The Truth Continues to Emerge About Influencer Fraud

My previous commentary that focused on the idea that Words Matter pointed out a flaw in semantics with how HypeAuditor reported fraudulent behavior. That semantic difference—a simple poor choice of words—lead Campaign U.S., a popular advertising industry publications, to post the statement that more than half of Instagram influencers—"engaged in fraud"—with 45 percent of accounts—"fake."  Engaged was my problem. Because fraud can happen to an influencer’s account without the influencer having a thing to do with it. HypeAuditor listened and in its May Report on Fraud on Social Media, made good with new data and new phrasing. It turns out that on average, almost 34 percent of influencers in the U.S. are impacted by fraud. That can be growth anomalies, inauthentic comments, comments from bots, giveaway comments or comments from pods … that being groups of people gang up to comment on each other’s content just to drive up engagement rates. The majority of the fraudulent impact comes from inauthentic comments. One-words, an emoji or two and similar structures that seem robot-like and irrelevant.  HypeAuditor estimates that fraudulent activity can be costing advertisers up to $800 million each year.  This episode's commentary dives into more and indicates my previous assumptions about the level of intentional fraud that happen in influence marketing may be right. You can find all the data from HypeAuditor’s May Fraud Report on t he HypeAuditor blog at Hypeauditor.com. Or by clicking the link in the show notes. This episode of Winfluence, the podcast, is sponsored by Julius. I mention that software more than others in my book because it’s the platform I’ve been using for a few years now to find influencers, engage with them and manage campaigns.  Julius really is easy to use but super powerful all at once. I can search for influencers by topic, interest, geography, age … I can also filter them by the demographics of their audience, which networks they’re relevant on … the permutations of isolating the ones that are super relevant for me are seemingly endless. Then, I can build lists of candidates, reach out to them for engagements, share contracts and assets with them, load in deliverables that I can track, measure the ROI of everything … it’s got it all.  And yes, Julius has an audience health tool, too. So it can help you understand what percentage of the influencer’s audience is perhaps suspect and subject to fraudulent behavior or attacks.  I literally work in Julius every day for my clients at Cornett. It’s become a required tool in my arsenal. I think you’ll enjoy having it in yours, too.  All I want you to do is a demo. They’re free and will show you the magic I use every day for influence marketing campaigns. If you love it like I do, you’ll sign up. If you don’t, what harm is there in checking it out, right? Sign up for that demo! Go to jason.online/julius and request one. I think you’ll be impressed!  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices