Unilever shuns fake influencers on social media sites

Unilever, world's second biggest advertiser, made a clear statement on Monday to not work with influencers in digital media who buy fake followers. Unilever said it found that some of the influencers it was using were buying followers in some instances.

In 2017, Unilever accounted for 20.51% ($9.5 billion) of the total amount spent by world's top 5 advertising spenders.

In the current digital age, brands are increasingly spending on digital media channels such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter etc. to increase their reach and frequency of advertisements. An influencer is a person with a large following who has the social clout to affect opinions and decisions. Social influencers use that to earn money by advertising products on social networking sites.

The fee that influencers demand is based on their follower count, which in turn can be increased by purchasing. Many a times these followers are fake. Bots are easily used to make it look as if more and more people are viewing the influencer's posts. In fact, fake Instagram influencers costs advertisers close to $100 million every year.

According to mediakix, influencer marketing spending has been on a consistent rise since 2015 and is expected to reach $7.5 billion on an average by 2020.

Instagram was the clear choice last year as 99.3% of the influencers who were surveyed preferred the photo and video-sharing platform. Out of the respondents, 70.2% used Facebook, and 37.6% used YouTube to promote products, according to a research conducted by hashoff.

Comparison of different social media platforms across 2016, 2017 and 2018 showed that Instagram is the most popular marketing tool and would be maintaining its top spot throughout 2018, followed by YouTube which is gradually gaining popularity amongst influencers.

75.6% of the influencers chose Instagram as it had the best tools for creators followed by YouTube with 13.7% and Facebook with 7.1%.