Vetting the influencers
After building your influencer list, don’t start your outreach instantly. I recommend going through an extensive vetting process. This is because the last thing you want your campaigns to reach is fake followers.
During the vetting process, you should look at metrics like:
- Engagement rate – This number denotes the level of engagement generated from a piece of content. You can calculate this at a post level or an account level. For example, the average engagement rate on Instagram is 0.98% (Sprout Social).
- Engagement quality – This is the percentage of real/active followers among the total engaged followers. While finding this manually is difficult, multiple tools can help you find the engagement quality for a certain account.
- Growth rate – This shows the number of subscribers added by an influencer in a certain period of time. Social Blade, for example, shows the growth rate for an influencer both daily and monthly.
A lot of the tools we’ve covered above can easily help you find the above metrics. However, you can also find these metrics manually by going through the profiles. Sometimes, just a glance is enough to differentiate an authentic influencer from a fake one.
Also, remember the niche also has an impact on the engagement rate and growth. Hence, compare influencers and their engagement rate/quality only within the same niche.
Before reaching out to influencers, you should also look at the sponsorships they’ve done before and if your brand values align with theirs. If they don’t, you’re better off not collaborating with those influencers.
In a digital world, everything you publish online is reflective of your brand. One small mistake is enough to create outrage and tarnish your brand. This holds true for whom you collaborate with too. Hence, it’s important to take enough time to analyze influencers before collaborating with them.
Final thoughts
If you want to run successful influencer marketing campaigns, you need to look beyond relevancy and follower count.
Even when you have the budget to collaborate with a mega influencer, you can get a better result by collaborating with multiple micro influencers.
Hope our guide helps you find the right influencers and that it answered a few questions you had before reading this article.
Got more questions? Ping me on Twitter.
