What are Engagement Pods and Why Should you be Wary of Them
The Fashion Network Editor
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Mark Dandy is a influencer marketing specialist having designed Influencer Strategies for some of the world’s largest brands. He has worked with thousands of influencers across various sectors, and now runs a specialist influencer marketing and social media agency – Captivate Influence.
- What are Engagement Pods?
Engagement Pods are a group of influencers who have formed an online working group to comment and like each other’s content. The aim being that they believe that Instagram will notice the post is more popular due to all the likes and comments, and so therefore boost the reach. They can also be used to make an influencer look more popular than they actually are, as more likes and comments make them look more influential to brands, therefore making it more likely they will be gifted products or paid to promote brands on their social media platforms.
2. Why should brands be wary of them?
Artificial engagement will never be a true reflection of people interested in your brand or service. A brand may look at an Influencer’s Post and look to retarget people who have engaged with it, but as this engagement is essentially fake. You will be further wasting spend on the influencer to target uninterested consumers, and then if you put paid spend behind it to retarget, you’ll be wasting spend again. It also massively skews your data, as you may be looking at engagement as a KPI and think you’ve had a successful campaign, when in reality, the data is flawed.
3. What can be done to spot them?
Analyse the influencers last 5-10 posts, and look for comment patterns from the same people. Also look for similar comments on each post, often short sentences such as “oh wow you look amazing” or along those lines. If you spot the same people writing similar comments often, they may be in an engagement group. I also tend to work closely with Influencers and often have their phone numbers, to which if you download the app “telegram” this is often a hotspot for Influencer DM groups as Telegram has no limit to the amount of people active in a group, whereas apps like Whatsapp restrict you to 50 people. They may have legitimate reasons to use Telegram, but this is sometimes is a giveaway and I would start to look deeper at other criteria.
Words by Mark Dandy - Founder of Captivate Influence