What is an engaged community and how to verify its involvement?
We hear more and more often that in influencer marketing the most important thing is commitment. And this is of course true, because it is the basis for determining the credibility and effectiveness of an influencer. However, to benefit from this truth, it is important to know why it is so and how to test it.
Commitment is credibility
In the era of buying followers, a committed community very often makes an influencer more credible. To explain this best, I will use a metaphor.
Imagine an influencer is a speaker who tells stories to his audience. When he makes jokes, the audience laughs, people support him, applaud him, and sometimes his listeners get so involved that they say something for themselves. In the world of social media, likes, hearts and comments are the equivalents. And how will the audience behave when purchased mannequins sit in the hall during the presentation instead of real people? Exactly how the audience of the creator who bought the followers behaves. Very often this audience is silent.
So what if the influencer has accumulated 10,000. Instagram users who follow him, if there are about 100 hearts and a few comments under his photos. You will successfully find accounts that do not have 2,000. observers, and achieve similar or better results.
How to research engagement
What does it all mean to you? Regardless of whether the followers were bought or not, if they are silent and not engaging with the influencer’s content, there is a good chance that they will not take advantage of his recommendations and your influencer marketing will turn out to be ineffective.
Check your engagement rate
Your engagement rate will help you assess the chances of your influencer marketing being effective. In various types of tools (such as Influtool or IGBlade) you will usually find it under the name “engagement rate” or “average engage”. The exact formula for calculating the coefficient can differ, so it happens that sometimes some tools show slightly different values, but generally it is the ratio of the number of interactions to the number of followers.
Obviously, the larger the account is, the lower the engagement rate will be. In addition, some topics are more engaging than others, so in some industries it is easier to obtain a high rate. So it is difficult to give here one “golden number”, which will be adequate in every case. So it’s best to check different creators within one category and on that basis determine what ratio will be satisfactory for you.
Influencer marketing isn’t all about numbers
Once you have the quantitative data, do a thorough account analysis and thus check the credibility of the influencer. If the comments under the photos of the creator you want to offer cooperation to are dominated by emojis or incentives to follow commenting profiles, then this is not a real commitment to the content either. Reliable comments refer directly to the photo, video or description published by the creator.
Remember that it is also worth checking if the influencer is also active in other places on the network. It is worth taking a look at, even if you do not plan to use these spaces in cooperation. Valuable knowledge may be waiting for you there.
When I see that an influencer has a Patronite account, I go in there and see how many people have decided to pay him monthly to support his work. If there are many of these people, it is proof that the creator has gathered a community involved in his work and that my campaign has a good chance of being successful.
Combine what you’ve learned
Once you have the data from quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis, all you have to do is combine the information. If the collected material has made the influencer credible in your eyes and you can consider that the influencer community with which you want to cooperate is engaged, you have a very good chance of successful cooperation. If the collected data made you have doubts, it is worth considering finding another influencer.
