The Influencer Effect
Influencers — they are individuals who produce content to share via social media to a large following. They are paid to do so, and this is a form of employment for many. Their level of followers and engagement determines their salary, which can be anything from $40,000 to per year to $10,000 per post.
How to Spot an Influencer
Generally, these individuals have a large number of followers. We’re not talking 500 people, but usually in the thousands, hundreds of thousands, and millions.
They usually use their social media account on a daily basis, in order to get as much engagement as possible. Therefore, an account having thousands of posts (with several comments) is also a clue.
In September 2017, it became a legal requirement for influencers to disclose that they are advertising a product using the hashtags #ad and #sponsored, which is another way to find out if someone is paid to promote. Australia followed suit in October 2020 and now have these regulations in place too. Recently, as seen below, the word ‘ad’ has been used, as opposed to a hashtag.
Investigating Influencers and its Challenges
Influencers are an OSINT dream. As maintaining high engagement is a top priority, their profiles are usually set to public. Not only are they posting daily, but usually this involves images in their home, videos around their neighbourhood, their friends, family and their activities. Depending on your objectives, finding information won’t be an issue. In fact, this presents a challenge for investigators due to the large amounts of information you are required to sift through. What’s key is sticking to your aims and ignoring anything irrelevant to your objectives.
As their aim is to be easily found, they will usually use popular hashtags, and also geotag locations — which creates less work needed in the geolocation department.
On top of this, they usually use the same username across platforms. A simple google search can assist with finding other profiles on different platforms; however, username search sites can also be used.
Engagement Platforms
These are platforms that manage the levels of engagement an influencer has, for marketing professionals to determine whether an influencer is the right fit for their brand/company. These can provide further insight into their business affiliations/partnerships, their engagement levels on various platforms, the average number of posts, and an analysis of their followers. It also provides a quick snapshot of who they are collaborating with currently, or previously.
Another key theme is looking for ‘bot’ followers, something “fake influencers” have, who don’t actually have much engagement. Some people use apps to generate fake following numbers, in order to falsely attain the influencer status in hopes of getting paid to produce content.
Hype Auditor is one platform, which is a paid service to analyse an influencers engagement online, example shown below.
This article has a list of 19 different influencer engagement platforms available.
Disinformation
Although the majority of this blog revolves around individuals advertising handbags and clothing, it can get a lot more sinister. There are influences who use their engagement for other purposes, such as spreading misinformation/disinformation, propaganda, and fake news.
Influencers are an early point of contact for extremist group recruiters, due to their large following. Recently, BBC have revealed YouTube influencers were offered money to spread misinformation regarding the COVID-19 vaccine. This shows the importance of influencers and their ability to persuade and influence public trajectory.
Influencers aren’t going away any anytime soon, and if you come across any in your investigations — be prepared to work with a lot of content.
Hope you enjoyed the article!
