not neglect AI technology. Keepface offers AI-powered influencer tools that will help brands to pursue their campaigns in the best way.

With the image recognition tool, Keepface analyzes accounts, for example, especially suspicious accounts, which can deceive companies causing a huge amount of damage to their business. It is tough for brands to recognize fraudulent figures by themselves without the help of pros.

Moreover, by using image recognition Keepface can easily classify influencers’ contents. It turns images into readable data. Of course, the only image recognizing is not enough for this process. Keepface ML/AI tools can analyze written data too. At the end of this process, Keepface helps the companies to choose the right influencers which have similar culture with their brands and can deliver content to the target audience.

So, sign in now to take advantage of AI technology and get the most out of your influencer marketing.

Lamiya Babazade August 20, 2020

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Influencer marketing

Fraud Detection, Fake Social Activity and Audience Health in Influencer Marketing

As influencer marketing is the direct way of authentically reaching out to possible customers it is still the epicenter of brands’ digital marketing strategies. Influencers have an inevitable impact on consumer purchases. That’s why, brands focus their strategies on influencer marketing.

The problem here is fraudulent activities by influencers. Conventionally, brands were in search of influencers with a large audience to partner with. However, trust and authenticity issues punched the influencer marketing in the last years. Unsuccessful influencer campaigns made brands understand the importance of engagement rate over the number of unreal followers. Fake social media accounts, bot followers, pods are ways of decisive activity that cause influencers to inflate their fees. Influencer fraud damages the whole market by dead-loss investments and diminishing ROI.

Reason behind influencer fraud is the lack of transparency

There are different types of fraud activities on Instagram such as bots, pods, and fake accounts. Let’s see what all these mean.

Bots are unreal profiles with no followers.

Pods are instead like a group of people who agree to like and comment on each other’s posts to artificially raise engagement. Fake social activities take place in almost all social platforms in different forms.

In May 2018, Facebook alone deleted 583 million fake accounts. YouTube announced the fake video views susceptibility by influencers to blow up their views counts and all these fraudulent views will be removed as new evidence comes to light. As Instagram is the number one platform for sponsored posts, influencer frauds mostly occur on this platform.

According to the CHEQ report, fake influencer activity cost brands 1.3 billion in 2019 and expected to reach 1.5 billion this year. Plus to monetary costs, influencer fraud has indirect costs causing the loss of trust by consumers. It has a lot more sizeable impact on the industry that can change consumer behavior.

How to spot fake activity?

Engagement rate

Engagement is the first factor to define if the account has fraudulent activities or not. If the engagement rate of influencers highly deviates from the average platform engagement rate it is the most probably because of influencer fraud. However, bot accounts do play with likes and comments to pretend trusty influencer images. Thankfully, bot comments also can be revealed by human involvement. If the influencer gets a huge number of the same positive comments or emojis it is probably by the bot accounts.

Follower growth rate

Influencer growth rates can tell a lot about the soundness of the influencers’ profiles. If influencer gets sudden hikes or falls in the number of followers that is because of buying bots or due to deletion of fake followers by the platforms. Trusty influencers show steady growth over time as they built their followers authentically.

The demonstrative way to find out if the influencer has done any fraud or not is checking out post captions. If an influencer tends to write small captions or emojis all the time it implies that influencer does not care about the aesthetics of their profile. Authentic influencers write long and meaningful captions, usually asking questions at the end. Quality captions also depict how influencers are interested in building relations with followers.

Influencer fraud can also be defined by going into followers’ accounts. Too much presence of profiles with no image and also, no followers manifests the fraudulent activity by influencers.

Do not forget to check the comments

Scroll down and read the comments. If influencer gets single-word comments like “Great!”, “Awesome!”, only emojis and repetitive lines in most of their posts and if they do not match with the content of the posts that is the sign of influencer fraud. Community building is the key to successful influencer activity. Real influencers engage with the followers by liking and replying to the comments.

How to guard your brand against influencer fraud?

So, influencer marketing fraud is one of the biggest challenges that most marketers and brands are facing today. The best way to protect your brand against influencer fraud is an in-depth investigation of influencers you want to partner with. Find out where their success comes from, their content or simply Google their names to see the campaigns they worked before.

Micro and nano influencers may not have partnerships with big brands to be mentioned; however, you can view their stories or posts and check the comment sections to see the quality of their job. As you can say, it is a long-running process to clearly decide on the right influencers. Influencer marketing platforms can help to reduce time spent on influencer reach and also providing reliable influencers based on their wide experience.

Influencer Analytics Tools

AI-Powered Keepface Influencer Analytics designed to assist brands in finding the right people. The tool helps you to find related influencer by giving insights about influencer profiles including performance metrics, influencer ranking, demographics, audience analysis, and special insights such as influencer media value, analysis of comment, fake influencer detection, similar influencers by content and audience.

Natella Mammadzade January 30, 2020

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