Instagram and influencers: numerous fraudsters among French speakers

On Instagram, there are almost 80,000 French-speaking influences listed in the hype Auditor study panel. If all are French-speaking, some do not necessarily live in France. These influences unanimously have an Instagram account.

After having divided them into different categories, according to their popularity, their preferred field, but also their age and their gender, hype Auditor has developed an algorithm to identify the practices of French-speaking influences and better understand certain aspects of their Instagram account. So between engagement rate, fake influence and consequences for brands that trust them: influence on Instagram does not always correspond to what we see when opening the application. It is in this sense, and to reduce the pressure imposed by competition on the social network, that Instagram began to test a version without like.

State of the French influence on Instagram

hype Auditor is an analysis tool dedicated to Instagram and YouTube. It uses an algorithm that is useful for it to better understand the audience of the content creator. This tool can be used by brands or advertisers to make the best possible investment (understand here that the brand will collaborate with the influence who will be able to give it maximum visibility and whose public will be most likely to switch to the purchase). This tool can analyze the practices of influences, detect false accounts among subscribers and also determine the commitment of people on their accounts.

Breakdown of influences by the audience

Specifically, hype Auditor lets us know that there are currently around 294 mega-influences (accounts that have more than a million subscribers), but also 1,986 macro-influence's, those who have more than 100,000 subscribers but less than a million. Then come to the middle-level influences, they are almost 10,000. We then go to more than 35,000 micro-influences, so people who have between 5 and 20,000 subscribers and finally, Nano-influences, they have more than 1 000 subscribers, but less than 5000, and since there are more than almost 32 000, they constitute, along with micro-influences, the most numerous influences of the Francophone community.

Distribution of influences by categories

Among the categories most represented by influences, we find the lifestyle category. This category concerns almost 40% of French-speaking influences. Next, comes the beauty and fashion category, then that of sport. Thanks to the analysis, we spot that on Instagram, accounts dedicated to books and literature are among the least popular (even though this category is the flagship on YouTube, just take a look at Book Tubers).

Breakdown of the audience by genre

Finally, the last important point observed by hype Auditor is the behavior of the audience on the social network. We note here, the proportion of men and women who constitute the audience of each category. And surprise, if we imagine that women were the most numerous to follow the fashion and beauty category, men are slightly more numerous and wins at 50.6% against 49.4%. Women are the most followers of the lifestyle and represent 57.05% of the audience. The category where the difference between men and women is most marked is the “motorcycle and cars” category, men represent no less than 81.72% of the category's audience.

Now that we know more about influences and their audience, as well as how Hype Auditor works to perform its analysis, it's time to focus on influencing fraud, a phenomenon that would not be so rare on the social network. which now belongs to Facebook.

Fake influence is common on the social network

The fake influence on Instagram is no longer rare, and all the more denounced already on several occasions. These frauds do not concern all of the influences, but all the same almost 40% of them. There are different types of fraud on the social network that increase the number of account subscribers and the engagement rate.

5 types of fraud:

First, there are subscriber buyers. The principle is simple, people wishing to obtain several thousand subscribers in just a few hours do not hesitate to pay between a few euros and several hundred to sometimes gain thousands of subscribers. However, the problem with this fake influence is that the engagement of the audience is not good: certainly, during a given period, you can choose to have additional likes every day on your publications, but as soon as you stop paying, no more daily likes and the number of subscribers may also drop, as ghost accounts are deleted by Instagram.

Then there is the old “follow-follow” technique, it is perhaps the simplest of all: it does not take too long and does not cost money. The technique itself is to follow many, if not many, people at once, wait for those people to follow you back, and then follow them.

It is also possible to buy Instagram likes Canada. As stated above, when we discussed purchasing subscribers, we can acquire likes, but also comments. These once purchased are simple to notice: they consist of basic words like "Fantastic", "cool", "wow", they can also simply take the form of emoji or just mention another account.

It is also possible to buy story views. And to get 100,000 views, it could easily cost you up to € 500 depending on the site. These purchases make it possible to increase the overall views on an account and also to develop Instagram statistics and then to demonstrate a commitment to brands during partnerships for example.

And finally, there is what HypaAuditor calls “Comment Pods”. We could, in French, define them as "comment groups". The principle is rather simple: between 10 and 20 Instagram users form a group, usually a conversation via Whats App, and they must comment on each of the posts of the other members of the group. This is to make the Instagram algorithm believe that the publication is popular. This practice can very easily take an enormous amount of time.