What to Look For in an Influencer Partnership

We recently hosted the second Navigating the Unknown event along with the DMZ and Robin Des Bois (RDB). These events are geared towards SMBs and we first introduced them during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in North America to bring in industry experts to help SMBs navigate during these uncertain times. Our recent event had multiple panels including one on Influencer Marketing. One of the questions asked during the panel was, “what do you look for in an influencer partnership?”

Farokh Sarmad, CEO of Goodlife Media, entrepreneur and influencer with over 10,000,000 followers across social media said the most important thing when looking for influencer partnerships is authenticity.

With authenticity, there’s two different aspects that need to be considered. Firstly, an influencer’s engagement rate.

You want to make sure that they have authentic engagement. Are their followers, likes and comments real or are they bots?

This has become more difficult to do since Instagram started hiding the total number of likes but Farokh said there are still a couple of quick ways you can verify an accounts authenticity.

You can read their comments. Are their comments all generic and spammy? If so, these are accounts you want to avoid.

You can look at video views. Instagram may have hidden likes but video views are still public. If someone has 1 million followers but only gets 2,000 views, you know something isn’t adding up.

Those are a couple of quick ways to verify the authenticity of a creator’s engagement but you can also use tools, including our platform SocialRank that shows you backend data from platforms like Instagram and Twitter to help you vet the creators you want to partner with.

At the end of the day, Farokh says if you add up the different metrics available (followers, views, comments, etc.) and you use common sense, you’ll likely do okay. If something feels off to you, you’re probably right.

“Are you really an influencer if you don’t have any influence?”

Authenticity also comes into play with the relationship between influencer and their followers. Are they capable of having an impact when they make a post?

It’s better to hire a micro influencer with 500 followers who has a trusting and loyal audience and will lead to 250 conversions as opposed to an account with 1,000,000 followers that only leads to two conversions. Only two conversions with 1,000,000 followers may seem crazy but Farokh has seen it happen.

The relationship the influencer has with their fans and followers will drastically change the success your campaign will have. Whether or not an influencer actually has influence is the most important thing to look for vetting influencers to partner with.