Tech

How to Assess Social Media Influencers for Fit

After creating a shortlist of potential social media influencers to work with, what will you do next? Next is evaluating each influencer to determine whether their brand aligns with yours. This is known as the suitability of the influencer to represent your brand to meet the required purpose or simply the fit. How you assess influencers will depend on various factors and metrics. Read on if you have no idea how.

Ways to assess social media influencers for fit

1) Gauge relevance

Relevance is the state of being closely related or connected, which means that your choice of influencers should be appropriate to your brand. This is crucial because the influencer of your choice will represent your brand. You do not want people to perceive your brand poorly. Besides, you want your brand message to be conveyed to the right audience.

Head over to the influencers’ blogs, social profiles, or channels. Scrutinize the posts and updates from the choices of words to the photos. Will your target audience appreciate the posts? Are the interests and topics resonate with your target audience? Did they work with a brand like yours before? More importantly, will they engage with your brand more if you hire this particular influencer? 

Some tools can help you find influencers and digital content creators with the most relevance. For instance, BuzzSumo allows users to find influencers by topics or mostly-shared content. You may filter results based on top sharers, top-performing pages, average retweets, and more. You may also discover through these tools the influencers behind your rivals’ content strategy. Think of it as a reverse method of finding influencers — by content.

Tools can also be filtered by location. This is important for local businesses, whereby they need to hire local influencers to boost conversions and drive results. This is the work of SEO services in the Philippines or elsewhere, for that matter: local SEO. But influencers are a fundamental part of this optimization strategy.

2) Establish quality

Influencers; thus, their influence is not created equal — some inflate their followers while others can genuinely drive engagement. And with the thousands to millions of influencers out there, you want to ensure that your topic picks are ‘genuinely influential.’ You need to know if the influencer can deliver on its promise to meet campaign objectives, whether the goal is increasing brand awareness or sales.

There are different takes on what makes an influencer influential. It is easy to get overwhelmed by metrics, especially if the influencers themselves are the ones showing them to you. In influencer marketing, the volume of followers is regarded as a vanity metric — nothing conclusive can get from it. That is unless it will be paired with other metrics, such as engagement rates. 

Other than engagement rates, you also need to look into the freshness and frequency of engagement. Undoubtedly, the influencers will put their best foot forward when asked for their metrics. However, these are historical and not based on real-time insights or data. It would be much better if you obtain the social handles of the influencers, so you can explore them yourself. Thousands of likes on each post are good, but looking for comments and questions and how the influencer addresses them is better. Mainly, you want to grasp how the influencers interact with their community. 

We are after real conversations since these engagement points drive conversions. When doing social media marketing in the Philippines and probably the entire world, a good engagement rate to stick to is from 1 to 5%. The higher the number of followers, for instance, the harder to achieve this goal. This makes having real followers all the more crucial.

3) Spot fakeness

Of course, real interactions happen if there are real followers. This is one of the pitfalls of influencer management — fake followers. Yes, buying followers is also a thing in the influencer marketing world. 

It is easy to spot fake followers by visiting the influencers’ social profiles. For example, if the influencer has millions of followers but barely has likes, this is indicative of inauthentic followership. Also, poor engagement rates are definitely a red flag. 

If your influencer marketing budget does not permit it, aim to connect with micro-influencers or those with 10 to 20K followers. They are proven to deliver substantial engagement with up to 60% higher engagement rates with 22x more conversions than traditional marketing methods. In addition, they are almost 7x more cost-efficient.

While at it, there are tools that can help you spot fake Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram accounts. Some of these are TwitterAudit and FakeCheck, which are freemium and premium tools, respectively.

Knowing how to research shortlisted influencers and their online presence gives you the structure to manage the influencer marketing campaign. However, before you contact any influencer on your list, do your research first. Gauge, establish, and spot! You need to be discerning because influencer marketing services do not come cheap — they are an investment too! So make sure you invest in the right strategy and influencers.