How to evaluate an influencer’s audience
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Partnerships between brands and influencers are a no-brainer for any marketing strategy. Promoting your brand through an aligned social account’s audience- easy right?
In theory, yes, but there is still a barrier to entry. With so many influencers in today's digital society the ability to research and navigate legitimate audiences is difficult. And then on top of that you also have to see if this person’s audience fits your persona in order to get the best bang for buck.
With Surf Analytics, we’ve come up with an efficient process for brands to research and identify viable influencer audiences to make those partnerships work for you.
1. Look at the influencer’s report and verify that they are real accounts.
Head over to the report summary and identify the fake accounts chart. When doing an audience analysis manually, it’s not feasible to check every single follower. Instead, looking at the summary gives you a good visual outlook as to the breakdown of followers.
In this step, you’re mainly concerned about the followers’ legitimacy. You can alternatively scroll the follower list of a report and look through a few profile info cards to get a quick look at what an influencer's followers look like.
If you notice that a few of the creator’s followers and engagements come from fake or inactive accounts, there’s a high probability that the influencer’s “influence” is manufactured.
2. Find out if the influencer has any followers who are also influencers.
Followers who are also influencers are known as “notable followers.” Influencers with high-profile followers will tell you more about their interests and values, since other influencers/celebrities are typically more open about their lives for the sake of their fans.
If you notice certain notable followers consistently reacting and commenting on one another’s’ posts, you may have uncovered activity originating from an influencer pod.
Pods can be risky- they could indicate that your influencer is part of a group that manufactures their audiences. If you suspect this to be the case, you could take a closer look by running some Content Reports to check out comments, likes, or tags. Is there genuine engagement?
(Don’t know about Content Reports? Email your Account Manager to find out!)
3. Apply the “Number of Following” filter and note those who follow more than 1,000 other accounts.
Next, apply the filter “Number of Following”, add a min of 1000 and leave the max at infinity.
Instagram users who follow more than 1000 accounts are generally not considered to be very reachable. If the followers of your influencer candidate are following many other brands and creators, there is a low probability that they see your influencer's posts in their feed.
Fans that follow fewer than 500 accounts are generally thought as most reachable.
4. Analyze follower gender and bio keywords filters
Now apply filters to identify the followers’ attributes. You can filter for bio keywords, keywords in captions, even gender. Note how well these characteristics match your customer personas and how many followers exhibit these custom filter traits.
5. Apply location and language filters.
Similarly, try to identify the most common nationalities and languages within your audience sample. If you’re interested in marketing your brand to more specific regions, see if you can pinpoint those audience locations, including states, provinces, or cities.
6. Use the comparison tool to identify an audience overlap.
Ideally after you’ve vetted the legitimacy of your potential influencer, the comparison tool is very powerful to identify and audience overlap between multiple accounts.
You want to start with removing all the applied filters you’ve done in previous steps. Below the comparison tool you are going to look in the “Find Profiles that are in” and add the current report of the influencer and also add your own accounts report —> hit compare.
And boom!!! You’ll see the intersection of these reports and see the followers in common. From here you can again begin to apply any filters and look at the general report summary of the overlapped followers.
A good rule for comparing your audience to an influencer’s is that you want a little bit of overlap to indicate that there is enough affinity to justify a partnership, but not so much that it limits follower acquisition
