How To Perform an Instagram Influencer Audit

Table of Contents

• Why You Should Perform an Influencer Audit
• Steps for Running an Instagram Influencer Audit
• Get Started with Your Influencer Audit with Klear!

Discover how an influencer audit can help you identify the best partners for your brand!

Thanks to sophisticated, data-driven influencer audit tools, vetting influencers has become easier than ever before. In the current climate where almost everyone wants to be an influencer (currently, one in four young people say that influencing is a career goal), it’s more important than ever for brands to take advantage of technology and vet their influencer partners.

Most platforms enable influencer discovery with an integrated influencer search engine, reducing the time you once spent performing manual searches for influencers. This makes it easy to learn how to approach influencers through emails: just let technology do most of the work. But, discovering the perfect influencer for your brand does not end there. Once you’ve identified potential partners, it is essential to perform a thorough influencer audit to ensure that your collaborations will generate the most impact.

Influencer discovery is only one element of an influencer audit. The entire auditing process is an important component of any influencer marketing strategy and will ensure that every stage of your campaign generates meaningful impact. Using an influencer auditor allows you to review past successes and make the best decisions moving forward. This article will highlight some of the different ways you can incorporate data-driven metrics into your Instagram audit. 

Why Should You Perform an Influencer Audit 

Fake Instagram followers? Spammy content? Bot comments? Brand erosion? Yes, it can all happen when you use influencers. Many brands that have hired influencers in the past look at surface-level data and think, Boy, I’ve struck the jackpot! This influencer has 100K followers, hundreds of comments on every post, and thousands of shares.

So they wonder why, when they move forward with a marketing campaign, their post gets tons of comments and likes but no click-throughs or conversions. Sounds like your unicorn Instagrammer is more like an Insta-spammer!

An influencer audit ensures your collaborations are impactful and your campaigns are running as efficiently as possible. Additionally, performing such a review will also help you identify past success and adjust future campaigns accordingly while ensuring that your partners align with your brand values.

Performing an influencer audit will help you detect and assess the following:

• Verifying the authenticity of an influencer’s audience 
• Set realistic expectations by reviewing an influencer’s engagement metrics 
• Fairly compensate influencers 
• Ensure campaigns are penetrating the correct target audience
• Manage the representation of brand values 
• Analyze campaign and influencer ROI

You may have multiple influencer partners across all your channels, such as Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Twitter. No matter which platforms you use, the value of auditing remains the same. You don’t want things like fake followers, fake accounts, spam, inactive users, or suspicious content killing your vibe.

For the rest of this guide, we’re going to focus on auditing Instagram influencers. But keep in mind that you can apply a lot of these follower audit tips to each social media profile.

Steps For Running an Instagram Influencer Audit

Using a dedicated Instagram audit tool makes light work of your auditing process. It’s an important part of maintaining healthy influencer relationships, as it sets the tone for all of your influencer partners to follow.

You can include any specifics about your Instagram audit in your influencer contract, letting influencers know you plan on regularly vetting them as part of your program. For more on influencer contracts, check out our free influencer contract template.

No matter what tools or technology you use, make sure you include the following steps:

Step 1: Verify Instagram Influencer Audience Quality

One of the most common mistakes when vetting social media influencers is selecting an influencer based on the number of Instagram followers in their network. This is typically based on the misguided belief that the more followers a user has, the more exposure their content will receive. Unfortunately, this notion has caused follower count to become one of the most popular influencer selection metrics, resulting in a false understanding of how to measure a user’s social media impact. 

Remember, when you collaborate with influencers, fake Instagram followers abound. Follower count has more relative importance when vetting an influencer. One of the reasons this metric can be unreliable is due to fake followers and bots. Users will purchase followers to fake the size of their network, or pay for bots to automatically comment on or like their content to give the illusion of engagement.

Performing an authenticity assessment will allow you to detect users who have used malicious practices. This ensures you are collaborating with users who not only have real followers but have followers that want to engage with your Instagram account. 

Luckily, an Instagram audit tool can easily spot fake accounts better than the human eye and save you from making a terrible brand mistake. Examples of an Instagram audit tool include Klear, FollowerAudit, SparkToro, FakeCheck, Social Blade, and Upfluence. Ideally, you can use the same platform to conduct your Instagram audit as well as manage the entire end-to-end influencer marketing plan.

Step 2: Assess Influencer Reach and Engagement Metrics

When preparing for an influencer campaign, it’s important that everyone’s expectations are aligned. Whether you’re an agency creating a campaign for clients or a large team working with important stakeholders, influencer metrics are a great way to address this. This will help you anticipate the impact of a potential partner. 

Useful metrics include:

True Reach: The number of real views an influencer averages for a single piece of content.

Engagements: Determine the average likes and comments an influencer typically generates as well as the engagement rate.

Klear Influencer Score: The Klear influencer score measures an influencer’s impact by taking a number of variables, including engagements, true reach, interactions, network authenticity, and more, to establish just how influential a user is.

This stage of the assessment not only establishes a deeper understanding of the potential of your partners but will create a sense of trust between you and your stakeholders. Entering a campaign with realistic expectations that are supported by data shows that you’re a trustworthy partner and can be counted on to run a campaign successfully.

Step 3: Fairly Compensate Influencers

Assessing influencer potential and audience credibility are also great ways to ensure that you are properly compensating your influencers. Influencer rates can be mistakenly determined due to the size of an influencer’s network, which, as we addressed before, is not the best way to analyze impact.

Additionally, measuring an audience’s impact analytics and KPIs (engagement, true reach, influencer score) will gauge the type of influencer they are, allowing you to set rates that are fair and aligned with industry standards. Providing fair compensation can help you better build and manage influencer relationships, ensuring both parties are satisfied.

For more on influencer rates, check out our Influencer Rate Card:

Step 4: Review Audience Demographics 

Identifying an influencer with an authentic audience that is generating real impact is only part of the process. Next, it is time to determine if the influencer is influencing and engaging with the correct audience.

This is where audience demographics come into play. By analyzing your influencer’s audience demographics, you are able to understand exactly who is in their network and ensure this supports the goals of your campaign.

For example, if you are running a campaign aiming to spread brand awareness in France, but the majority of your influencer’s audience is located in the US, then your goal will not be achieved. Audience demographics play one of the most important roles in a campaign and should not be ignored. It is one of the key demographics which will make sure you achieve your campaign goals. 

Step 5: Perform an Influencer Risk Assessment

Once you’ve identified partners who have the ability to generate strong and relevant impact, you should assess the safety of the partnership. This is typically done through an Influencer Risk Assessment, which is meant to analyze the alignment of an influencer’s values with your brand’s values.

A risk assessment will help you ensure brand reputation control and guarantee your influencers are generating a positive impact. Learn more about performing an Influencer Risk Assessment here. 

Step 6: Measure Campaign and Influencer ROI 

An Instagram influencer Audit is not only useful before the campaign goes live; it’s also a great way to assess the investment impact of your campaign. Earned Media Value (EMV) offers a great perspective by showing a campaign and an influencer’s impact in relation to paid media standards. This allows you to understand the ROI of your campaign and determine if your Instagram audit strategy should be altered to drive more monetary impact. 

Klear sets baseline values for EMV estimation, which can be customized for a specific campaign. Our research has determined that influencer content is worth 10.52X more than paid media. This allows us to automatically calculate the EMV of a campaign. This data is great for measuring campaign impact and for setting budgets for the upcoming campaign. 

Once you’ve weeded out fake influencers and confirmed there are no fake followers, inactive followers, spam, or bot content to slow down your marketing, you can move forward with an influencer proposal. See our free influencer proposal template for more details.

Get Started With Your Influencer Audit

Now you have everything in place to perform an Instagram audit. Remember, data is the most powerful tool, and it is essential to have a platform that provides you with the data to perform a comprehensive influencer audit. If you’d like to learn more about Klear’s data capabilities, and how Klear can support your Influencer Audit process, schedule a call with one of our influencer marketing experts.