Mia Wilde is the picture perfect Instagram influencer.

The health and wellness influencer, who lives on the doorstep of one of Australia's most beautiful beaches, lives a life filled with acai bowls, activewear, bikini shots, #sponcon, and endless brunch dates.

But Mia Wilde's life isn't as perfect as it seems.

In fact, it isn't even real.

Watch when influencer Natalia Taylor faked Bali holiday in IKEA. Post continues after video.

For the past six months,SBSjournalist Calliste Weitenberg and producer Elise Potaka have been carefully crafting a fake influencer persona in an attempt to cash in on the multi-billion dollar influencer marketing industry.

In a four-part investigation on The Feed titledLike, Subscribe, Follow,the pair spent six months building "Mia's" Instagram account to 2,900 followers.

Speaking toMamamia,Weitenberg explained the experiment was largely inspired by the rapid rise of micro-influencers (social media users who have between 10,000 and 50,000 followers) and nano-influencers (users with less than 10,000 followers).

"If you go to your Instagram account and scroll through the types of content in your feed, it's more and more people like your best friend, your neighbour, or your personal trainer who's showing you stuff," she said.

"It's no longer just mega influencers who are spruiking products. It's the everyday Joe Blow next door who's also doing that."

At the beginning of the experiment, Weitenberg's goal was to build a solid following on Mia's profile in the hopes of attracting sponsored content.

But within weeks, it became clear that building an Instagram following from scratch would be no easy feat.

"For the last six months, I've had very little spare time," she said.

"When we started planning this project, we originally thought we could shoot a bunch of content in a couple of weeks, and then have a stash that we could upload over a period of time. But nowadays, these platforms are more immediate. The amount of content you need to create to keep a profile feeling real and authentic is just enormous."

In the end, a lot of Mia's "content" ended up coming from multiple sources. And Mia's followers were none the wiser.

"A lot of the content we've actually outsourced from friends and family. I'd just be messaging my mates, and they'd send me photos and videos of the beach," Weitenberg shared.

"To live Mia Wilde's life, you can't be working a full-time job. It's impossible. She's living at the beach, she's eating brunch all the time. It's not a sustainable lifestyle and certainly not one that I could fit into a normal day."

Once Mia's profile, @thatcoastalgirl, reached 2,000 followers, she was signed to a well-known social media agency.

But although being signed to an agency connected Mia to lots of brands, she didn't actually earn any money from those connections or brand deals.

"We very clearly set up a wellness and fitness niche [on Mia's account], so brands would approach us with their products," Weitenberg explained.

"We got free products; we got g strings; we got free food; we got coconut water. There would probably be around $1,000 worth of products that we've received, but no cold hard cash, unfortunately."