In April, I wrote about the possibility that AI influencers will supplant flesh and blood influencers. My colleague Mike Boland and I also discussed this possibility on a podcast episode later that month.
In that article and episode, I noted the relatively small number of Instagram accounts with 100,000 or more followers. And if you want to land collabs with brands, 100K is barely table stakes.
Influencers have to have people to influence. Followers are the coin of the realm.
So I wasn’t surprised that brands are calling BS on a predictable trend. The trend is influencers using bot accounts to (artificially) pump up their metrics.
This came to my attention via an article today in the Indian business publication Mint that cited some eye-opening findings from the influencer marketing tech platform KlugKlug. The platform conducted an audit of influencer accounts and found that “only 2.48 million influencer profiles out of 8 million audited by them exhibited credible and high-quality followers. The followers of the rest of the profiles consisted of around 60% bots.”
According to Mint, this state of affairs is leading to a “rethink” among brands that have been working with influencers and haven’t been blown away lately by the ROI.
Eroding ROI
Mint quoted a brand founder saying that they were concerned about the presence of bots. The founder noted that followers are how they determine the commercial value of an influencer deal. And if bots are boosting follower numbers this way, the risk of hiring influencers goes up.
Still, we do not expect influencers to shy away from using AI.
We learned recently, for example, that Meta will “enable creators on Instagram to build AI versions of themselves that can interact with fans via DM.”
According to Social Media Today, “Meta’s custom AI bots, currently in beta, and in limited testing with selected creators, will be able to answer questions in the style of that account.”
Ok, Let’s say you represent a brand. And you want to collab with an influencer. Your first interaction with them might actually be with a bot. These days that’s hardly a surprise.
