Working with the right influencers is the key to any successful influencer marketing campaign. Influencers who are relevant, authentic, engaging, and well-matched to your brand values and image will contribute greatly to your campaigns.
Researching and finding the right influencers may seem like a scary process. There are many factors you’ll need to keep in mind during your search. You’ll also have to look out for signs that indicate whether an influencer is fake or not!
In the last article, I’ve given you 5 tips on how to choose the right influencers for your brand marketing campaign, if you haven’t read it, please find it in the history articles. Today, I will provide you more 4 criteria to support your business.
Content quality
When you work with influencers, you’re giving them creative freedom to create sponsored content for your brand. Because their content will be representing you, it’s important to check whether their content quality is a fit for your brand image. When you look at the influencers’ profiles, you should look closely for content that’s clear, well-composed, creative, consistent, and optimized.
Frequency
When you explore influencer’s profile, be sure to look at how often they publish content. In order for influencers to build a loyal audience, they need to engage their followers by posting high-quality content regularly. Active profiles should ideally publish content once every 1-3 days.
You should also check how often the influencers publish sponsored content. You should be looking for a good balance of sponsored and normal content. If you notice that influencers have published 3 or more sponsored posts in a row, their credibility may be at risk.
You should then read through some of the comments their followers have left on their sponsored posts. Negative comments indicate that the influencer may be promoting too many brands.
Reliability
To ensure your collaborations run smoothly and effectively, the influencers you choose to work with must be reliable.
Reliable influencers are proactive, and they should typically reply to all of your messages promptly and professionally. If influencers take over a week to answer your messages, it may be a sign that they’ll be slow at communication when you start collaborating!
Some influencer marketing platforms also have a review system in place. You can read through the feedback brands left them in previous collaborations to see what their experiences were like.
Audience quality
When you search for influencers, you may come across some who have fake followers or engagement. To determine whether they do, it’s important to keep your eyes peeled for these 10 abnormalities:
- The influencers’ content quality is poor, but the influencers have a high following.
- The influencers publish very little content, but they have a high number of engagements or a large following.
- They have very high or low engagement for their number of followers.
- The influencers have more people they’re following than followers. They may have, for example, 5,000 followers, but they’re following 7,000 people. This follower to following ratio may be a result of ‘follow-for-follow’ or ‘follow-unfollow’ tactics.
- A large sample of influencers’ following have a combination of the following traits: (a) little to no content, (b) no profile photos, (c) strange usernames, (d) anonymous profiles, (e) suspicious follower to following ratios, (f) copied bios, and (g) stock photos for their profile photos.
- The influencers recently created their profiles, but they already have a large following.
- There are sudden and irregular follower patterns on the influencers’ profiles. They may suddenly display massive bursts of follower growth, then experience large drops in their following.
- The majority of the comments left on their posts are low quality, generic, and repetitive.
- After publishing content, the influencers’ post quickly gains a large amount of likes in a very short period of time.
- The influencers’ posts have a low number of views compared to their follower size.
Bear in mind that even if influencers’ profiles may display one or more of the abnormalities listed above, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the creator is fake. Their profiles must be examined as a whole and in the correct context. For example, profiles that show follower bursts over a short period of time may be a result of them being featured on the Discover Page, rather than them buying fake followers. Now got it all?