Checklist for Influencers Analysis: How to Analyze an Influencer’s Account and Performance?

The importance of influencer marketing in the era of social media has risen to heaven. It has become a complete promotion tool for various brands. According to the latest research, 93% of companies opted for influencer marketing for their advertising campaigns.

Today, collaborating with influencers is useful for most niches. Businesses need to select a creator and think about a cooperation strategy. In this article, we will overview how to analyze an influencer’s account, what metrics to take into account, and how to choose an influencer and get the maximum results from integrations for your business.

Why should you work with influencers?

Before we focus on influencer analytics, let’s discover why in general it is necessary to collaborate with creators:

• Any information posted on an influencer's profile is taken as a friendly recommendation or personal opinion, not direct advertising.
• The influencer’s authority is transferred to your brand. That's why they are called “influencers” – because they can influence their subscribers. Even if the followers understand that they have a paid post in front of them, they will still think about buying, as a person they trust tells them about it. If an influencer visually demonstrates the product, this once again reinforces the confidence of users in the reliability of your company, as they see the product in action.
• The influencer creates compelling content. If you need to generate unique content, there is no need to contact advertising agencies. It is enough to start cooperation with an influencer who will take spectacular pictures and bring fresh ideas.
• Content virality. Content created by influencers is rapidly spreading across social networks. Users actively like and comment on posts, add publications to their favorites, share them, and discuss them with their friends. And this, in turn, directly attracts attention to the brand.
• Sales generation. Influencers can generate traffic effectively. It is enough for creators to “deliciously” present the product on their page and attach a link to the site so that traffic increases instantly. In addition, such a campaign will positively affect the search engine optimization of your website.
• Establishing communication between the company and the target audience. Influencers are the link between your brand and customers. By establishing communication with followers, you will receive honest feedback, and this is one of the fundamental aspects of the company's development. Users will comment on influencer posts and you will be able to track what customers like about products and what points they would like to improve.

Influencer analytics: what metrics are vital for advertisers?

Finding the right influencer is a challenge. Most likely, out of 100 influencers, a maximum of 10% will suit you. Why so few? Many factors can impact the choice – from the influencer community to statistics.

To select the right creator, it is necessary to analyze the profiles of the influencers you want to partner with. Will your ad fit into their content? Maybe just a month before you offer an integration, this creator advertised a personal trainer with enviable persistence, emphasizing that home workouts would not bring any results, and now you are suggesting promoting an app for independent online exercises. At best, the influencer will refuse, and at worst, you will get an advertising campaign that instead of reaching new customers, will bring only a storm of indignation.

Now let’s focus on the statistics that you have to request from an influencer and that are worth your attention:

1. The number of subscribers. In this case, more is not always better. Sometimes an ad in an account with 10,000 followers is much more effective than a post by a celebrity with a million followers. This is due to the engagement rate (it is usually higher among micro-influencers).
2. The ratio of ordinary and advertising publications. How often do ads appear on the influencer’s profile? If it happens every day, then run away from this influencer as far as possible, because the audience's trust in such an opinion leader is very low.
3. Engagement rate. An indicator that will show how actively the audience interacts with the influencer's content. Likes, comments on posts, shares, number of views, and saves to favorites. The requested statistics are the best way to assess engagement. 
4. Reach. To analyze the profile, ask the influencer to submit their statistics for the last month. If an influencer has around 150K followers, reaching 70-90K is perfectly acceptable, but if you see 10-15K instead, it’s worth considering. Either the creator got banned, or most of the followers are simply fake.
5. Fakes. Modern problems require modern solutions – this is exactly what some influencers think. Some of them can add extra zeros to the number of followers, for example, and falsify statistics without shame. Unfortunate masters are often given floating numbers, but still, we recommend double-checking the data using specialized platforms.

You can request these metrics from an influencer but we suggest using any free influencer analysis tool for a double check. Below we will point out the most meaningful indicators you can check yourself with the help of a dedicated app, like an influencer score calculator.

Once again about the importance of engagement rate

Each social network evaluates the relevance of posts and promotes them in the feed according to its algorithms. This is necessary to show users the most interesting content, not limited to chronology or random selection.

Getting into the feed is based on the engagement rate. The priority is given to the quality content and the publications that are interesting to audiences, and not the number of subscribers in the account. Therefore, this metric is very important for the operation of algorithms and affects the number of users who will see the content in the feed, and hence the effectiveness of the whole advertising campaign. 

The engagement rate is an indicator of audience reactions to content, but the content itself in this case should be aimed at:

• Consumers who need this product;
• A solvent audience that can purchase the product;
• Product benefits and motivation to buy;
• Maintaining interest in the company's products and services.

Then the ER ratio will be a really important metric and will help you make the right marketing decisions.

There are several ways to calculate the ER. The formulas are simple and approximately the same, but they use different bases and different time intervals in the calculation.

• Based on the number of subscribers

ER = reactions / followers × 100%

The main formula that allows you to understand whether subscribers like the content and whether they are interested in this community. It also helps to assess the quality of subscribers - how interested the users are, and how targeted the audience is. If there are few reactions, and publications do not cause responses, it may be worth analyzing the methods that an influencer uses to attract the audience. 

Using this formula, you can calculate both the overall ER and the engagement rate for individual posts (reactions to a post are substituted into the formula). ER by individual posts helps to assess how interested the audience is in certain topics, and headings and further develop such content to increase engagement and brand loyalty.

• Based on the reach

ERR = responses / coverage × 100%

Shows how interesting the content was to all users who saw it. It doesn't matter if they are subscribers or not. This engagement rate is commonly referred to as ERR - engagement rate by reach or coverage rate. This metric allows you to evaluate the overall quality of the influencer’s publications.

• Based on time interval

ER = Post Reactions per Period / Subscribers per Period × 100%

Shows how the interests of the audience changed within a particular month or during the period of the action, a decrease in demand, or a change in the direction of activity. It allows you to study the decline in activity in time or evaluate the success of a new type of promotion.

What ER is considered good? There is no single answer to this question. But there are average numbers that marketers use:

• Less than 1% – bad;
• From 1% to 3.5% – the average value;
• From 3.5% to 6% is a good level;
• Over 6% – very cool.

Instead of making long calculations, there is a more reliable option - use special services, for example, the BuzzGuru analytics platform. It provides you with access to influencer analytics, automatically calculates the ER indicators, and compares them to other similar accounts.

To know the ER of the influencer you are interested in, you first need to select the social network on the dashboard of our platform:

Next, you only have to insert the name of the creator or select from the millions of available profiles. For example, you can learn the ER of the selected influencer on various platforms. 

• On YouTube:

• On Instagram:

• On TikTok:

As you see, our tool does not only calculate the ER but compares it to the ER of similar accounts and channels, giving you a better understanding of both the average ER for the selected platform and the influencer’s performance. 

Related: How to Check Instagram Engagement Rate & Why It Matters

How many fake followers can an influencer have and how to spot them all?

Despite all the efforts the social media platforms take to fight against cheating, “pumping” an account with the help of fake followers remains the simplest task. In a couple of minutes, a creator can find hundreds of tools in a search engine, including free ones. They promise real followers and meaningful comments, quickly and without blocking. It's a temptation that's hard to resist. The scheme seems to be a win-win: an influencer gains a hundred or two thousand subscribers, and creates the illusion of good engagement with the help of bought likes and comments - and it is already a successful person with a bunch of advertising offers. However, in the vast majority of cases, you can easily recognize such a fake influencer.

1. The number of likes. There is reason to be wary if the number of likes practically does not change depending on the subject of the posts. A beautiful round figure under each publication is an idyll, which is almost impossible to achieve without fake followers. If the number of “likes” at first glance seems adequate, you have to study who left them. Are the vast majority of likes from users with profile photos inappropriate for the target audience, or without them at all? With names in the form of an unreadable set of letters and numbers? Most likely, you should not linger on such an account for a long time; 
2. Comments. A clear red flag is the complete absence of comments. It is suspicious if subscribers are not involved in the conversation, and do not respond to each other - a creator with a live audience usually has a community core that actively communicates with each other. A strange situation is when, with dozens and hundreds of comments, only 5-10% relate to the topic of the post content.
   Your next task is to calculate the percentage of cheated comments. To do this, it is necessary to make a selection of 5–10 posts, preferably including a couple of advertising publications. And let's go read! How to recognize a bot comment? First of all, have a look at whether it corresponds to the subject of the post. Next, turn your attention to semantics. They require verification of the message with the following words and expressions: “Super!”, “Excellent!”, “Wow!”, and “Beauty!”. Often, pre-written comments are stylistically neutral and can go with just about any photo in the world. For example: “very cool photo”, “beautiful frame”, “this is a masterpiece”. Emoji-only comments should also raise questions. 
3. Statistics. Some important metrics will help you to spot fake followers in a creator’s account. They include:

• The number of "likes" under posts. You have to calculate the average and compare it with the average coverage of the publication. It is not a good sign if the number of likes relative to reach is less than 10%. But a figure above 40% is abnormal. However, it should be analyzed in dynamics - perhaps you have found a very high-quality account. 

It’s also strange when every second follower likes a post if it’s not some kind of significant event - a wedding, the birth of a child, and the like. If this happens all the time, then you have either found a content genius or a fan of cheat services. 

• The number of comments on posts. It is necessary to calculate the average indicator and its relation to the average number of “likes”. It should be at least 1%. It is difficult to imagine a situation when an influencer makes a post, whether it is an advertisement, a text with reflections on life or just a beautiful photo, the audience seems to have seen it and even appreciated it, but not even every hundredth gets involved in the discussion. Considering how people on the Internet like to express their opinions😏 
• Reach an audience that is not subscribed to the account. This indicator should not be more than 20-30% on average per post. Is the score higher? This means that either the publication went viral or received an additional promotion through advertising.
• Audience geography. According to our benchmarks, at least 60% of the influencer's followers should be from the country of your target audience. At first, the owners of services for cheating, without hesitation, made a lot of fake accounts with IDs from different countries. And influencers who used such solutions at the beginning of their careers still carry this “international” trail. 

The exception is the profiles of models, athletes, and artists - the celebrities. Their activities imply the possible presence of fans from all over the Earth. 

• Audience age. Usually, marketers prefer to work with influencers whose audience consists of at least 70% of people aged 18-45 years. This does not apply to children's accounts and viners - there will most likely be many subscribers under the age of 18.

As you see, statistics give answers to various questions. But how to collect all the necessary data? How to check influencer demographics? Of course, you can always do it manually, build the diagrams and maybe after a year you will succeed. Or you can opt for the BuzzGuru platform! We have already collected all the info you need to evaluate any influencer in one place.

If you want to study the number of likes and comments for the last 10 posts in an influencer’s account - we have collected this data in a form of a handy chart:

If you need to dig into the influencer demographics, here it is:

We also provide a section with content analytics. It shows the analysis of the likes and comments count and compares it to the indicators of similar accounts:

But if you want to spot a fake influencer without paying attention to all the statistics, our platform has done it for you. We have a special section - “Audience statistics” that quickly shows you 3 main metrics:

• Audience credibility helps to understand if the influencer has a real audience;
• Likes credibility that allows one to see if the likes were purchased;
• Likes from non-followers show how effective this influencer is at reaching outside of the existing audience.

Related: How to Spot Fake Instagram Influencers?

Conclusion

Working with various types of social media influencers is one of the most effective marketing strategies today. This is not only a tool for increasing income, but also working with brand reputation, creating interest in the product, and increasing awareness. 

If you have already tried working with influencers or just thinking about it, try the BuzGuru discovery and analytics platform. We have collected, calculated, and arranged all the data you may need to start a successful collaboration with influencers!