Philip Beeching: Beauty Blogging's Dirty Little Secret

Last week I became a young, female beauty blogger (which is quite clever for a middle-aged man) - within a week I had 350,000 followers on my Pinterest account, 150,000 followers on my Instagram account and 185,000 Twitter followers. So what's the secret of my instant appeal? Well to be frank, I cheated. I set up a fake account, added a few images and then I went over to the dark side and paid for my followers at one of the many sites offering these types of nefarious services.

Not very nice is it? And there is so much pressure to gain followers it's not only beauty bloggers who are buying their followers, some disreputable beauty brands are doing it too. Now for the seasoned blogger, it's pretty easy to spot - huge number of followers gained virtually overnight and too little interaction relative to the amount of followers are two telltale signs. Also a closer examination of those followers will reveal they are far from the beauty blogger's typical target audience.

So I would encourage brands who have influencer marketing programmes to tread warily and remember the figure which cannot lie is website unique users from Google Analytics - after all that's the only platform a blogger actually owns!