Real influence or not?

The controversial issue of a young American woman with 2.5 million followers on Instagram who did not manage to sell even 40 T-shirts from a merchant, has evidenced throughout the digital community the large and fragile base on which the advertising market has grown in social networks, people with many followers, equal number of likes that do not manage to sell according to the number of fans they have. Something similar happened with 'influencers' last year in Spain were a categorical failure and customers admit to be saturated, so many offers made by influential people in the public. In addition to the multiple controversies in which they are involved by creating themselves false accounts to praise themselves or counteract the criticism they receive.

(Image created by me using Power point)

More than 15 million individuals work and dedicate their full time as influencers worldwide. The career of the 21st century, many said, Youtubers, influencers, Tiktokers. A business that generates and traffics more than 1,000 million dollars and that supposedly came to regenerate advertising. In many cases, some of them already highly publicized, the community they have is false and their audience is of low quality, because more than 50% of their followers are bots and everyone knows that they do not buy, do not go shopping, do not transform likes into physical money. The lie is easy and cheap to execute.

Internet is full of websites where you can buy followers in any social network to strengthen your influence, with 10 dollars you can get 8,000 new followers, with 50, 50,000. Getting 20,000 likes in the last publication can be worth about 15$ and gaining 200 comments a similar figure, for no one this is a secret and yet many businesses do not study the selected influencer and fall or succumb to the trap, even the influencer himself comes to believe his false influence. No one questions how many real users an influencer has or how much return an Instagram campaign has compared to a campaign on television, radio or a page in the press, i.e. the old sales methods.

Influencers must maintain credibility as their field is becoming more and more competitive, the publicity they generate and the profits they earn must be commensurate with the work they do, the threat is how real can an influencer be?