Over 60% of the Instagram followers of nearly 2 out of 3 Indian influencers are fake: Report

Many Indian influencers have significant number of fake followers on Instagram.

India's influencer marketing industry, which is over Rs 1,800 crore in size, loses a significant amount of money due to fake follower fraud, which is affecting many legitimate creators, who are in a race to amplify reach and get the attention of brands.

Nearly two out of three (58.5 percent) Instagram profiles in India have spurious or fake followers in excess of 60 percent, an analysis by influencer marketing platform KlugKlug has revealed.

"This alarming trend is especially prevalent in the beauty and fashion industry. These industries grapple with influencers resorting to deceptive practices, potentially leading to significant financial losses for brands investing in influencer marketing campaigns," said Kalyan Kumar, Co-Founder, Klug Klug India.

Only 2.48 million profiles out of the eight million audited exhibited credible and high-quality followers, the platform said.

India is the largest supplier and buyer of fake followers currently, noted Kumar.

"A lot of the fake follower farming is happening in India, then Brazil and Indonesia. Suppliers of synthetic followers (humanly managed profiles of dubious quality, sold as real followers) are largely from Russia and Turkey," said Kumar. "A lot of the fake follower buying is happening in the Middle East as well. The UAE has 40-50 percent incidence of fake followers among the top influencers, just like India. In Indonesia, 19 percent of followers are dubious on Instagram, which is 59 percent in India, as Indonesia sells more fake followers than it buys."

The cost of buying fake followers can be as low as Rs 8 to Rs 10 for 1,000 followers and can go up to Rs 50 per 1,000 followers on Instagram, Kumar said.

Kumar said that as the industry is growing, more categories of influencers in India are buying fake followers. "The micro and nano influencers have started buying fake followers and the problem is that brands and (influencer marketing) agencies decide an influencer on the basis of following. Creators buy followers to increase their reach, which can help them charge more from brands."

Influencers are categorised into five types based on their social media following. Nano influencers are those with 100 to 10,000 followers, while micro influencers command a following of 10,000 to a lakh. Macro and mega influencers have a following of 1 lakh to 1 million and over 1 million, respectively.

"In India, fake followers and bots are widespread, making it challenging for brands to identify and partner with truly influential content creators for their influencer marketing campaigns. This situation adds extra complexity and cost to the process, said Sahil Chopra, Founder & CEO- iCubesWire, an ad tech platform.

Brands losing money

Brands lose 30-50 percent of their money on every campaign due to fake followers, Kumar said.

"Let’s take the example of the brand Sugar Cosmetics. In the last one year, 11,000 female profiles tagged the brand. However, only 3,000 profiles had a credible following. If today a brand picks 100 influencers, at least 30 of them are not going to be worth their money," Kumar said.

Out of the total size of India's Rs 1,800 crore influencer marketing industry, at least 25 percent, which is over Rs 400 crore, has gone down the drain, he added.

"For brands, it's like paying for gold and not getting the worth of it as they invest resources in partnerships that yield superficial reach but lack genuine engagement," said Ramya Ramachandran, CEO & Founder of Whoppl, an influencer marketing platform." Because influencer marketing is gaining a lot of momentum, a lot of influencers invest in followers and fake bots to grow the followers faster, which results in poor engagement rates. This complicates efforts to measure true impact and ROI (return on investment)."

While fake followers are being bought by all types and size of influencers, a smaller fraction, who are larger influencers, also buy comments and likes, in what is known as engagement buying . "The big creators who monetise their content can afford to buy likes and comments, because with likes and comments one has to do it for every post unlike with fake followers," said Kumar. "Also, they buy likes and comments because they have to show higher engagement to brands. Most brands we have met do not know that influencers can buy fake likes and comments."

Legitimate influencers losing out as well

But it is not just brands who face the side-effects of fake followers; some influencers, too, are losing opportunities.

"There are many legitimate creators available yet brands are working with the top 500 creators and they are so overused. This is becoming a roadblock in the industry. It is very hard to make space for new creators," said Kumar. "Why should an influencer with one  million followers of which 70 percent are fake win the battle against a creator who has half a million followers that are all legit?"

Spot a bot

Despite the menace of fake followers affecting the influencer industry,  there are some red flags that brands and influencer marketing agencies have started to look out for.

"If someone has 100,000 followers and doesn’t get even 10,000 views, we know for certain that they are not worth investing in. We follow certain benchmarking practices to ensure we avoid working with people with a higher number of fake followers. For example, we do not work with creators below a 2-3 percent engagement rate. Looking at comments is also a great way to know whether their following is genuine or not," said Shivam Agarwal, Co-founder of Kromium, an influencer marketing firm.

Instagram's improved automated detection of spam is also helping the platform to moderate fake followers. According to the platform, the automated spam detection is giving more tools to easily control how spam accounts interact with users. The platform is filtering into a sperate box all the suspected spam or bot accounts for users to review.

For agencies, it is second nature to understand which profile has bots, said Viraj Sheth, co-founder and CEO of influencer marketing platform Monk Entertainment. However, he said that while celebrities with upwards of 10 million followers have a high percentage of fake followers, the impact is not much because of the large number.

"These accounts (big influencer accounts) have 100,000-200,000 likes on average, and because of this, brands don't evaluate how many fake followers potentially are there and whether or not they should be paying the amount they are. What they (brands) are evaluating is how many likes and comments they are getting, on average," he added.

Kumar expects the ratio of fake followers to come down among the bigger influencers as he thinks big accounts will be under the lens due to more awareness among brands.

"Awareness has increased and today even audiences can spot a bot. If a micro creator with 20,000 followers buys 50,000 bots, then the ratio will be off and the creator will be called out. This education among brands and audiences is positive for the influencer marketing ecosystem," said Sheth.