Nothing feels worse than spending weeks negotiating content with a YouTube or Instagram influencer only to find out that, although the content itself is great, the engagement they promised you doesn’t exactly match the expectation that was set.
Fortunately, there are a few little processes you can put into place to ensure that you book creators that legitimately generate a ton of engagement from their audience and more attention to your brand.
First, it’s important to break it all down
What is Engagement?
Engagement is essentially a value that represents all the activity on a post. Simply put, it’s how a creator’s followers interact with them whenever they post.
Engagement can be anything from:
- Likes
- Comments
- Shares
- Views
An easy way to calculate engagement is to use the following formula:
Engagement Rate = Total Engagement (Likes + Comments) / Total Followers x 100
Some industry-standard guidelines to help you out when benchmarking your stable of creators:
- Less than 1% = poor engagement
- Between 1% and 3.5% = fair/average engagement
- Between 3.5% and 6% = good engagement
- Above 6% = excellent engagement
Before working with an influencer, take some time to scroll through their profile and calculate the average engagement across their last ten or fifteen posts or so. If you consistently see poor engagement then it probably means they -- perhaps -- bought their followers or they used a bot to artificially boost their profile. Not cool!
Why is Engagement Important?
Engagement is an important number to consider when thinking about any influencer partnership, perhaps even more than reach. Unlike reach, engagement can help you determine the ROI of a post by getting a better idea of how well a piece of content resonates with the particular audience you’re trying to reach. A highly engaging post also means that the content is more likely to succeed if you decide to license that post for amplification across Instagram or Facebook.
A common mistake many experts in charge of curating influencers to supercharge their marketing campaigns make is blowing their budget on creators with a massive amount of subscribers or followers.
Here’s a quick example of data from over 600 videos from creators sampled from our platform:
(Data gathered from 620+ Campaigns Run on the Grapevine Platform)
As you can see, in the case of YouTube, click-through-rates (CTR) decrease the more subscribers a creator has. Obviously, it’s up to you to determine what’s better for your brand. The Grapevine approach recommends creators on the “power-middle” (100k-500k) followers with healthy followers and content that’s niche enough to be engaging but broad enough that it has a wide appeal.
Grapevine Engagement Score: Let us Do the Math For You
The Grapevine Influencer Marketing Platform now features engagement score calculations right on our Discover dashboard. Not only will you be able to browse influencers just like before, but you can also understand a measure of their engagement without having to scroll through their Instagram profile and input numbers on a spreadsheet:
When you build an influencer marketing campaign on Grapevine, knowing just how far an influencer post can take your brand with the engagement they inspire can be a massive time saver. Time better spent ideating on your next awesome campaign.
If you think you’re ready to dive into the world of influencer marketing, don’t hesitate to reach out to us!