How To Find Out If An Influencer Is Fake

We just launched one of our clients, ReDairy, into supermarkets nationwide.

We had to choose an influencer for our campaign (I’ll let you know who we chose at the end of this).

Here are the tools we use to see if an influencer is worth the dollars.

1. Keywords Everywhere - Install this on your browser of choice (Google Chrome, Firefox or Edge) on a desktop computer

2. Go to Instagram (You have to have an account already) and find an account you want to look at

   

   Masterchef Judge Nadia Lim who we were considering for the campaign

You’ll get some key metrics:

• Average likes per post

• Average comments per post

• Engagement Rate (This is the number of average likes & comments on a post divided by the total followers)

Accounts that have a ton of followers but average content show up with a very poor engagement rate.

A reasonable engagement rate is above 1% if they’ve got anything less you need to do some more digging if they’ve got a larger audience.

3. Go to another tool called Social Blade, and type in the account name you want to analyse.

In the follower gains and losses, you can see where people are buying followers based on:

• The last 30 days of followers (If they’ve lost a ton of followers, this is a bad sign)

• Big spikes of unfollows (As circled in the image above)

• Paid follows where they all turn up in one lump sum on one day (As circled above)

Still curious to see who we went with for the launch?

We chose Ethically Kate for our campaign based on her engagement rate over. Nadia Lim.

She was far cheaper, and her audience was far more engaged.

When you are shopping for influencers, don’t get duped.

Do some work to find out if they are the real deal.

Gravy Vee

In 2022, we had 2,000 followers and no clue how to make content. But we could see brands and "personalities" were pulling back on social media. Because no one sees my posts anymore. And dare I say it, we decided to listen to Gary Vee and give content a go.

I wrote a post about it on LinkedIn at the time, saying we'd spend $100,000 on content within a year and it would be an inflection point for our business.

That didn't happen, but we did get into content and that inflection point might finally be here.

Before that LinkedIn post, we were posting once a month.

Since then, we’ve cycled through three marketers, four video editors, and published hundreds of posts.

We've made many wrong turns, and for a good part of the last 2.5 years, I've felt a little lost as we've gone through the process.

But we kept at it. And lately, something's been happening.

All our numbers have been trending up—revenue, gross profit, operating profit, gym members, vending machine sales, conversion rates. And now we're hitting all time highs—numbers we haven't seen since Grant Robertson ghosted inflation.

But what really surprised me was when, the other day, I was looking at some Google search volume numbers.

Rugby Bricks
— Founded: 2017
— Followers: 500,000+
— Customers: 60,000+
— Google Searches/Month: 1,000

Compound Gym
— Started: 2024
— Followers: 8,000
— Customers: 500
— Google Searches/Month: 1,000

And then I started checking around other gyms.

Dunedin has the most gyms per capita in the Southern Hemisphere. It’s the Bermuda Triangle of fitness businesses. No one knows why, but they open and close constantly here. Yet except for Les Mills, we're the most searched-for gym in Dunedin.

And you might say, "google searches, who cares..."

Google searches matter because generally they show buyer intent. Views and followers don't count for much if they don't amount to action. Turns out our content is doing work.

I had very few ideas about what I was doing when we got started. Yet here we are getting the same search volume as an international brand like Rugby Bricks. It makes no sense but its proof enough that social media is still possible for small business New Zealand.