Key Metrics

Whether you decide to choose one or more influencers for your campaign, you should take some time reviewing influencer metrics. The more informed you are about what type of influencer it is you need, the more aware you will be of the type of campaign you can do.

Engagement

We consider engagement as any interaction between an influencer’s post, such as likes, comments or video views. So in this case it would be the percentage of the audience that interacts with the influencer. Each influencer has a percentage of engagement and it varies depending on the niche that their content is about. This means that an engagement of 3% could be good for Fashion influencers, but different value could be good for Fitness influencers. The value may be good or not depending on what segment of followers that person has. For instance, in the segment of 50 – 250K followers, an engagement of 7.1% is very high. According to many brands and companies that do influencer marketing, this is a crucial value you should check first.

Post frequency

How many posts does the influencer you are interested share per week? You need to check that this value is not too high, because if it is, it might mean that the influencer’s followers are losing interest in their publications and the engagement rate might go down. On the other hand, if this rate is too low, it might mean the influencer may not be committed when the collaboration starts. In the proposal you send to the influencer, make sure the quantity of posts they should share in the campaign is stated. Oftentimes, influencers are working on several campaigns at the same time, so if you are planning for the influencer to share a couple of posts about your brand, keep in mind that the influencer marketing campaign can last a couple of weeks.

Comments/likes ratio

This is another important metric to take into account. Comments/likes ratio gives you an overall idea of whether or not the influencer has bought followers. Why is that? Because a fake influencer usually buys bots that like their pictures, but it’s not very typical to buy comments. With this ratio, you can see the average ratio for that segment; so if it is higher than that, it could be a suspicious sign. In the case below, you can see that it’s almost the same ratio, so you shouldn’t be worried.

Followers/following ratio

As we mentioned before, there are influencers who purchase fake followers or use other techniques to grow their followers base. Have you ever heard about the follow – unfollow strategies? It is a way of getting followers fast but then you lose them very quickly because they are either bots or not interested in your account. If this number is close to 1, it’s typically a sign of this strategy so you should be careful and not hire that influencer, because their followers might just be temporary and not connected with the influencer.

Follower growth

This is another way to find if the influencer has being growing organically or buying followers. How can you see this? Well if you have a graph like the one you see here, you can see over time how much their follower base has been growing. If you see spikes, we recommend you to check the posts that the influencer has shared around those dates because it could either be a giveaway or the influencer might have appeared in the news. If you don’t see spikes that go up or down, don’t worry because it’s a good sign.

Alongside this, you should check the follower growth rate. If it’s a low to medium value, it’s normal since influencers don’t tend to have a follower growth that is higher than 50% (unless there is a giveaway going on). In this graph it is very clear to see how this influencer hasn’t been buying any followers or doing any suspicious techniques. Her follower growth rate is 5%, which is a good and consistent rate.

Branded posts

Before knowing if the influencer is a good fit for your brand, you might want to check if they have been mentioning your competitors in recent posts. They might have mentioned them because they like them or are wearing some of their clothes. You can check the brand mentions and what metrics those posts have (likes and comments). This also can give you an idea of the types of brands they usually mention or work with, and if they are aligned with your brand, the values and objectives you want the influencers to share with their followers

Cost per post

Have you ever wondered if you can afford the influencer you want to hire? You can contact them to ask for their media kit, but if you want to have an overall idea, you could check the estimated cost of promotional post. Depending on how many followers or the engagement they have, this value goes up or down. It also varies in each industry, as well as the country they are from, but it could be useful when estimating your budget. The cost per post is not the same for a Fashion influencer with 50K followers in France as a Fashion influencer in New York.

The average cost is very different, depending on the type of content. When an influencer does a video for a campaign, it requires more work than uploading a picture. Because of this, a video is usually more expensive than a photo. You need to take that into account when thinking about the budget and type of campaign you want. If you use the platform that we mentioned before, you can get the average cost per post for a promotional post (photo) and for a promotional video.

There you can also see the average likes and comments that a promoted publication has. This could be very valuable when you are presenting the strategy to your team and setting objectives based on the results that each influencer has on their promoted posts. The averages that you can see with this tool, are for the last 12 posts, so it gets updated.

Quality Score

This number quickly gives you an overall idea of the influencer metrics. If you don’t have much time to analyse all the metrics mentioned before, this value will tell you if the influencer is trustworthy or not. It considers all the results calculated in previous metrics such as engagement, comments/like ratio or follower/following ratio and provides a number from 1 to 100. This means that the higher the value, the healthier their metrics are. Of course this metric can change in the future, as the influencer could post more attractive content for their followers or do a collaboration with a popular brand.

Audience Match

Liking the influencer is not enough to determine if the influencer is fit for your brand or campaign, you have to match your audience and theirs. For instance, we like HYPR as marketers who identify the influencer’s audience especially based on demographics and interests. Instead of targeting broad audiences, focus on a more exact audience profile this will help with campaign effectiveness.

Conclusion

As you can see, there are a couple of metrics that should be taken into account when hiring an influencer. Taking some time to analyse and discover influencers who are suitable for you is necessary in order to have a successful influencer marketing campaign. We recommend you see which objectives are good for your brand and then search for influencers based on those parameters.

Once the campaign has finished, you can go back to those metrics and check when they are updated to see if any of the values have changed. You could see if the follower growth for that influencer has been growing since then. Also ask the influencer to share the metrics with you that they usually get in the promoted posts, which are only available for them; those can be very insightful in order to calculate the success of your campaign.