Chapter 2: Discovering and Vetting Influencers
Identifying Influencers
Identifying influencers whose audience aligns with campaign goals Once you have identified your influencer marketing strategy (refer to chapter 1 for a refresher), it’s time to identify influencers that support your goals. This means discovering influencers with audience demographics that support the network you are trying to target, and whose values align with your brand values.
This stage is best supported by a sophisticated influencer marketing technology that enables influencer demographic vetting and content portfolio review. Klear’s influencer discovery tool lets you set specific search filters such as audience location, influencer, and audience gender, audience age, influencer category, or use specific hashtags to guide your influencer discovery.
Performance Metrics
What Are Performance Metrics
After identifying influencers that support your campaign goals, it is essential to review the influencers Performance metrics.
Performance metrics are data-driven indicators that let you determine how effective an influencer collaboration will be.
True Reach
True Reach is one of the most important performance metrics. It measures an influencer’s exposure potential, by identifying the average number of users who view a piece of content.
Engagement
Engagement is similar to True Reach, but rather than identifying the number of views a post gets. This metric helps you determine the strength of your influencer’s network and allows you to set realistic expectations for your campaign.
Klear Influencer Score
To help make the Influencer vetting process easier, we have established a special AI-powered score to quantify Influence. The Klear Influencer Score is a 0-100 score that rates how influential a user is based on a variety of criteria.
Influencer Safety
What is an Inauthentic Audience
An influence with an inauthentic audience could mean several things.
1. An Influencer has fake followers that were purchased but offer no engagements or genuine exposure
2. An Influencer is a member of a Pods. An influencer Pod is a forum or group where individuals follow each other’s accounts and will exchange likes for likes. Pods are dangerous because it may appear as if an influencer is generating engagement, but these engagements are not coming from a genuine network.
3. An influencer has purchased an engagement-bot, which automatically comments and likes content, but does not offer genuine engagements.
Is your influencer’s audience real?
After vetting an influencer’s performance metrics, you’ll probably have a good understanding of the authenticity of their audience. As mentioned before the size of an influencer’s audience is not the most important factor, but rather the quality of the audience.
There are some good indicators of an inauthentic audience. Just as there are strong True Reach metrics, influencers with a larger following by low True Reach and Engagement metrics could possibly have fake followers. Another important thing to be aware of is the demographics of an influencer. For example, if a large portion of an influencer’s audience is from a country that seems very random it would be wise to do a further investigation.
How to check for fake followers and engagement bots
While you can use some of the clues we’ve suggested to vet your influencer’s audience authenticity, it is meticulous work and sometimes small indicators can go overlooked. For this reason, Klear’s AI technology can easily identify influencers with an inauthentic audience using hundreds of parameters our data science team has researched and set. This enables you to easily review an influencer's audience authenticity and enter new partnerships with confidence.
Value Alignment Assessment
Why Should You Perform an Influencer Value Assessment?
Influencer Marketing is different from traditional marketing channels. You have a third party connect your brand to an audience, and act as an ambassador. When collaborating with an influencer you are publicly saying that you trust and endorse their values. That’s why it is important to ensure that an influencer has never made public statements or engaged in past collaborations that contradict your brand values.
Review Past Collaborations
Check all of the past collaborations your influencer has engaged in to ensure that they have no past partnerships that would be harmful to your brand's image. For example, if your brand is publicly supportive of strict gun control legislation, it might not be in your best interest to partner with an influencer that has endorsed the NRA.
Check For Malicious Keywords
Past collaborations are not the only way to identify an influencer’s values. Use an influencer marketing tool to set safety keywords. This will allow you to get the full picture of your influencer’s online persona, and avoid a messy scandal.
Safety Keywords should align with your brand values. For example, an organization with a strong pro-LGBTQ+ agenda would perhaps flag words that are derogatory to gay and trans people.