Like everyone, some Instagram bloggers have many secrets — some of those being shady ones. Right now, influencer marketing on Instagram is far from being transparent. As an advertiser, you don’t have access to any of the influencer’s performance statistics or target audience data. Even the bloggers themselves don’t know exactly who follows them.

The only numbers that everyone can see are the count of followers, likes and comments. However, some influencers know how to make these numbers more attractive for advertisers.

Instagram Bots

I’m sure that you have already read The New York Times Article about the bots problem on Instagram. It’s a known fact that many influencers buy followers and likes. It has been happening for a while, but it’s only now that marketers are drawing attention to the problem.

I would imagine this is because influencer marketing budgets are growing from year to year and actually, still nobody knows how to really measure influencer marketing ROI properly.

So, the blogger knows it, but what they also know, is that most marketers love vanity metrics and only look at the amount of followers a blogger has. The more followers you have, the more money you get. Right?

The other metric that is highly popular among marketers who work with influencers is Engagement Rate. Unfortunately, bloggers also know how to manipulate with ER too. They are buying likes and comment or using engagement pods.

To detect fake likes and comments you can use special tools like Hype Auditor or Social Blade or do it manually. You can check some of the commenter’s accounts, if they are empty and have no posts or bio — then of course, they are fakes.

There is yet other category of suspicious accounts — mass followers. They are bloggers that use tools for automatic following or liking to boost their followers count. Some of them are bots, but others can be brand accounts and bloggers. Unfortunately, these are not a quality audience because it’s impossible, when you have 2000 or even 6000 followings to read your Instagram news feed.

They just don’t see your posts, and anyway, even if they do like or comment on your content — it’s done by machine, not a human.

Engagement Pod Fraud

Engagement pod is a group of 10–50 influencers who, at the beginning, commented and liked each other’s posts to beat the algorithm when Instagram introduced the non-chronological feed. The way it works is that the more likes and comments the influencer’s post receives shortly after posting, the better the post will perform in the news feed.

An Instagram pod is an ethical dilemma. Most of the influencers and some social media marketers think that it’s acceptable to use the pods. Maybe they are right.

However, it is not acceptable to use pods when you publish sponsored posts and ask for more money based on high engagement.

Some influencers even ask pod members to comment and like their sponsored posts. It completely distorts the real data of the post-performance and the whole influencer marketing campaign.

There are many different types of pods with different requirements for entry, rules and purposes: niche, broad pods, follower-based and others. You can easily find engagement pod groups on Facebook. Most of them have several thousand members but the comments they produce are always short and of low quality.

It is much more difficult to determine small Instagram pods when it is only a mere 10–20 bloggers that organize a chat in messenger like Telegram.

The cold hard truth is that influencer marketing is a shady game between bloggers and advertisers. Despite this, if you spend more time to take a closer look at each bloggers you are planning to work with, then you will definitely win.