AI service busts influencers with fake followers and likes

Auditor for Instagram usess machine learning to check influencers' Instagram accounts for fake followers and likes.

Want to know if a social media Influencer is worth advertising with or just full of hot air and, worse, fake followers and likes? There's now an AI to help you with that. 

Influencer marketing platform HypeFactory's Auditor for Instagram uses AI to help marketers check influencers' Instagram accounts for fake followers and likes.

"Our team has been working with influencers for several years and we know a lot of the pitfalls. But the main problem is that influencer marketing doesn't work for most advertisers," it said on its blog, adding that more than 70% of influencers buy followers, likes and comments.

It defines influencers as "popular bloggers or personalities on Instagram, YouTube, Facebook or Twitter. They usually have a large followers number, as well as influence over their audience. They can use this high level of audience engagement to promote brands". 

"We want to make influencer marketing more transparent, that's why we have developed a special tool – Auditor for Instagram," it said.

The service used machine learning to find behaviour patterns that correspond with real people versus automated bots or sporadic usage to quantify how many followers and likes were faked. 

HypeFactory claimed it had analysed over 100,000 bloggers so far. 

Auditor's analysis included determining followers' geo-location and gender; authenticating of followers, likes, and comments; estimating how many followers might see a sponsored post; and comparing engagement metrics across other influencers.

These metrics were used to calculate the influencer's Audience Quality Score (AQS), which was the quality of the audience that would see and react to a sponsored post. 

"AQS helps to decide in a minute is it worth to work with this blogger or not," said Hypefactory. 

The service priced audits at US$9 (RM35) for five checks, US$40 (RM158) for 25 checks, and US$75 (RM297) for 50 checks.