When the majority of marketers say that influencer marketing works, it means you have no reason to ignore this powerful marketing strategy. Most of your competitors are doing it, and you’re losing the game if you’re not working with people who have significantly more followers than your uncle.
But before you can witness the amazing benefit of this form of brand promotion, you have to do the crucial step: choosing the right influencer.
How do you do that?
Do you just look at available influencers on social media? Do you reach out to those with the biggest follower count? Should you start right after having a little chit chat with a prospect? Well, not so fast.
Here are the key metrics that you need to consider:
1. Relevance
To be relevant, an influencer should have posted content that is related to yours or important to your brand. Relevance is the first thing that you should check before even approaching an influencer. If you’re just randomly messaging people on social media, you’re terribly wasting your resources.
However, assessing the relevance of multiple influencers at once is difficult, if not time-consuming. This is why this task is often done using influencer marketing tools, especially those that allow you to search for influencer content using keywords or hashtags.
Relevant influencers are people on Instagram or YouTube or Twitter who often use the same keywords on their posts as you do on yours. These matching keywords indicate that you are in the same niche, if not related niches, and their audience are people who pay attention to content related to your brand. Meaning, you can work with these people.
2. Type of audience
One of the first mistakes brands make is signing up influencers based solely on the number of their followers without taking into account whether they have the right audience. You need to work with content creators whose audience is of roughly similar demographics and has the same interests as your customers. You can work with a popular celebrity, but if your audiences don’t match, your campaign will not resonate well with their people.
3. Engagement
Ask any marketer how to find the right influencers for your brand, and they will say look at the engagement, a word thrown around to mean interactions with a post. On Instagram, engagement means likes, comments, and saves. The more likes, comments, and saves a post has, the higher its engagement.
It takes skill, art, and heart for a post to be well received by audiences, and influencers just have a knack for touching people in a way that compels them to interact with a post. This knack makes them quite effective in making a brand known to a large audience without making them sound like salesmen.
But when we’re talking about engagement rate, we’re talking about the number of likes, comments, and shares in relation to the number of followers.
Two different influencers can have the same number of interactions on a particular post, but have significantly different engagement rates. For example, a celebrity has a million subscribers on YouTube and her latest video has a thousand likes, while a regular YouTuber has the same number of likes but she only has 50,000 subscribers. The latter has a far greater engagement rate for her recent video.
Engagement rate matters because it tells us the percentage of active audience a content creator has. Remember that what matters is not the total number of followers, but the number of followers who are actively interacting with an influencer’s posts.
The thing is, it’s hard to calculate an influencer’s engagement rate when you factor in all posts and all variables. In virtually all cases, you need a platform like linkr to find content creators in your niche with the best engagement rates.
4. Branded engagement rate
Engagement is not the end of the story. What happens when an influencer with a high engagement rate in his posts suddenly uploads an Instagram photo of a wristwatch? Will his new upload have the same engagement as his old posts? If he uploads a picture of your product, that post will most likely have the same engagement as all his other branded content. So it’s important to know whether his branded posts suffer from a dramatic drop in engagement. It’s an indication that his audience isn’t particularly receptive to these kinds of posts or that maybe he doesn’t know how to feature a brand without sounding pushy.
5. Reach
Reach is the number of people who see your post regardless of whether they interact with your post or not. While it’s understandable that only a fraction of your followers will see your post, an extremely low reach in comparison to your follower count means your audience are no longer tuning in. Reach indicates an influencer’s effectiveness in grabbing the attention of his or her audience. However, a relatively low reach may indicate that a large portion of a person’s follower count is composed of inactive users or fake accounts.
6. Content quality and uniqueness
Examining the content of your potential partners on social media is as important as finding out whether they have high engagement or high quality followers. It’s not enough to see that they’re using keywords relevant to your brand. You have to assess their posts. Do they make good videos? Do they take well-composed images? Do they craft smart captions or descriptions? Do their posts sound authentic?
The quality of a person’s YouTube, Instagram, or Facebook content reflects their personality and communication style. It’s also the kind of content their audience expects, and that’s most likely how they will create your campaign. And if that’s okay with you, you can go ahead.
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But if you don’t think that’s how your brand should be represented, then look somewhere else.
Are you still wondering how to find social media influencers in your industry? With linkr, you don’t have to worry about all the technical aspects involved in choosing the right social media partners.
Are you ready to tap into our pool of vetted, quality influencers?
