What is Influencer Engagement Farming and Why You Should Be On the Lookout For It.

Here’s a story you might be familiar with. You/your client are a brand looking to promote a new product, service, or an idea, and you’ve identified an influencer who:

? has the perfect audience demographic

? has the requisite following size

? most importantly, matches your budget

? and has none of the usual red flags ?? (check The Basics below)

You get all excited, sign them up, lock down deliverables, generate a personalized promo code and a tracked customized link (UTM), provide feedback on the content drafts, finally hit send on the approval email and….nothing.

Sure, they post the content, and you get likes. You might even get comments. But the number of promo code usages and the clicks tracked from the UTM just do not match up to the following and reach you signed up for. You try to understand why, discuss it with the partner, and come back round to the “this algorithm sucks” and “organic is dead” trope. And make no mistake, those are definite factors. The algorithm does suck and organic reach did die a slow bleeding death. BUT, there is one factor that might have slipped by: the authenticity of engagement.

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?The Basics

We all know by now what influencer marketing is. The practice of partnering up with a social media influencer or content creator (discussion for another time) to tap into their following. For the purpose of this discussion, let’s assume we’re talking about influencers and creators on Instagram.

Specifically, Merriam-Webster defines an influencer as: a person who is able to generate interest in something (such as a consumer product) by posting about it on social media.

This “generation of interest” and hence, the selection of an influencer, depends on a variety of factors such as their audience profile, the size of their following, their content, your budget etc. And while most people are fairly adept at identifying the right influencers based on the above parameters, gauging the authenticity of their intended partner’s engagement is one area they might be overlooking.

But first, let’s talk about the common influencer marketing considerations and ?????? that everyone is (mostly) aware of to get them out of the way.

• Type of engagement: All engagements are equal, but some are more equal than others. For instance, comments are better than likes, and shares may be better than comments due to the amount of effort involved and hence the level of content resonance it signifies. So, if you see only likes and barely any comments on an influencer’s posts, be wary.
• Engagement proportionate to following: This is by no means an exact science and varies depending on multiple factors, but if you look at a range of influencers and creators with similar follower count, you should be able to get a gauge on what the standard engagement rates are across different levels of following. And if your intended partner’s engagement doesn’t match up to their peers, you might want to continue searching for a better one.

Shoot me a DM if you want to discuss more about these, but let’s move on to what we’re really here to talk about.

The Authenticity of Engagement

In the past, marketers mainly looked at the size of an influencer's following to gauge their reach. But as the industry matured, marketers also started to pay attention to engagement metrics, such as likes, comments, and shares, to ensure that influencers' followers were genuinely interested in their content. Like I said, this is not an exact science, but that’s where research and experience count. ?

However, influencers also became savvier and more started using engagement farming and influencer pods to game the system and artificially inflate engagement on their posts. Or to be fair, those who wanted to get endorsements quick and make money fast without putting in the work, did.

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So, what are influencer pods and engagement farming?

It's a practice where influencers join groups or pods, consisting (usually) of up-and-coming influencers, to engage with each other's content in a reciprocal manner. Whenever one member of the pod publishes a post, they share it with the pod via messaging services like Instagram DMs or Whatsapp, and other members are expected to like and comment on the post in return, making it seem like they’re all one, big, friendly family.

If you were to dig a little deeper into their posts, click that oft-ignored tiny + sign that loads more comments, and scroll through all their comments, you would realize that of all their following, these same groups of "friends” with unusually high followings are often the most frequent commenters and have influencer/creator profiles themselves. And usually, their comments will be something generic and insincere like “I love this so much!” and “Cannot wait to try it myself” or “Booking it now!” with barely any substance that do not contribute to the conversation in any significant way. Because of course, they're all reading off the same playbook and there's only so many different ways to say "I like this, yay!" on 10 posts a day.

But why do they do this?

They do it because it’s a fantastic way to create the illusion of a highly engaged audience and also to try and trick the IG algorithm.

IG assigns a quality score and ranking to every post that is published on their platform. This score is based on a number of fairly ambiguous (to outsiders) factors or signals such as content format (photo/video), popularity of the post in particular and the author in general, relationship between author and viewer, viewer’s interests, relevancy to viewer, the viewer’s history of interacting with someone, to list a few.

When an individual or several individuals with higher following than the average user comment on a post, it gets included as a signal for the IG algorithm, helping it predict that this post might contain content that is potentially popular and make it pop up higher in followers’ feeds.

It also helps that this boosts their social currency and presents them as attractive potential partners for brands – making it seem like their content resonates with the audience when in reality it’s just being propped up by their pod members.

But if it’s showing up to more people and garnering engagement, what’s the problem?

There’s a couple of reasons this engagement is problematic.

First, if the audience of your influencer is just other influencers, how likely do you think they are to buy your product.

Second, IG has wised up too and started to penalize posts and creators it believes are part of these pods. Yes…they’re aware of them. And since these are the people who figured out how to keep you hooked to your phone so they could make ungodly amounts of money selling your behavioural data, you best believe they are smart enough to track these pods.

And last, but perhaps the most important, it doesn’t change the intrinsic value of the content. Sure, IG users may chance upon the post because it pops up and spend some time on it because they see other influencers engaging, but if the content itself isn’t compelling, they will at best drop a like and move on.

And when you’re trying to drive a certain action with your influencer campaign, a like is as facile as the thumbs up you give your cousin’s photo of their baby spitting up milk for the 100th time.

So, dig a little deeper. It might just make your marketing dollars go a little farther. Or at the very least, you will be supporting authentic creators who put in the work and not frauds.

Also, don’t just take my word for it! Here are articles from Klear and Grin on the subject that delve a little deeper and another one from Vice that features an interview with Olivia Yallop, an influencer herself.