Instagram Followers Of Nearly Two Of Three Indian Influencers Are Fake: Report (image@Pixabay)Reportedly, India’s influencer marketing industry lose a significant amount of money over the fake follower fraud. As per influencer marketing platform KlugKlug, nearly two out of every three Instagram profiles in India have fake followers. The platform said fake followers are especially noted in beauty and fashion industry.
The Co-Founder of KlugKlug India, Kalyan Kumar said, “these industries grapple with influencers resorting to deceptive practices, potentially leading to significant financial losses for brands investing in influencer marketing campaigns”, as quoted by moneycontrol.
KlugKlug observes that close to eight million profiles audited, nearly 2.48 million profiles showed credible and high-quality followers. Currently, India is the largest supplier and buyer of fake followers, Kumar said. Brazil and Indonesia follow India in the fake follower farming business.
Kalyan Kumar adds that the supplier of synthetic or humanly managed profiles of doubtful qualities that are sold as real followers, are largely from Russia and Turkey. A lot of fake followers buying are taking place in Middle East also. Over 40-50 percent of fake followers incidences were marked even among the top influencers in UAE, similar to India.
As per the report, Indonesia sells more fake followers than it buys. Over 19 percentage of the followers in the country are dubious, whereas the figure is 59 percentage in India. The cost of buying fake followers, Kalyan Kumar adds, vary from Rs 8 or Rs 10 for 1000 followers to Rs 50 per 1000 followers on Instagram.
The influencers are categorised into five base on their followers on social media. Nano influencers are the ones with 100 to 10,000 followers and Micro influencers are the ones with followers from 10,000 to 1 lakh. Meanwhile, influencers with followers from 1 lakh to over 1 million are labelled as Macro influencers.