WHAT MAKES A GOOD INFLUENCER?

In the age of digital marketing, influencers play a vital role in creating brand awareness and generating leads. The main reason for that is people tend to trust the recommendations of influencers because of their relatability and popularity. But what determines the success of an influencer? Follower count or engagement rate.

One can be easily deceived by the massive number of followers an influencer has, but the real question is: are those followers even organic? Or are they just paid? It does the brand no good if the followers are not real and do not engage with the content created by the influencer.

Engagement is defined as the likes, shares, and comments on a post, and when you divide it by the number of people seeing that content, you get the engagement rate. It tells us how much the followers care about the content that the influencer posts. You can have thousands or even millions of followers; but if the engagement rate is not good, the number of followers hold no importance or benefit.

An influencer is called an influencer because they have the power to influence an action. That is why having a good engagement rate is better than having a vast number of followers – Quality over quantity.

This means having quality followers is immensely important. They can be simply defined as active accounts that engage with your content rather than fake audiences or passive user handles, who are just sitting as a number on your profile. To get a real picture of this, WALEE with the help of its AI and social listening tools has developed a proprietary scoring method called IQS (influencer Quality Score). This has increased the reliability of comparison across influencer categories and can help assess the quality following of an influencer whether he or she is a mega, micro, or nano influencer with respect to following.

Each influencer has its own niche and passion points. It is important to choose the content creator relevant to the subject of the campaign and not just based on their popularity. For instance, if your campaign is related to cricket then Wasim Akram would be the right choice, not Mathira.

While some brands still rely on the number of followers an influencer has as their main metric for success, more and more brands are turning to engagement rate as their primary metric. And rightfully so! The number of followers an influencer has doesn’t always equate to engagement. Sometimes it’s quite the opposite. 

Unless it is just a mass awareness campaign with no set KPIs, brands prefer to work with an influencer that will help them in increasing the number of conversions/engagements, or any other KPI that they have set.

Try and figure out depending on your target group and its age bracket what are the key passion points of engagement for your TG. These data points will help you select the right content creators for your next campaign.