You're evaluating an influencer's performance. Are you considering these best practices?

A mistake regarding influencer marketing is consider it only as an acquisition channel, and consequently evaluating metrics such as CPA. Influencer marketing is primarily a channel for brand awareness, enabling you to connect with individuals who may not be ready to become your customers yet but might be in the near future. Identifying these individuals can be challenging, which is why metrics related to brand awareness, such as impressions and CPM, should also be considered.

Be open and transparent on what your hopes and dreams are. Share the objective and a wish list of things you’re hoping to achieve with an influencer from the start. This will help with creating the best strategy and allow you to better plan for how the content should be positioned. Have your influencer partners involved with this step; trust that they know their audience well.

New influencer metrics redefine influencer marketing as a growing marketing channel. We now have the AI technology to understand social video which means brands can automatically find relevant mentions. Apart from metrics such as likes, comments, and shares, brands can also evaluate engagement rate as well as the positive, negative, or neutral tone of the creator and the concurrent audience reactions automatically.

1. Audience engagement: Measure the influencer's ability to engage their audience through likes, comments, and shares. 2. Content quality: Assess the relevance, creativity, and authenticity of the influencer's content. 3. Brand alignment: Evaluate how well the influencer's content aligns with the brand's values and messaging. 4. Reach and impact: Analyze the influencer's reach and the impact of their content on the target audience. 5. ROI: Calculate the return on investment generated from the influencer's campaigns and collaborations. 6. Long-term potential: Consider the potential for sustained success and growth in the influencer's partnership with the brand.

Authenticity is crucial for individual creators on social media as it builds trust, fosters connection with audiences, and sets them apart from competitors. By sharing genuine content and personal stories, creators can cultivate loyal followers and open doors to collaboration opportunities. In essence, authenticity forms the foundation for building a strong and impactful social media presence.

When casting creators for a campaign, I like to get an understanding of why the creators are interested in the campaign themselves. Hearing directly from them gives a better idea of how they would represent the brand, and whether or not they're already using it, or have a real use case for trying a new product/service if not. This can usually be done in the form of asking a question in a casting call or brief that prompts a unique response from interested creators.

The average number of views is a crucial metric, even more so than followers. Frequently, many accounts with a large following have low and inactive engagement metrics, making the cost for content on their profile disproportionately high, while their performance is lower than an account with, say, 10k followers. That's why I always pay close attention to the average number of views, especially when considering collaborations for reels.

Engagement rate is an important metric, because it shows whether or not the creator can motivate their following into taking an action versus passive observation.

The best way to analyze this data is not on vanity metrics. It's within the Facebook ad account. This is where you can optimize for conversion to your target audience and lean into the machine learning system of Meta vs being a slave to the organic algorithm.

Niche creators are an excellent source of feedback, especially for a new product or service. Since they tend to test and try many things, they have experience and knowledge to share. Plus they see consistent feedback from their following as well, via comments and questions in response to their posts. They can offer a viewpoint that includes real-time responses.