Meet the bikini-loving, follower-buying, filter-using extra-fraudinary influencers | Mumbrella360 video
The following session from this year’s Mumbrella360 conference, lifestyle and news commentator Shelly Horton argues there aren’t enough processes and rules around influencers.
According to Shelly Horton, “an influencer is a someone who has bought 50,000 followers on Instagram and poses in a bikini with a green smoothie.”
“To me influencers, they’re ‘extra-fraudinary’, and there aren’t enough checks and balances on them,” Horton says.
Co-founder and principal of Digby von Muenster Law, Stephen Digby, said there is no distinction between a celebrity, influencer or expert.
The main spruikers to be wary of are those that tell you all you need to do is influencer marketing.
Be wary – a lot of influencers call themselves ‘experts’. Who are they really? What were they yesterday?
Marketers using influencers really need to remember that not only can you purchase followers, you can also purchase comments –
people who will post “you look great babe”, “Wow” and so on underneath your posts.
You can buy a load of these comments for as little as $10.
Some of these so-called Australian “influencers” have numbers that would be literally impossible for them to get on social media alone – unless they’d purchased them.
Just saying.
There is a lot of truth in this but please don’t tar all influencers with the same brush. And yes PRs need to be far more diligent, oh and stop expecting free promotion.
Why does this surprise people…
Two things:
Anyone who is going to use easily to manipulate numbers to determine how much money they are going to give someone is always going to get caught out. People cheat. You’re just making it easy.
Popularity != influence and I’m baffled as to how it has become so blurred. Maybe as a few people have comment, we’re just lazy or niave and just want to look at numbers and not do our research.
We have some amazing small and large influencers in evey industry, but you’re never going to find them looking at follower counts.