As influencer content is more popular than brand advertising, choosing the right influencers is a significant milestone in achieving your goals. Advertising with influencers can open up new target markets, raise brand recognition, and drive sales. Businesses have to keep up with constant shifts in consumer behaviors and new trends and what consumers want is trustworthy reviews from experts on brands and products. Influencers can take word-of-mouth marketing to the next level and generate buzz around your brand if chosen cautiously.
It goes without saying how substantial it is to check creators’ performance and audience metrics before contacting them. And this is where influencer analytics comes into the picture. It enables brands to examine crucial influencer metrics and make decisions based on these data. Knowing what influencer statistics to review and what tools to use, you won’t compromise your brand and waste money on influencer marketing.
9 Influencer Metrics You Should Analyze
Even if you follow the work of several creators and you think they are a good match for your brand, you ought to make an influencer audit and check several key metrics, including:
Reach,
Engagement,
Audience demographics,
Audience psychographics,
Content quality,
Brand safety,
Audience growth,
Audience quality,
Performance of sponsored posts.
Reach
Reach signifies the number of people who see an influencer’s content. If your goal is to reach a large audience, you must closely explore creators’ reach. For this, you’ll need access to the creators' analytics data on each social media channel or you can check it on an influencer marketing platform, like HypeAuditor.
Without analytics insights, you can estimate reach yourself, relying on the number of followers on Instagram, the number of views a video has on YouTube, or the number of unique visitors on a blog. Naturally, the number of Instagram followers reflects only the potential reach of a creator. The actual reach is 10-30% of the total number of followers. Posts that go viral, for example, Reels on Instagram can generate two or five times or even higher reach.
It’s been often determined as a vanity metric and sure enough, studying reach by itself can be misleading. Brands need to examine multiple metrics at once, such as engagement and conversion rates, the audience’s quality as well as brand safety, to make the right decision.
Engagement
Engagement shows how the online audience interacts with the influencer’s content. The more reactions a post receives, the higher the engagement and the better the relationship between the creator and their audience. As you start to analyze influencers on different platforms, you will realize how many ways engagement can be measured and how they measure up to each other.
Likes: The audience’s appreciation can come in many forms. Liking a post is the most common and easiest way.
Shares: Social media platforms allow users to share an influencer’s content with their followers or friends. A high number of shares indicate that the content is exceptionally good and can even grow a creator’s audience.
Comments: Compared to likes, the number of comments weighs more on social media. For liking a post, users only need to click on a button, but comments require more time and energy. Through comments, followers can express their opinions and their support of the influencer’s content and ideas.
Retweets: As a form of sharing, Twitter users can share tweets with their followers by retweeting them. Again, a retweet demonstrates that the content is valuable enough to be promoted more widely.
Engagement rate (ER): Besides reach, ER is the other most essential metric to measure the effectiveness of an influencer’s content, taking into account the number of shares, likes, and comments.
Engagement authenticity: Effective endorsement in influencer marketing greatly depends on the users’ authentic reactions. With engagement authenticity, you can measure the level of genuineness the influencer’s post generates. Evaluating the authenticity of interactions is a tedious job without proper tools. Fortunately, HypeAuditor’s Analytics is one of the best tools for detecting fishy methods, like comment pods, loop giveaways, and purchased likes and comments that boost engagement.
Can you run a basic analysis of engagement authenticity without tools? Yes, although you won’t be taking into account all the factors an influencer marketing platform will. Here are a couple of ways you can check the authenticity of engagement:
Comment authenticity: You can analyze the quality of comments users leave on creators’ posts. If it is relevant feedback on the topic coming from a real account, then it counts as genuine engagement.
Comment-like ratio: This metric shows how many comments an influencer’s post receives per 100 likes on average. By comparing this number to other similar accounts, you can detect significant differences that may mirror fraudulent activity.
Follower-to-following ratio: The ratio between the number of followers and the number of people the influencer follows. The fewer people a creator follows and the larger audience they have, the more secure you can be that they have a genuine and engaged following.
Audience demographics
When you start building your influencer marketing campaign, one of your first tasks will be to determine your target audience. Gender, age, location, language, and interests will all play a crucial role in identifying influencers whose follower base matches your target market. Specifying influencer follower demographics will help you reach the right people who are interested in your brand.
You can look at influencers' statistics on a particular platform to better understand an influencer's audience. Instagram and Facebook allow you to gather information on the social media creator’s audience, such as age, gender, and location. YouTube and other platforms may offer some basic influencer data, while Google Analytics and various social media analytics tools give you insight into consumer behavior and interests.
As mentioned previously, social networks provide some information about the audience. However, you’ll need more advanced tools if you want to see the audience’s interests or level of education. With HypeAuditor’s influencer identification tool, you can narrow down your search by applying filters related to the creator’s audience. Our influencer account analytics includes detailed information on the distribution of age groups, gender, location, language, interests, level of education, and income.
Audience psychographics
Audience demographics will help you define the suitable social media channel and posting frequency. Psychographics will help you specify what content strikes a chord with your audience. With audience psychographics, you can map out your customers’ interests and values, thus making it easier for you to tailor content to their tastes.
If you’re present in a specific niche, scan the interests of the influencer’s audience to create attention-grabbing content and drive engagement. Don’t stop at interests and hobbies, though! Review what other brands the influencer’s audience interacts with. Checking the followers’ brand affinity on HypeAuditor’s influencer analytics reports helps you determine which brand values the influencer’s audience shares.
Content quality
Even if the influencer’s audience fits your market, their content and tone must also meet your criteria to effectively endorse your brand. Do their posts feel scripted or natural? Are they well-produced and edited? Do they resonate with their followers or not? Be sure to study whether they’re creating on-topic, visually appealing, and informational posts and measure their level of engagement.
Brand safety analysis
During your content analysis, you can come across influencers whose values are not aligning with your brand or cover topics that can endanger your business’s reputation. There are several factors you need to take into consideration if you don’t want to compromise your brand.
Working with a creator who publishes dubious subjects can affect your brand’s prestige negatively. Avoid those who regularly share toxic and crime-related content.
Influencers who are involved in plagiarism or scams will damage your brand’s public perception.
Identify opinion leaders who clearly align with your brand’s values and can genuinely represent them.
Select influencers who are transparent about their sponsored content and disclose their brand collaborations clearly.
Audience growth
Obviously, you want to partner with individuals who have a large and engaged audience. To ensure that your collaboration is a success, you need influencers with real followers who interact with their content. By evaluating an influencer’s audience growth chart, you’ll see whether their follower base was grown organically or with artificial methods.
So, how to check if Instagram followers are real? How can you notice if an influencer grew their follower base with gray-hat methods?
Normally, the growth chart is a steadily rising line without any huge drops and spikes. Sudden peaks and falls in their graphs indicate they probably used bots to increase their audience, purchased accounts, or participated in other fraudulent activities, like comment pods, follow-unfollow tricks, etc. The fewer real followers have, the less effective your campaign will be.
Audience quality
It follows from the previous point that the more real users make up an influencer’s audience the more they interact with their content. A genuine and dedicated audience is more likely to engage with the creator’s posts, trust their product recommendations, and stick with them. Thus, more of them will take action when they see a sponsored ad.
HypeAuditor’s proprietary metric, the Audience Quality Score (AQS) measures the overall quality of a TikTok or Instagram influencer’s account and ranks them between 1 and 100. As an industry benchmark, AQS for Instagram creators is calculated by taking into account 15 metrics, divided into 4 categories. Creators with a score above 60 are considered good, that is they have an authentic audience and their content generates a higher level of engagement.
Performance of sponsored posts
You’ve definitely come across influencer content endorsing a product and disclosing it as a paid collaboration. Sponsored posts are one of the most popular ways of advertising with influencers on social media. In addition, if adequately disclosed, you can quickly evaluate its effectiveness through the number of likes, comments, and views and calculating its ER.
The metrics listed above are essential to pick relevant influencers, foreshadow how they would perform in a campaign, and help you determine whether to include them in your influencer marketing strategy or not.
Influencer Analytics Tools and Resources
Knowing what needs to be measured, let’s see what can help you measure it and streamline your influencer analytics process.
Spreadsheets: If you choose to collect and organize performance and audience data by hand, use spreadsheet software, like Google Sheets.
Data visualization: Visualize the numbers you gathered with visualization apps, like Tableau or Google Charts, and get a better understanding of influencers’ performance.
Social media analytics tools: Social media outlets, like Instagram and Facebook, provide you with performance insights, including reach, views, and engagement and some audience metrics, like age, gender, and location.
Influencer marketing platforms: These all-encompassing suites, like HypeAuditor, Aspire IQ, and Upfluence, offer influencer analytics software for brands and agencies. Their features enable businesses to study creators’ content performance and evaluate their audience metrics.
Check out these influencer marketing platforms with powerful influencer analytics features:
HypeAuditor: With HypeAuditor influencer analysis tool brands can analyze social media influencers with the help of more than 35 metrics, access detailed audience demographics across five social media platforms and use our top-rated AI fraud detection tool on the market.
Aspire IQ: Aspire IQ offers influencer search and insights features for brands to connect with relevant creators.
Upfluence: Through Upfluence’s platform, businesses can examine how influencers’ posts performed and review audience demographics across five platforms.
Julius (formerly known as HYPR): Julius’s influencer analysis tool allows brands to find influencers with whom they can target the right audience.
Businesses can optimize and speed up their influencer analytics processes with the help of these tools and solutions and choose relevant creators who are most likely capable of producing top-performing content.
Before You Pick an Influencer Analytics Tool
What are your needs?
Before choosing the influencer marketing analytics software, consider what you want to use it for. Do you want to analyze the demographic and geographic data of the influencer’s audience? Would you like to check basic performance metrics, like view, reach, ER, and conversion rate? Or do you need a tool with advanced data, like CPE, most used hashtags, content sentiment, and brand safety analysis? Specifying your goals and the corresponding metrics will help you pick the tool that meets your requirements.
Review available solutions
Many tools, many solutions. Considering your needs, pick the influencer analytics platform that offers the most functionality within your budget, has good customer support, and is easy to use.
Test the tools you shortlisted
Try out and compare how your preferred tools and their features really work. Since most companies provide free trials and demos, you’ll see first-hand if the user interface is too complex or if some influencer analysis tools are not working the way they should.
Is it possible to integrate with other tools?
Switching between several softwares presents the risk of making errors. In case you already use some analytical tool, make sure that the new solution can be integrated with it.
HypeAuditor’s API can be integrated with CRM platforms or other analytics tools. Our platform also offers Magento, WooCommerce, and Shopify integration for businesses who want to measure their e-commerce campaigns.
Conclusion
One of the reasons campaigns fail is that businesses pick the wrong individuals for collaboration. Most likely, this is due to the lack of knowledge about the metrics required for their analysis or the tools that help with this. Influencer analytics allow brands to gain valuable insights into creators’ performance and audience. By relying on influencer analytics and effective tools, they can identify creators who fit their target audience and share their values.
Don’t fall for fake followers
Analyze prospective influencers from the get-go to find the cream of the crop. Learn which factors are vital in terms of assessing influencer audience quality and performance metrics, and use our checklist to easily vet any creator’s content.
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