Influencer Marketing in India

Influencer Marketing in India is on the rise, and for good reason: the right influencers can make or break a brand. It is no surprise that brands in India are joining in on the trend, but can they truly get the promised return on investment from their influencers?

The rising problem of Fake followers 

In India, there are over 30,000 India influencers (and counting!) in our instagram influencer database. By running our instagram influencer analytics, we acknowledged that there is a large number of influencers who have been using infamous ways to buy their Instagram followers. Do you know that a payment as little as ₹150 ($2.10) can earn you up to 1000 followers?

We all know that buying instagram followers is a bad idea. One of the reasons that influencer marketing works so well is the ability of influencers to create real impact over the purchasing behaviors of their fans. Once the audience itself is fake and can easily be purchased, little room for campaign effectiveness can remain.

How to tell if an influencer has bought followers?

One manual way to figure out if an influencer has purchased followers is by sifting through their followers. If you see something like the following then there is a high chance that the followers are paid for:

Similar account names, with stock imagery as profile pictures

As you can probably see, this process is highly manual and time-consuming. Luckily, at Affable, our machine learning algorithms do that for you! This is described in our previous post.

The good news

It’s not all gloom and doom. India has plenty of authentic, engaging influencers, and our advanced instagram influencer analytics can help you find them within a few minutes! Here is a food influencer that our search engine identified as having one of the highest engagement levels:

Sample analytics of @the_savage_lens on available on Affable

@the_savage_lens is a Pune based creator that takes gorgeous pictures of foods. Our analysis shows that he is one of the most engaging Indian influencers with an average engagement of 11%, which is several times higher than the 1.49% engagement of similar influencers. This, of course, is no mystery once you see how beautiful and well composed his posts are:

View this post on Instagram

This vadapav was ajajzbzbzbbzznnz….❣️ And I'm feeling ajsnsnznzn right now because a) I missed the deadlines for @platterjoy giveaway b) I'm not getting time to write a crazy good caption. So my dear dear sizzy, Nidhi, accept this entry of a Desi snack with a twist. The twist is that I made the Vada and everyone twisted after eating it because I misjudged the amount of spices. I know I'm awesome at cooking. No claps pls. 🙂 . Anywho, it's Wednesday… midweek and I've finally come home. My braveheart crossing 14 signals to go to office and another 14 to come back home. And typing this caption while waiting in between the ever growing traffic, pollution and population of Pune just to save a few minutes so that after coming home I can just post it ASAP because I gotta leave for work!🥂 . Ah! Wasn't I just back from one? Yeah, that was the one which pays my bills. This is the one which pays for my smiles. Yes, you might have guessed it right – Photography. I'm finally visiting a place I've always loved. Which place is that? Well.. keep checking the stories for details. 🐿️ . I'll roast you if you find typos 🦅

A post shared by Sameer | Food Photos (@the_savage_lens) on Dec 5, 2018 at 5:14am PST

Now the only question remains, how can you find influencers as engaging as this man to spread the word about your brand?

Find the right influencers with our instagram influencer analytics

At Affable, we have built cutting-edge machine learning algorithms to help brands detect fake followers and make the right decision based on reliable statistics. More than that, we are also an influencer campaign platform that helps brand measure the true reach other influencer marketing campaigns.

Sign up free today and search among 30,000+ Indian Instagram influencers here: