When you’re looking to run your own influencer marketing campaign, a massive variable in the success of the campaign is the creators you work with. You need to ensure you’re partnering with the right creators to represent your brand. We wanted to look at three key metrics to look at when you’re partnering with creators for your next campaign. You can use SocialRank to track all of these metrics.
Fake Followers
Believe it or not, every single follower someone has is not a real person. Almost every single user on Instagram has fake followers and the bigger a creator gets the more fake followers they will have.
There are two sides to fake followers and you need to be more cognisant of one than the other when reaching out to creators.
One type of fake follower is a bot that someone has set up to engage and follow accounts to try and get the attention of Instagram users — usually used to generate awareness for a real account or online store.
The other type is fake followers that people can purchase to make it look like they have influence. In some cases, these followers can be purchased by the thousands! These types of accounts with a lot of fake followers are ones you want to avoid.
On the surface it may look like they have a lot of followers but you’ll be paying to market your product to robots. With SocialRank you can look and see what percentage of someone’s account has fake followers.
Everyone will have fake followers so if they have a few don’t panic. We recommend partnering with creators with no more than 5% 10% fake followers and depending on the size of the influencer audience under 5% fake followers would be extremely low.
Follower Location
With SocialRank you can see the percentage breakdown of where someone’s followers are located in the world.
If you are marketing a product with a consumer base in North America, than you’ll want to make sure the creators you partner with don’t have most of their followers in England.
This metric is especially important for small, local businesses. People can often get caught up in the appeal of partnering with creators with massive followings. If you’re a business in Toronto, partnering with a creator with 100,000 followers might seem like a good idea. But if you look into their follower location and find that only 2% of their following is in Toronto then you’d be better off to partner with an account with 3,000 followers that 90% of their following is in Toronto.
Engagement Rate
During our monthly Navigating the Unknown Event, Goodlife Media and Communications Founder Farokh Sarmad was discussing what to look for in an influencer partnership and posed the following question:
“Are you really an influencer if you don’t have any influence?”
When doing influencer marketing, you’re paying to reach a new audience while having the message come from a person and creator that new audience trusts. You want to partner with someone who has a genuine connection with their audience. A great way to see what kind of impact a creator has within their community is by looking at their engagement rate.
If they are posting and nobody is engaging with their posts then you know that their audience doesn’t have a strong connection with them.The below chart that was included in a February 2019 Report by Influencer Marketing Hub and shows average engagement rate by profile size. We recommend using these numbers as a benchmark when looking at engagement rates. With the average engagement on Instagram decreasing since 2019, these previous averages make good engagement rates to aim for when vetting creators in 2020.
Get Started Today
By using these three metrics when vetting influencers using SocialRank you’ll be doing a better job of making sure that you and your company are partnering with creators who have an authentic audience and a genuine relationship with their followers.
