There are multiple steps a brand or agency can take to protect themselves from falling victim to influencer scams and ensure genuine audience engagement:

1. Audience Analytics: Use an influencer marketing platform, such as Flinque, to get accurate and detailed insights into the influencer’s audience demographics and engagement rates. Verify whether the influencer’s followers match your target audience. Pay attention to details like audience location, age, and interests.

2. Bots & Fake Followers Check: Be wary of influencers with unusually high follower counts but low engagement rates, which could indicate the presence of fake followers or bots. Platforms like Flinque give you the tools to determine the authenticity of an influencer’s followers.

3. Engagement Quality: Look beyond engagement rates. Scrutinize the quality of engagement the influencer receives — the comments and the conversations their posts inspire. Generic comments might be a red flag indicating inauthentic engagement.

4. Past Performance & Campaign History: Review the influencer’s previous campaigns, their success, and the kind of return on investment they generated. Platforms such as Flinque provide options to track an influencer’s past performance.

5. Contractual Agreements: Draft clear contractual agreements that set expectations for both parties. It should include details on deliverables, timelines, brand guidelines, payment terms, and other critical aspects of the campaign.

6. Brand-Influencers Alignments: Choose influencers who genuinely align with your brand values, style, and ethos. Authentic connections between the influencer and brand tend to generate higher genuine engagement levels.

Comparing different approaches and tools that influencer marketing platforms provide, like performance tracking, historical data access, engagement quality scores, etc., is imperative in identifying genuine influencers and avoiding scams. Always evaluate and adjust your strategy based on data, real-life use cases, and experiences.