Influencer or “influenzer”? Why brands and agencies need to be better at social media auditing

People in my social circles like to call influencers, “influenzers”. It’s a tongue-in-cheek and rather affectionate term to describe the bleak state of social media and influencer marketing today. The “influenzer” spans endless sponsored content, hyping products and events they get VIP passes to, but it feels… empty. They have the numbers, the “reach”, but the actual influence and impact is often felt as transactional, and more about optics than authenticity.

The global market size for influencer marketing is projected to reach $32.55 billion by 2025. However, as the world’s largest advertising channel, social media is overrun by “influenzers”, influencers that are more like the influenza, spreading content that doesn’t feel fun nor interesting to watch anymore. The sad reality is that brands and agencies, more often than not, are enabling this. We’re letting quantity trump quality, and that’s pretty much why social media auditing should be much more scrutinised than what we do now.

If you’re a marketer, an agency professional, or a business owner, you might want to pause and wonder if these campaigns actually bring real impact, or are they doomscrolled past instead?

Let’s go back in time to roughly a decade ago. Picking an influencer was a simpler process. Like how size matters (allegedly, don’t quote me), the bigger the following, the better. Then, brands got wiser and more curious, and started looking at likes, comments, shares, and saves. Audience interaction became the gold standard, and engagement rates were the highly sought after metric. However, throughout the years, the problem that brands and agencies had was verifying the legitimacy of those numbers.

A friend who worked with an influencer agency shared that fake followers and bots liking and commenting can inflate these metrics, which makes engagement not equal to influence. Now in 2025, we’re focusing more on community management. Brands and agencies are focused on who’s actually listening, engaging, and creating dialogue. It mirrors the shifting preferences of social media users – where authenticity is highly sought after in a social era dominated by commercialism.

Falling into the optics trap: Timelines, budgets, and lazy selection

Here’s the reality for brands and agencies. Timelines are tight, budgets are finite, and the pressure to deliver immediate results is intense. When marketers juggle between multiple campaigns and agencies handle different clients, it’s tempting to go for influencers who’re “available”, have impressive following and/or engagement rates, or seem easiest to work with. This could lead to influencers with little to no genuine connection to the overall brand, product, or event.

Ben WHOA’s F1 Singapore Grand Prix reel was probably the most recent example that came across my feed that mirrors this sentiment. Certain influencers were given exclusive pit-lane access, VIP passes or close-up experiences, but if you were to scan their feed in the past year, it reveals little knowledge or relevance that can tie the influencer to F1. It was definitely flashy, and tapped into the greater Singapore Grand Prix experience around the motorsport, but did the campaign resonate with the right audience? (Valid crashout, in my opinion.)

Unfortunately, this phenomenon isn’t new. It’s intensified by a focus on short-term wins. Tight timelines and pressure for impressive results often mean that numbers, not relevance, drive decisions. That’s why for brands and agencies, campaigns can chase vanity metrics, but the qualitative impact on the stakeholder that truly matters – the audience – falls flat.

Also read: PR in the age of TikTok: How to balance between social media trends and your brand voice

Influencer fatigue, influenzer fever

I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels that my feed is just bombarded with ad breaks every few posts or stories. Social media users are overloaded with sponsored posts and ads from influencer campaigns, claiming that a certain product or service or event is the best. Within the same week, multiple posts shout that anything and everything can’t be missed. But as Syndrome from The Incredibles mentioned, “When everybody is Super, no one will be.” Essentially, if everything is the best, nothing is. There’s no difference. 

If an influencer’s feed is spammed with PR reviews and sponsored posts, chances are that your collaboration post with them won’t stand out either. It’s easy for the audience to tune out due to influencer fatigue. Users are much more likely to hold more skepticism on an influencer’s review content, because it feels more transactional. Instead of honest reviews, it comes across as content for the sake of paying the bills.

I believe that no social media analytics tool can fully tell you whether an influencer is the right pick for your campaign. Undeniably, they supply you with information on following, engagement rates, reach, demographics, etc. BUT they can’t reveal alignment, values, or the authenticity of their content. It’s one of the few reasons I feel confident that PR and marketing professionals still bring value, because the human touch is still unparalleled in connecting with audiences.

A thorough social media audit requires manually scrolling through posts, stories, reels, and even tagged content if relevant. Assuming that we’ve already done the due diligence of filtering for influencers that fit the same genre of our client (i.e., beauty, car & automobiles, fitness, food & beverage, etc.), here’re the few things I ask myself:

• First glances at their profile: Does the influencer’s feed style, and tone in their posts match my client’s and the campaign’s?
• A closer look at their following: Looking at their following list, do these accounts actually comprise real life people? Or do they appear like bot accounts?
• Signs of manufactured engagement: From their most recent posts, are the comments genuine, or built on engagement pods? If their most recent post came out a few hours or minutes ago, is there a significant number of comments that were posted immediately or very shortly after it went live?
• Collaborative behaviours: What brands have they worked with before? How often do they post sponsored content? Are there any previous partnerships that could be in conflict with my client’s brand?

I definitely agree that this detail of social media auditing takes a lot more time, which could be overwhelming if marketers or agency professionals are under pressure to turn around a list of potential influencers to collaborate with in hours. However, the attention to detail separates brands that are discerning about working with influencers that drive business impact, from those who are looking for quick ROI from “influenzer” collaborations.

It’s up to us to keep influencer marketing in check

If there’s anything I have learnt watching this online, social space, it’s that influencer marketing is here to stay, and is unlikely to ever die. However, its effects are shifting how we – the user – are consuming and reacting to this type of content. As brands and agencies, we have the power to engage who we deem suitable and ideal. If our audiences are viewing collaborative content with skepticism and criticism, it’s time for us to rethink the process in our influencer marketing campaigns. Are we engaging the right influencers? Or are we neglecting the internal process leading up to that selection? Or are we unsure of the goal of the campaign in the first place?

In Singapore, we have always been a little more numbers-focused (and transactional), but I think it’s time for us to focus on rallying brands and agencies to be more intentional. Throwing money and expecting trust and link clicks – not the way to go. The brands that will win are the ones who understand their audience deeply and work with influencers, not “influenzers”, who align with them genuinely.

It’s not about killing influencer marketing, it’s about making it mean something again. That’s what we’re helping brands do at SYNC PR. If we’re going to keep playing the influencer game, we might as well play it smart. If you’re on board to run influencer campaigns that deliver value and impact, we’ll take you further. Drop us an email at hello(a)syncpr.co today.