On the surface this looks great. Fashion Blogger with 1.3m followers. I would have to assume that she has an overlapping audience that would love the brand that I am working with.
The first thing I always look for in an influencer is authenticity. Are you a real person? Can people relate to you? If you look at her Instagram page (https://www.instagram.com/chrishanxoxo)
ou will see all of her photos are almost exactly the same. She is centered in front of some sort of background. A lot of the photos look forced or fake. At best they look like she’s creating stock photos that could be used for articles. It just doesn’t feel authentic.
That being said, if you look at the likes and comments per post. They look pretty good. It appears she has an engaging audience. This is where I use a software tool to analyze her account and followers. I look at the following factors to determine if this person’s account is authentic and has the ability to actually influence:
- Audience Gender Mix
- Age ranges
- Audience by Country
- Audience by Language
- The persons engagement rate
- Non-follower likes
- An overall credibility score
For a fashion blogger influencer in the United States, I would expect her to have the following metrics for those categories:
- Audience Mix: 80-90% Female Following
- Largest percent of followers in the 25-34 Age Range (followed closely by 35-44)
- Audience Country: Greater than 75% United States Audience
- Audience Language: Greater than 75% English (just a metric that falls in line with Audience Country)
- Influencer engagement rate: Ideally 3% or greater
- Non-follower likes: Less than 10%
- Credibility score: Must be greater than 75% (but ideally above 80%)
Here are the stats for @chrishanxoxo
- Audience Mix: 33% Female
- Audience by Country (in order of largest to smallest): India 29%, Brazil 15%, Indonesia 12%, Iran 6%, United States 5%
- Audience Language: 42% English
- Engagement Rate: 1.3%
- Non-follower likes: 98%
- Credibility Score: 12.8%
As you can clearly see this profile is a fake. Most likely the followers were purchased, the likes and comments were purchased. She is supposed to be a fashion blogger in Los Angeles but only 5% of her followers are in the United States. She appears to have posts referencing China and Chinese New Year but China isn’t even in the top 5 locations of her audience.
The biggest red flag is probably the non-follower likes metric. 98% of her likes come from profiles that do not follower her. To me this is a tell-tale sign that her likes are purchased. Clearly the 1.3m followers she has do not engage with her (most likely because they are fake as well).
All this being said, I have worked with many influencers who have been great! I just have to make sure to do my homework before we work with an influencer to make sure we are not getting scammed and their audience would be a good fit for our product.
