Social media is a runway, and every brand is working hard to stand out.
One way to maximize your chances of standing is to arm yourself with data, lots of it, and use it wisely to make informed decisions for your brand. For instance, you can use data - or more specifically content creators insights - to choose the right influencers to collaborate with.
This will help you nurture a talent-scouting mindset and build your strategy before even reaching out to a specific creator to initiate a future collaboration.
Getting and using content creators insights
How to leverage content creators insights to reach the right influencers
How to leverage content creators insights to reach the right influencers
If you seek a future, successful collaboration with influencers, the possibilities may seem endless.
Keep in mind: influencers come at a cost, so it’s not a good idea to get this wrong if you are a small or medium-sized business.
This list of key questions might help you narrow down your search:
- How big is their following, and how fast is it growing?
- Do they have an active community? In other words, how high is their engagement rate?
- How often do they post? Multiple times a day, daily, weekly?
- What type of influencer they are - micro/organic, rising star (fast-growing), a key opinion leader or a celebrity influencer?
- Are they active in a specific niche or industry or do they tackle a wide variety of topics, follow trends and have more of a general audience?
- Is their voice aligned with your brand voice? Is it positive, inspirational, humorous or is it dark and satirical?
The answers to these questions are your content creators insights.
Soon enough, you will be able to find these stategic insights inside a new Socialinsider tool, designed specifically to eliminate manual work, help you discover creators that mention your brand on social media and collect valuable information on them.
But for now, let’s stick to the tools we do have.
Once you have a few potential influencer matches in your sights, it’s time to do some in-depth research on them.
Socialinsider can help you gather content creators insights and use them to create highly personalized offers for your potential influencers.
There’s nothing influencers hate more than receiving generic messages, offers or PR gifts. That’s why it’s essential to do your homework and reach out only when you’re ready to make a unique pitch.
At this point, I think it would be more useful to examine a real use case.
Take Lily Pebbles, for instance. She’s a London-based mid-sized influencer that mainly focuses on beauty and lifestyle. She started out as a YouTuber but over the years, she has attracted a considerable following on Instagram and TikTok, as well.
If you had a beauty or clothing brand that you wanted to promote via influencer marketing, then Lily Pebbles might just be the right match for you.
But, before extending an offer for a collaboration, it would be wise to do some research. In other words, take a close look at your influencer’s stats.
Here are some of the most important content creators insights you should check before making a choice:
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Active channels
Your brand might be active on one single social media platform, several platforms or even all of them. It’s up to you where you want to launch an influencer campaign, just make sure the channel you choose coincides with your influencers’ most active channel.
Otherwise, you run the risk of investing too much time and effort into a campaign that won’t reach as many people as you want.
In Lily Pebbles’ case, her oldest and most popular channel is YouTube. However, Instagram and TikTok are very quickly catching up.
But that’s not enough information. You need more in-depth, cross-channel analytics to get a full picture of your influencer’s current status.
Wondering which channel to target? Socialinsider can help clear things up. Here’s how you unlock all the brand-level data you want:
- Add the relevant social profiles
- Group them together to form a Brand
- Select the Brand you created from the sidebar
- Check out all the juicy brand-level analytics for your influencers
In the Brand Overview tab, you can compare follower counts, engagement rates and the number of posts between channels (for your chosen time range), and figure out what channel you should target for your influencer campaign.
If seeing this cross-channel data side by side is not enough, then maybe some charts will help.
Here you can track the distribution of published posts across all three channels, see where Lily Pebbles tends to post most often. In this case, Instagram seems to be her most active channel.
Or maybe you want to find out where her community is most engaged:
Again, Instagram seems to be the winner, driving most of her engagement. If your brand is also active on Instagram, then you should consider launching your campaign on this platform.
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Video activity
If you’re thinking of launching a video-first or video-only influencer campaign, you might want to take a look at the influencer’s video views for each channel to find out where their videos are getting the highest number of views.
In this case, Lily’s videos are getting the most views on Instagram (7M in the last 6 months):
Followed by TikTok with 1.5M plays:
And YouTube with 1.1M views:
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Community size
Audience size isn’t everything, but it sure counts towards having a bigger reach when it comes to influencer campaigns.
With Socialinsider, you can bypass the hurdle of checking all the native app analytics and see, at a glance, which one of your influencer’s channels has the biggest number of fans.
In this case, because YouTube is Lily's first and oldest channel, it has the largest number of followers. However, Instagram is not far behind. And TikTok is growing at a fast pace.
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Content & tone of voice
Now, here comes the hard part. By hard, I mean hard to quantify. You can measure all sorts of things - followers, reach, impressions, engagement, posting times, video views etc.
What data and charts cannot capture (yet) is a creator’s particular tone of voice and the type of content they share (beyond post types).
Brands and creators should ideally be aligned in terms of tone of voice, creative vision and social awareness, so it's important to know where your influencer stands before reaching out.
For this particular mission, it’s best to prepare for some detective work, sifting through the influencers’ best-performing posts and see what made them so good.
Take some time to watch some of their videos, read their captions and take a look at how they interact with their community in the comments.
To easily find all your influencers posts for the selected time period and the channels you added in Socialinsider, go to the Posts tab in the Brand section. You can sort and filter the list to only show what you’re interested in (most engaging posts or maybe just videos).
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Sponsored posts
Before reaching out to an influencer, it might be smart to find out what other brands they have collaborated with in the past.
There’s no way to see that in Socialinsider (yet) but you can get some ideas by taking a look at the creator’s most popular hashtags (on Instagram and TikTok):
Instantly, I can see that one of Lily’s top hashtags on Instagram is #ardenambassador, which means she’s previously worked with the beauty brand Elizabeth Arden.
For extra clarity, if you click on that specific hashtag, you can see the exact post(s) that feature(s) it.
Final thoughts
Leveraging content creators insights is an excellent way to arm yourself with all the right data before reaching out to influencers for a future collaboration.
Like I mentioned before, there’s nothing influencers despise more than being sent generic gifts, messages or offers, so you have to make it clear why you’re interested in them and that you’re very much aware of their social media presence.
Be sure to leverage creators insights to get the best influencers to come work with you!
