16 Million Fake Indian Influencers In Instagram

Social media influencers which is choice of many millennials and many corporates and marketing firms are running after to feature their advertisements invests their money with a good return from the marketing expenses, but seems they would have lost assuming these influencers were working for them and promoting their products or services on Instagram.

The cost to the marketers on account of the fraud is being put at around $750 million. The fact is boots only showing the hits in the network of facebook group media platforms including Whatsapp and Instagram. The cost to the marketers on account of the fraud is being put at around $750 million.

Indian content creators said to be the third-highest number of followers, likes and boosted engagement in the world and found that the fake influencers on the social media platform Instagram. The number is as high as 16 million, and whereas, the US has 49 million and Brazil with 27 million fake influencers are higher in compare to India.

Influencer marketing is a relatively new technique the online marketers have found. The influencers will then use their own followers on these platforms to post some good things about the products. The present finding shows that at least these 16 million Indian ‘influencers’ were not real accounts and the followers they claimed they had on Instagram are not for real.

The estimate on the overall market for influencing through Instagram is placed at $2 billion currently, up from $1 billion just two years back. There’s also the opinion that in markets like India, the level of awareness among the regular users of computers and mobile phones is quite low. This gives room for such fake accounts to manifest themselves.

In another related incident, there was a case of 49 million records of several high-profile influencers getting exposed and the source of the leak being traced to a firm Chtrbox in Mumbai. This was a social media marketing firm. The report says.

A Good Company and data analytics firm HypeAuditor has found that many influencers in India have more fake followers than fake smiles. The study analysed 1.84 million Instagram accounts in 82 countries and found the three regions with the most fake followers on the Facebook-owned platform are the US (49 million), Brazil (27 million) and India (16 million).

In a statement to PRWeek, Anders Ankarlid, CEO of A Good Company, said, “Companies are pouring money into influencer marketing, thinking that they are connecting with real people and not Russian bots. In reality, they are pouring money down the drain and giving away free products to someone who acquired a mass-following overnight.” Marketing firm Mediakix estimated that influencer marketing on Instagram alone could reach $2 billion by the end of 2019.