Just because someone has a million followers, doesn’t mean your campaign will be successful. They might have a large following, but can they influence their audience to do something, like leave a comment, participate in a giveaway, or even buy?
Taking a step back, we need to ask: are the million followers even real? Fake influencers are aplenty. We don’t want to waste our money on campaigns that get no returns.
This is why we need to evaluate the list we’ve just created. Before we even do any outreach, we need to make sure that these are the influencers we really want to work with. That they represent our brand well, can create the type of content we want, and actually have the ability to help us achieve the KPIs we’ve set.
In The Influence Code, Amanda Russell—an influencer and influencer marketing expert—suggests evaluating five Rs:
Reach
Recognition
Reference
Relevance
Resonance
1. Reach
This is the total size of the influencer’s followings across all platforms.
Most businesses make the mistake of focusing only on this metric. It’s understandable as this is the most publicly available metric. But treat this as a starting point.
Not only is this number easy to ‘manufacture’, the number of followers doesn’t equate to actual reach either.
Spotting fake reach
Reach is the easiest metric to fake. Go to sites like Fiverr and you’ll see services that promise to get you X number of followers overnight. The New York Times even wrote an article in 2018 about the black market of fake followers.
The workload like this whatsapp number list allows both the vendor and the affiliate to focus on. Clicks are the number of clicks coming to your website’s URL from organic search results.
Always make sure you look carefully into an influencer’s following.
Do their followers have weird usernames, like a long list of numbers?
Do their followers have an empty display picture?
Do their followers have any posts?
Do their followers have zero followers themselves, yet follow a lot of other people?
These are all red flags. Here’s an example:
Now, just because an influencer has fake followers, doesn’t mean they bought them. As an account grows in size, it becomes impossible to avoid fake followers and social media bots. Just make sure it is not a significant percentage of their followers. A quick way to check could be to use a tool like SparkToro’s Fake Followers Audit (Twitter only) or HypeAuditor’s Instagram Audit.
2. Recognition
This is how ‘known’ or ‘recognizable’ the influencer is in the niche.
They don’t have to be on a Hollywood actor’s fame level, but they should be known to your target audience. Even if they’re not so well-known, are their expertise, credentials or accolades recognizable?