Thursday evening I opened up my feed reader to browse the world wide web looking for the latest updates from the various blogs and websites I subscribe to. It’s always good to catch up on what’s happening in the industry. 
Once I read the blogs and websites I know and trust, I have a folder of feeds that are essentially Google Alerts for certain topics I want to keep a finger on the pulse of so I can see the information about that topic from sites I may not know or subscribe to. One of the topics in that folder is influencer marketing.
So there I am, scrolling through the headlines looking for an interesting article to read and I see one that catches my eye. It reads, “Why top influencers are buying Instagram followers.” It was from a site called TechBullion.com and written by a person named Kristel Staci.
I thought to myself, “Well I sure do want to know the reasons.” Buying followers, after all, is one of the most pronounced black eyes on our industry. That fraudulent practice alone is amplified enough that it discourages many brands from investing in influence marketing at all.
So I start to read. And I get uncomfortable. And then I see that the entire article is not telling me why top influencers buy Instagram followers. It’s recommending the practice to others. 
I’ll rant my way through the near stroke I had reading the article in today’s commentary. 
Today's episode is presented by TrendHERO. It’s a new but advanced influencer marketing software platform specific to Instagram. So, for those of you who focus all your influencer energies on that platform, TrendHERO can help you search and discover Instagrammers based on a wide range of filters, from nano influencers, all the way to celebrities. There are over 90 million profiles in their database. 
The feature I like most about TrendHERO is a big fat yellow highlighter to the topic of today’s commentary. It has advanced fake followers check. So you can detect if an influencer followed the advice in the article I’m about to rip apart in today’s episode. 
TrendHERO also has an algorithm that tells you the chances a given posts’s comments are real or fake. So if you’re in a vertical that might be susceptible to comment pods and fake followers … a vertical that might consider this article I’m about to talk about as reliable information, TrendHERO can help you suss out which Instagrammers are worth it and which aren’t.
TrendHERO also has a nice database of sponsored posts so you can quickly see how an Instagrammers content performs when they have to disclose a paid relationship. Or you can use two clicks to search for similar influencers and identify good targets quickly.
The great thing about TrendHERO is they’re giving you a 14-day free trial just for listening to Winfluence! And if you decide you want to use the platform after that, the lite plan is just $15.99 per month. 
Sign up for that free trial now at trendhero.io/falls.

The full script of today's episode is posted on the show notes page at http://jason.online/buyingfollowers
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