You may think you know your influencers, but did you know that many of them are living double lives?

More recently, we've begun to see a trend across influencer profiles as we dig in to look at who to hire. They're showing two different faces - one to the brands and one to their fans. And this has potential to become a huge problem since you're associating your brand with this influencer.

For example, we've seen influencers with perfectly curated feeds on Instagram of wonderful photos, but if you spend time in their stories, they're often displaying very different types of content and using a different tone. Some often use profanity, or use the platform to express personal opinions on political or controversial topics - things that brands wouldn't necessarily want to be associated with. This is exactly why you need to make sure you're hand checking your influencers and spending time on their social channels -not only in the curated feeds where they expect you to look, but in the more disposable content, such as stories.

We're also seeing influencers spending more and more time in areas that they own and have more control of, such as influencer newsletters that they send out. This is another area that influencers could be displaying a very different persona than that within their social feeds. And because they have more control of this content, we expect in the near future that influencers may begin to start offering paid sponsorship's or ad space within this content as well.

That said, it's important that you not just rely on algorithms and not just rely on quick looks at your influencer's feeds to see if an influencer is right to represent your brand. More and more, as there's a separation between feeds and stories, and it's important that you spend time looking at all the assets an influencer has to offer.

For more information about vetting the right influencers for your brand, check out our ABC's of influencer selection, or contact us for access to our database of over 55,000 influencers.