Understanding the quality of influencer’s audience on Instagram is the key element of influencer analysis.
How can you know that all those thousands and millions of followers are real? This question bothers many businesses that are looking for reliable partnerships to promote their brands. To help them make the right decisions, we developed the Audience Quality Score. In this article, we’re going to explain what it is, what elements it includes, and how to read the Instagram quality score.
Audience Quality Score: Definition and Components
Audience Quality Score (AQS) is HypeAuditor’s proprietary metric that allows advertisers to check Instagram influencers before they start working with them.
The score is based on a 1 to 100 scale and consists of four components:
Engagement Rate - a percentage of followers who engage with the influencer’s content.
Quality Audience - a percentage of real people among the influencer’s followers.
This element is a key to understanding how authentic the influencer’s audience is. Suspicious accounts may be bots or real people who use specific automation services to artificially grow the number of likes and comments and purchase followers. A high percentage of suspicious accounts is a red flag. Mass followers are real accounts with over 1500 followings. People with too many followings are far less likely to see an influencer’s post in their Instagram feed due to the specific Instagram algorithm.
Follower and Following Growth - any abnormal activities detected on HypeAuditor’s Follower and Following Graphs.
Engagement Authenticity - a percentage of recent likes and comments from real people who don’t participate in engagement pods, and were not inflated by a tag-to-win giveaway.
AQS helps to understand the overall quality of Instagram creators. Influencers with AQS 100 are most likely to have a high-quality audience and bloggers with AQS 20 won’t have a real impact on your sales. However, AQS is not always enough to make a decision on whether or not it’s worth partnering with the influencer.
How to Analyze the Audience Quality on Instagram
The Audience Quality Score is distributed consistently and extreme values are a rare case. That’s why we advise you to study the detailed HypeAuditor report to better understand if the Instagram influencer is right for your business. To get a clear idea of how quality the influencer’s audience is, pay attention to the following elements as well:
Follower & Following Graphs. If an influencer has followers who have a mass following, you’ll see sudden spikes on the Following Graph. If an influencer grows the number of followers artificially, you’ll see sudden spikes and hockey-stick growth on the Follower Graph.
Like to Comment Ratio. It shows if the blogger gets more likes or comments. If the like to comment ratio of the analyzed influencer differs significantly from the ratio of similar accounts, it might mean that either comment or like number was increased artificially.
Likes Spread. It shows the difference in the number of likes between multiple posts. If the spread is too low it might indicate that the influencer purchased likes. Generally, followers like some posts more often than others. That’s why it’s suspicious if all posts have the same amount of likes.
By using this data you can analyze the influencer’s audience and engagement in detail and make the right business decisions. HypeAuditor’s Instagram Analytical Report provides multiple metrics that help you understand who their followers are and assess influencers’ performance, comment authenticity, audience growth, and engagement rate.
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Was this useful? Learn even more about our influencer quality scores and then some by reading this in-depth product review from our friends at Markup Hero — complete with annotated walkthroughs and detailed feature analysis. It’s a good one.
