There is one obvious one: high follower numbers and even high engagement that aren't authentic or artificially inflated. Have someone familiar with communities poke around. Are those real people? Are they bots? Is it a lot of like farming? That's an instant red flag, anyone will tell you. That isn't the real red flag in my book. The real red flag is not responding to emails in a timely fashion. Not responding when promised. Not answering the questions asked. Sure, someone may have a legitimate, unusual emergency, but usually, I've found the emergency is chronically unorganized influencers who will routinely miss deadlines. A good way to tell if this isn't the norm is to check their socials and see if they are always complaining about a tsunami of bad luck. Then reach out to other brands they've worked with and ask about timeliness.
Biggest influencer red flag: they'll partner with anyone. If their niche is "available for brand deals," your partnership is going to feel like an ad... because it is. And their audience knows it. I learned this the expensive way early on: big follower count, clean content, "sure I love your product!" energy... and then the performance comes back like a wet napkin. The comments basically read, "here we go again." That's when it clicked: the currency isn't reach, it's trust and understanding of your product. Now instead of going for massive follower influencers, we just hit up influencers who have a few thousand followers but really get the product and our niche. How do we make sure they get it? We give them free access to memelord.com and make sure they spend time playing around with it. We want people who get our product 100%. This turns into 1000x better results than some random giant influencer with 1M followers. Influencers like Lukas Mullen and Carson Scott both have less than 20k followers but absolutely get our product 10000% and that's how we make it work. They're focused. They have a lane. That's the whole point. I'd rather have 10 micro-influencers who get my product than 1 massive influencer who will say anything for anyone.
I have learned that the biggest red flag in influencer marketing is fake engagement. If an account has 10,000 likes but zero meaningful comments, you are looking at a bot farm, not a community. I once partnered with a popular fitness influencer who had 50,000 followers to promote my foldable bikes. The reels got thousands of likes, but I didn't see a single sale or even a question about the product. When I analysed deeply, I found that 99% of the likes came from new accounts with stock photos. I lost $300 on that deal and realised later that 78% of their audience was fake. See how I tackle it now. I pass it if the engagement rate is below 1.5%. Then I manually check 50 comments and find the specific questions. The questions can be like "How long is the assembly?" I also avoid generic "Nice!" or emoji replies. I never commit to a big campaign without a small, $100 paid test post. That let me track actual story views and clicks over 14 days.
I have learned that the biggest red flag in influencer marketing is fake engagement. If an account has 10,000 likes but zero meaningful comments, you are looking at a bot farm, not a community. I once partnered with a popular fitness influencer who had 50,000 followers to promote my foldable bikes. The reels got thousands of likes, but I didn't see a single sale or even a question about the product. When I analysed deeply, I found that 99% of the likes came from new accounts with stock photos. I lost $300 on that deal and realised later that 78% of their audience was fake. See how I tackle it now. I pass it if the engagement rate is below 1.5%. Then I manually check 50 comments and find the specific questions. The questions can be like "How long is the assembly?" I also avoid generic "Nice!" or emoji replies. I never commit to a big campaign without a small, $100 paid test post. That let me track actual story views and clicks over 14 days.