Thursday, January 23, 2020

As Influencer Marketing Grows, the Give and Take on Influencer Fraud on Instagram

Interesting article on Digiday about influencer fraud on Instagram. The article references Instascreener data on fake engagement on Instagram - which declined from 1.7% to 1% from May to September 2019 but has popped up to 1.2% in December.  While these numbers are not large, it points to the rise of Instagram as a key vehicle that agencies and marketers see as a way to increase engagement, and indeed, there appears to be significant spending wasted on fake engagement. As the article notes, $1.4B out of $1.9B of all US/Canada influencer marketing spend in 2019 was spent on Instagram and shockingly, as much as $255M of that amount may have been spent on accounts with fake followers.

The article also suggests that marketers are still trying to figure out the right metric - followers, likes and comments are useful, but there are likely other mechanisms to build out more complex metrics tied to revenue generated by marketing spend.

No comments: