Coinciding with the rumours and subsequent announcement of IGTV, we've received requests from our clients to figure a solution to identify the right instagram influencers. Apparently problem of fake instagram influencers was already quite extensive in an earlier post by Mediakix and the subsequent follow up post. Despite the number paid solutions the conflict of interest remains with hiring influencers where the influencer agencies/platforms are measured based on the numbers that are delivered by the influencers on their platforms. It's kind of like having a recruiter to assess the performance of a candidate that they have hired for you and using that as a measure of their own performance. The candidates will naturally be rated exceedingly well as it is a reflection of themselves.

During our quick research we've found that the data that they need is in fact public and readily available. We've listed 2 must use free tools that will help you find the right instagram influencers.

IGAudit.ioenables you to find out the relative percentage that the users of any instagrammer account is real. Created by Authentíque, Inc to bring more transparency to Instagram. Originally built by a former NASA Scientist/Facebook/Snapchat engineer, it examines a random sample of followers for any public user, and in ~15 seconds, estimates their real follower ratio using an internal classification algorithm.

In short you can check an instagrammer for follower authenticity easily. The service is NOT BY 8 Connect Consulting but we've found it very useful.

However we've found that this information insufficient and decided to extend the amount of public information with some simple analytics to create a historical database of engagement levels by the instagrammers.

IGcheck.com adds on to the good work of igaudit.io, we’ve decided to extend a free service to check for engagement levels and to monitor the growth of followers and engagement over time. IG check.com measures the details missed by igaudit.io. Based on public data you can forecast the likely engagement level you will get for your influencer with every post. The database currently tracks more than 100k Instagram Influencers and we are currently developing a data model on Google data studio that will help brands and agencies identify the right instagram micro influencers.

At the time of writing both services are provided completely free and we believe that with free and open data we can improve the reputation and reliability of the influencer eco-system.