Ep3 Stop the FAKE
Stop the FAKE - The ugly world of vanity awards, vanity influencers & paid magazine features
Welcome to The Belinda Esterhammer Show! This is a podcast about the art of winging it - whether it’s business, marketing, startups or life… well sort of.
I recently received an email from a Lifestyle magazine inviting me to be on the cover of their July issue featuring Business Women. After being in this industry for a while I know the drill and am sceptical about everything that sounds too good and when no catch is mentioned. I thanked them for their interest and asked for details. Obviously the reply came swiftly and SURPRISE there was a catch that she conveniently forgot to mention - for the sweet price of USD1000 they would feature me. They have to charge because it’s a free magazine, they have to pay their staff,... This is not a dig at free magazines whether they're online or print. I get it, you have to pay your bills and your staff. But think about the credibility you take away from people you feature when you don't disclose that they've paid to be featured thus making it seem like they are in there because they are so amazing and not because they are so accomplished.
My reply to the lady that invited me?
VOGUE Hong Kong, May 2020
Thanks for your interest in featuring me BUT I am not paying to be featured in any magazine – I am featured as an industry disrupter in VOGUE Hong Kong's May 2020 Issue and obviously didn’t have to pay.
I really don't like humble bragging and this has been my first share on socials that I am in VOGUE this month - but in this case scratch the humble and I happily throw VOGUE right into your face.
Important side note 😉I know the illustration of me in VOGUE doesn’t look like me but because of the state of the world they decided to go ahead with illustrations of all disruptors instead of a scheduled photoshoot.
Back to that lifestyle magazine - my issue with this whole situation of having to pay to be featured in a magazine is that it creates a false picture to everyone on the outside. Imagine how it looks to those who know about this magazine and that they charge to feature you. Those people probably would lose their respect for you. People who don't know this magazine and their practices assume that I earned my award by being an awesome businesswoman. But this magazine also didn't reach my target audience in any way so a random expat mom would have probably flickered through the issue and then used it for one of their children's craft projects.
Why do I care that it creates a false picture to people on the outside who would just assume that I am great and isn't that the whole point? Because I know deep down that I didn't earn it because I had to pay for it, and it basically was an undisclosed advertisement. But furthermore, one of my core values is integrity. I suffer constantly from imposter syndrome - where I doubt my accomplishments and there's this internalised fear of being exposed as a "fraud" even though there's nothing that I can be exposed for... And being featured in VOGUE is a massive honour and honestly speaking also gave me massive imposter feelings - I will dedicate an episode to imposter syndrome in the future as it's something so many people I know go through - I'd dare to say most entrepreneurs and successful people. And it's no wonder so many of us suffer from imposter syndrome and the fear of not doing or being enough.
At the beginning of my startup journey imposter syndrome kicked in when I saw people within my industry who were seemingly doing so well on social media and I doubted my own accomplishments. It took a while to really realize that social media is just a glimpse of someone's life and also that you can pretend to be anyone you want on socials.
I know people measure success in many ways and often it's tied to being publicly recognized. I get it. And it's completely fine to share your accomplishments - if you haven't paid for them.
Do not FAKE it til you make it
Speaking of paying for accomplishments and social media I quickly want to touch on faking it on social media and our influencer culture. Let's be more precise and talk about micro-influencers which are influencers with an online following between 1,000 to 100,000. I can confidently tell you within 30 seconds of scrolling through an instagram or Facebook company profile whether they bought followers and engagement or not. I will mainly discuss instragram in this article but you can buy followers for all social media platforms - whether it's instagram, twitter, linkedin and even TikTok. These fake metrics are also referred to as vanity metrics in the industry.
How does this work and Belinda, why do you know so much about it?
I used to play around with engagements and buying followers on my travel instagram which has been retired. I lost the inspiration to keep on posting travel pictures as instagram travel pictures all started to look the same. And what I'm mentioning now only applies to my travel instagram and not my official instagram which is under my name - never applied any of these tactics I am mentioning to that profile. Back in 2015 I wanted to expand my digital marketing skills and I became curious about the world of growing instagram not just organically but also through paid followers and engagement. I started to play around with it for around 2 years and half-heartedly kept my account until I eventually grew tired of curating insta-worthy pictures and I honestly stopped enjoying it and it became more a like-count. And yes, you can not only buy following but likes for each picture and spread the likes and followers over several hours. I also played around with engagement bots that would comment, like and follow on your behalf. Seriously, I learnt a lot about social media and many sneaky tricks.
I want to highlight that I always had this travel account just for fun, I never advertised any products or got paid or reimbursed for any of my posts - I occasionally received the odd "promote our product" message but I never replied.
At one point I decided to start with a blank slate and created my personal instagram handle which you can find under my name. No bought followers, likes or engagement just me sharing snippets of my professional life. And whenever I do talks around personal branding and social media I always tell people to not buy followers.
So how can you spot if someone paid for their followers?
Generally speaking instagram has higher engagement rates than other social networks. Facebook & Twitter have an engagement of around 0.5% – 1.0% while instagram has around 3%-6% engagement.
The quickest way to spot fake followers is to look at the follower and engagement ratio.
There are free websites where you can check the engagement rate and also the historic followers. If you want to do it yourself it’s a quick calculation and there are many different formulas you can find on google. Below is the formula I use.
How to calculate instagram engagement per post
Say you have a following of 10,000. To calculate your engagement you combine your likes and comments per post, and divide by your following. Head over to your profile and write down the number of comments and number of likes of that post. Let’s assume you had 468 likes and 15 comments on your latest post.
468 + 15 = 483
Next up you divide this number you just calculated (483) by your total followers.
483 / 10,000 = 0.0483
Then use this number and time it by 100 so you can calculate the percentage.
0.0483 x 100 = 4.83%
Your total engagement rate for this post is 4.83% which is exactly how a post should perform on instagram.
Let’s continue the example with 10,000 followers and let’s assume you don’t want to calculate or don’t trust the metrics. Check the lastest 5 posts for likes and comments - do you see any pattern? Are the same people commenting? What's the quality of the comments? Also are the likes really similar? If for example someone constantly gets around - I made this number up say - 750 likes take or leave you should assume something is off as they probably bought around 500 likes and the rest are real likes. Also scroll back further in time and check engagement for older posts (1 month to 6 months away) this will also help you to determine and analyse the growth of the account. Also be aware that even video views can be bought.
One of my favourite tools to check if people bought followers is socialblade.com where you can get valuable insights even with their free version. Many people who bought their followers are losing followers monthly and on Socialblade you can see that real quick. You can see spikes in the historical data where all of the sudden these profiles received many followers in a short time.
You'd be surprised how many people within your network who are considered as micro-influencers actually paid for their following at one point - run them through Socialblade or any other website that offers these kinds of services and see for yourself.
Sometimes it gets more tricky to determine whether the profile is organic or not and that's when they not only have a decent following but also also engagement in the form of likes or comments. But as you learnt by now those can be bought too. Or that's also when people turn to pods - a pod is a private group chat of about 15-20 people who are in a similar industry as your own. Pods' rules vary depending on the organizer, but essentially, whenever a user posts something new, they share that post in the direct message, and everyone in the group is required to like and comment. So basically if I would use a pod I would post a picture on my insta, then share the post in the private pod group and everyone in the group heads to my profile and likes the image and leaves a comment. If someone else posts a picture I am obligated to do the same - like and comment. Often also you see these micro-influencers ending their post with a question at the end and by the quality of the comments you can easily spy the bots and pods...
There are many other ways how people actually drive fake engagement, if you're interested to learn more about this, let me know in the comments!
I want to highlight that this is not a dig at anything specific in my network, haha there would be too many. I am not pointing my finger at anyone! I just want to show people who have no clue about this practice that they should not always believe everything they see. And also I hope brands will be more cautious with who they work with as many brands actually often naively believe what they see and don't check the actual metrics.
Also buying fake engagement and followers can hurt your brand. Since 2018, Instagram started to crack down on practices that are against their terms of service. That includes fraudulent third-party apps, fake followers, and bots.
Moreover, fake followers and vanity influencers cost brands $1.3 billion in 2019. This resulted in a growing number of auditing and vetting software (just like Socialblade).
I know that there's this belief that you must have a certain number of followers to be taken seriously—especially as you get your brand up and running. But these vanity metrics are all about appearances and that’s it.
From fake followers to another fake - fake awards. You heard right.
When I received the invitation to be featured in this lifestyle magazine and saw the price tag attached to it - I started to think about the wider issues. I got similar invitations in the past about receiving an award as best - you name it - entrepreneur, agency etc. BUT here's the catch - you have to pay for it.
And this reminds me of seeing social media posts of people in my industry announcing:
“LOOK AT ME. I just won an award!”
You paid for your award – and there's a name for it - it's a vanity award.
According to wikipedia
“A vanity award is an award in which the recipient purchases the award and/or marketing services to give the false appearance of a legitimate honor.”
We’ve all seen brands and individuals boast on social media that they won an award as top, most recognized or best company, consultant or leader of the year within their industry. Usually when they mention awards you’ve never heard of chances are high that the company who is giving them out are unknown in the industry either…
So how did they receive an award?
Let me introduce you to a little practice that’s gaining popularity all across the globe.
It starts with an email:
“Your company was selected as a winner this year for the biggest business award in Hong Kong attended by top CEOs and executive directors from multinationals and listed companies globally.”
I immediately saw the catch:
“…all award-winning companies subsidies a small token of contribution of 4500USD as the entire project’s production and publicity initiatives are being outsourced to third-party services.”
The email goes on about other “benefits” this person would receive such as a crystal trophy, and so on. You read it right – they wanted 4,500USD for an award that nobody had ever heard of and I've never applied for.
I didn’t reply, but they found other people who were willing to pay and those companies received their awards as being the “most respected business in Hong Kong” within their sector…
Here's the question - do you think that if you have to pay for an award, you really won it?
And here's my unsolicited advice: instead of paying for an award use that money to learn a new skill and motivate your team
And if you really want to win an award - keep up the good work, look for the respectable ones and their criteria’s and work towards them!
To clarify here: I have deep respect for people who are legitimate award winners and “earned” their award through their work, but not through their financial contribution to the awards company. If a company ever expects you to pay, chances are 99.99999% that it’s not a legitimate award.
So this was today's episode on STOP THE FAKE. I hope you enjoyed it and if you have any comments or requests for future episodes leave me a comment!
Join me every Friday where I will share my thoughts, tips, hacks and generally anything you can imagine around life, business, marketing and my world and how to wing life. You can listen, find, download, share and worship this podcast anywhere you can find podcasts and if you feel the urge to get in touch with me drop me a message!
And in case you wondered why this podcast is about the art of winging it, it’s because I’m winging right now.