Influencer Scandals and How to Avoid Them

As influencers become an increasingly popular way for brands to market themselves and their products, it’s not surprising that we’re seeing more influencer scandals than ever before. Whether it is Instagrammers buying fake followers to boost their online presence or vloggers being publicly shamed for requesting a free stay from a hotel, it seems like a lot of influencers are popping up in the headlines for all the wrong reasons at the moment.

It’s important to protect your image as an influencer. Scandals can be damaging, potentially making you unappealing to brands you otherwise might have collaborated with. Thankfully, we’ve got your back. Avoiding these sorts of situations is a mostly straightforward process and if you follow our suggestions you’ll probably never have to worry about them.

Be Responsible

Our first tip to avoiding scandals as an influencer is to make sensible decisions. Don’t do anything that would shock or disappoint you if you discovered another influencer was doing it, such as making use of risky and morally questionable promotion tactics. Good examples of this are the aforementioned fake followers’ scandal and plagarising the work of others rather than creating fresh content. It’s never worse risking your reputation for a quick boost.

A large part of the appeal of influencers from the perspective of brands is their genuine, down-to-earth nature. An influencer sponsor is arguably a lot more relatable to audiences than a celebrity one because of this. Being involved in a scandal is likely to have a detrimental effect on how brands and your followers perceive you, so it’s never worth doing anything that compromises your personal morals or values.

Always Be Professional

Maintaining a good level of professionality when working as an influencer is another great way to keep your image in check. That doesn’t mean you have to be super serious all the time – just consider how certain actions may be perceived by your followers or brands.

Influencing is a business and so it’s at times important to treat it like one. Simple things like adopting a polite and professional tone when contacting brands and completing work on time when you commit to it go a long way. Several influencers have received bad publicity in the past for not acting professionally, for example, not posting sponsored content they have been paid for, and it’s never a good look.

Collaborate With Trustworthy Brands

It’s always a good idea to research a brand thoroughly before you commit to collaborating with them. As we touched on in a previous blog post, associating your name with untrustworthy brands can be damaging to your reputation. It can cause you to lose followers as well as make collaborating with you less appealing to other brands. Every time you choose to collaborate with a brand that has a bad reputation, you’re risking a scandal.

Before you commit to collaborating with a brand make sure you give yourself plenty of time to think it over. Are you interested in them and what they do? What are their values and messages? Do they match yours? Promoting something you don’t believe to your followers can shake their trust in you, so there’s no reason to accept every collaboration offer that comes your way.

This Is Where We Come In…

By signing up with us at CollectivEdge, we can help protect you against these potential pitfalls as well as other ones. We connect influencers with brands that are looking to collaborate and ensure each of them gets their perfect match. As we consider both what the influencer and the brand are looking for in a collaboration, we make sure there are no communication errors, helping you avoid scandals or bad publicity.

We only deal with trustworthy brands, meaning that you don’t have to worry about checking whether a business is safe to work with before you collaborate with them. We just make the whole collaboration process a lot easier.

Be sure to give us a buzz if you’re looking for collaborators that you can trust. Signing up is free, so there’s no reason not to give us a go.