TikTok has become a major player in the world of social media, thus many businesses are using this platform’s influencers to promote their business. By choosing the right influencer you can certainly make your brand more popular with the audience. However, hiring fake influencers on TikTok could lead to not only financial losses but could also ruin your company’s reputation.
We must first understand what a fake account on TikTok is before learning how to spot it. In this way, you will better understand how to recognize an authentic creator.
Influencers pretending to be real TikTok influencers post high-quality pictures, pretend to be connected to big brands, and lead high-quality lives. In most cases, however, behind those following such accounts, there are fake accounts or even bots.
What is even more disturbing is that the account owner you see in the videos may not actually be who they claim to be. These accounts are often run by someone else or a group of people trying to trick you into thinking the account is authentic.
How to detect fake influencers?
Most of the time, the content of their profiles will be flawless. There are some people you can trust that can make you believe everything they say is true.
Still, there are a few factors that can show if an account is real or not.
- Check the followers’ profiles
Probably the simplest method to detect fake accounts on TikTok is to check their audience. You can tell a lot about the creator by the quality of their audience.
A large number of profiles will lack photos. Furthermore, fake followers are unlikely to have content on their profiles, and they are likely to be private. They may even repeat their names with a small difference, such as a different number or letter, as another way to identify themselves.
- Check the engagement ratio and quality
The videos of real TikTok influencers would be highly viewed and have a large audience. In addition, if the account has many followers, but few likes and comments on its videos, this is a sign that the account could be fake. Likes and comments of a popular TikTok user would be proportionate to their number of followers.
Having a high engagement rate could also be an alarming sign. It can also be a bad indicator when an influencer’s profile constantly receives up to 90% of the followers’ likes and comments on their videos.
TikTok creators with pro accounts should be able to provide you with some more details about their engagement. You would then be able to analyze the quality of their engagement by looking at the source of their likes and comments. The comments left by the same accounts on all of the posts, or only from 1-2 locations, or from the same age groups, indicate a fake account. Influencers who fake their scores on TikTok usually don’t want to spend much time and energy on comments and likes, so this can be a clue also.
- Ask for references
When fake accounts are involved, reference availability tests rarely fail. If the TikTok influencer cannot provide authentic references upon your request, you should break off the partnership. You can use this method to catch the fake ones easily.
Final words
A TikTok influencer marketing campaign can produce stunning results in a short period of time. However, it must be executed properly. In the end, you need to pick the right influencer carefully to make this work. You can think of it as a partnership that can boost your business. By now, you should know what to look for and how to avoid the fake influencers on this social media giant.