Davis: Creator engagement pods end up looking like fake engagement to agencies
Ryan Davis · Stanford Found More Brand Notes Made the Content Perform Worse · Jun 17, 2025 · at 10:30
Ryan Davis, co-founder of People First, explains why participating in creator engagement groups harms influencer credibility during agency vetting.
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“Another thing that people do that they think is helping, but ultimately is sort of engagement farming is they form these sort of collectives. So like, you know, me and you would be in a group with 48 other like business podcasters. And every time you publish the podcast, you would drop it and you'd be like, Hey, like this. And like that gets a lot of engagement, but what happens is engagement all from the same network and we can see that and it looks, it actually ends up looking like fake engagement, even if it's not. And so that, that, that kind of goes against what you're trying to do.”
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