Business benefits
Start an influencer spreadsheet with columns for Name, Social purpose match, Platform focus, Creativity, Style, Competitor collaborations, Brand safety, and Compliance.
If you have an influencer shortlist spreadsheet, add the columns to this or start a new tab within the spreadsheet so that all your influencer research is centrally located.
Score each influencer from 0-7 for each column.
Distill your brand’s role on social media to one sentence communicating what you’re trying to achieve and how you’re trying to achieve it.
Some common brand roles in social media include:
- Brand awareness: Social media provides the reach you need to increase awareness of your brand.
- Brand perception: Social media can help make your brand feel more human and demonstrate authenticity.
- Direct response outcomes: Social media drives traffic to your landing pages or website.
For example, Our brand uses social media for direct response outcomes, so we create social content with strong calls to action on platforms like LinkedIn that allow links to drive traffic to our website.
Score each influencer in your list against your brand’s role in social statement on a scale of 0-7 for Social purpose match and Platform focus, where 0 is not a match and 7 is best match.
To use Social Blade to help determine Platform focus, type in the influencer’s name, see which platform’s results show up first for that influencer, and view all the accounts they have listed on the top right of their page.
Assess the influencers’ creativity, effort, and skills based on the types of posts they frequently make and the originality of their content. Enter a score in Creativity.
Look at their recent posts and consider:
- Does this format typically take a lot of time and planning, like a long, structured video?
- What is this influencer’s unique talent or skill?
- How does the influencer engage and interact with their audience?
- Does the influencer have their own branding and unique voice?
Check how often each influencer on your list has worked with competitors. Assign a weighted score in Competitor collaborations that reflects your comfort level and the frequency of collaborations.
Decide whether collaborations with competitors are a conflict or a source of credibility for influencers representing your brand.
For example, if your brand is uncomfortable with competitor collaborations and considers them an unnecessary risk, you’d give a low score to influencers who have frequently worked with competitors. If your brand is comfortable with competitor collaborations and considers them a good thing, you’d give a high score to influencers who have frequently worked with competitors.
To verify competitor collaborations, check your influencer search platform’s influencer report for a section on brand mentions or companies they’ve worked with. In HypeAuditor, it’s in the Brand Mentions section.
Look through each influencer’s posts and weigh their style, tone, and values against those of your brand. Give each a score in Style indicating how well they match.
Consider characteristics like:
- Are their pictures colorful, neutral, or minimalistic?
- Are the captions they write funny or serious?
- Do they share your values? For example, if your brand wants a family-friendly image, make note of and avoid influencers who frequently use explicit language in their captions or videos.
Search "[influencer name] + controversy" in a search engine. Enter a score in Brand safety from 0-7, with a higher score indicating less or no risk to brand safety.
Look for results that would be problematic for your brand.
For example, when you Google “Logan Paul controversy,” you will see news articles, forum posts, and social media comments about his problematic past. Avoid influencers who don’t share your brand values or are untrustworthy.
Look through recent posts from each influencer for obvious disclosures. Give a higher score in Compliance to influencers who are consistently compliant with influencer guidelines and best practices for influencer marketing.
Disclosures should be clear and conspicuous. On Instagram, look for the Paid Partnership with [brand] banner on posts where the influencer seems to be promoting a specific product. Also look for terms like ad, advertisement, or sponsored.
Sum each qualitative variable and to generate a Total brand fit score for each influencer. Use the brand fit score as a quick guide to prioritize influencers.
Your brand may still choose to work with an influencer, even if an influencer has a low score in some categories. When certain qualitative variables are especially important to your brand, you can use a custom formula to weight specific criteria. For example, if creativity is your company’s primary concern, you might use a formula that looks like = fit + voice + competitors + (2 * creativity) + skills.
Narrow your shortlist to include about 2 times as many influencers as you can budget for, based on the Total brand fit.
Remove influencers who will never be a good fit, like ones whose values don’t match your company. If an influencer just isn’t a good fit for one specific campaign, consider keeping their information in a separate spreadsheet for a future campaign.