Essential Influencer Metrics: Follower Quality

At a glance, an influencer with a high number of followers may appear promising, but what if 90% of their followers are bots or fake or inactive profiles?

Or what if they’re real, but they follow millions of other accounts which saturate their feed, meaning your content goes by unnoticed?

A high number of followers can be a significant metric, but it’s often not very effective when trying to reach certain social media objectives, hence why we need to carefully assess influencers’ follower quality so that our campaign is a success.

How Can You Evaluate Follower Quality?

Followers are so much more than just a number. Analyzing an influencer’s followers is without a doubt a very important metric. This metric, however, must be assessed qualitatively.

In order to evaluate follower quality, we have to assess whether or not they’re active on social media; do they interact, share, view or click on your content? In other words, do they give life to your feed?

Follower Quality: this metric specifies the quality of an influencer’s public, taking into account the number of bots or inactive profiles that follow them.

Influencity’s software calculates this metric based on unrealistic behavior or repetitive patterns, such as an exaggerated number of likes, the time of the likes, following certain hashtags with similar patterns and unpersonalized comments. This way we can tell the fake profiles from the real.

Quality vs. Doubtful Followers

A good follower:
● Is active: they login on a regular basis
● Is committed: they frequently interact with your content, either by commenting, liking or sharing.
● Follows a limited number of accounts: yes, this is important. The more accounts followed, the least likely it is that the user will see your post. For that reason, the most valued followers are those that follow between 101 and 250 accounts. That way, the follower’s feed won’t be saturated with excess content.

A bad follower:

● Is inactive: they haven’t logged into their account for over 30 days.
● Is not committed: they don’t post in their own account or interact with others.
● Follows too many accounts: by following a high number of accounts, their feed will be filled to the brim and your content may not make the cut.
● Has lots of fake followers: followers who have been bought and don’t interact organically. Sometimes these followers aren’t even humans, but bots, which are created by a script and therefore cannot interact with content.

How Can You Get Quality Followers?

Now that you know the importance of follower quality and the difference between the good and the bad, the next step is knowing how to get quality followers in order to create an active community that shares, likes and generally interacts with your content.

First things first; you need to define your target audience. There’s no point in creating content if you’ve got no one to market it to. Once you’ve figured that out, you can begin to create your content strategy. You should always try to make followers fall in love with your brand and encourage engagement.

Relationships with quality followers isn’t something that can be achieved overnight. It requires time and interesting content. With Influencer Marketing, just as in real life, empathy is key for maintaining relationships and building trust. In order to have an active timeline, try to generate interesting debates, launch competitions, carry out questionnaires in an attempt to get to know your followers and, most importantly, encourage conversation and respond to their problems or needs.

You may think that contracting a top influencer is going to solve all of your problems, but quite often microinfluencers are the recipe to success, since their high levels of interaction with followers mean that their public is well formed and followers feel they can identify with them.

And finally, don’t forget to analyse your followers and clean up your community in order
to keep it active and up-to-date.