13 min read
| October 15, 2022
An audience quality score is one of the most valuable metrics for establishing how successful an influencer might be at promoting your campaign. It helps you evaluate an influencer’s audience in detail so that you can determine how likely it is that their followers will be interested in and engage with your brand. The score takes into account their performance, the authenticity of their audience, the growth rate of their following, and how engaged their followers are.
Let’s take a look at what an audience quality score is, how you calculate it, and how using this influencer marketing KPI can benefit your influencer marketing campaign.
What Is an Audience Quality Score?
The best way to ensure that your influencer campaign is a success is to collaborate with an influencer that has a good quality audience.
Let’s start by looking at what we mean by a quality audience.
A quality audience is one that is made up of real, genuine followers. This is vital because there are many fake accounts floating around these days, so you can’t always trust an influencer’s follower count. You need to make sure that the people that follow them are real, not ghost accounts, fake profiles, or bots.
A quality audience also relates to subjective matters. In other words, whether the audience is likely to be interested in your brand and engage with it. Are they active? Do they interact with the influencer? Do they follow so many other accounts that your sponsored posts are likely to get lost in their news feeds?
An audience quality score is a metric used to establish the quality of an influencer’s social media account based on a number of factors. By using this score, you can make sure that an influencer’s audience is both real and likely to engage with your brand, helping you launch a successful influencer marketing campaign.
How Do You Calculate an Audience Quality Score?
The quality of an influencer’s audience helps you determine if they are as good as they say they are. The calculation takes into account a number of aspects, including engagement rates, follower activities, and profile information (i.e., if the profile has a real name or a handle with a random string of numbers and letters) . You can see this metric and others when you analyze an influencer’s profile with an influencer marketing platform.
When you analyze a profile with Influencity, for example, an influencer’s audience is divided into two categories: Nice Followers (purple) and Doubtful Followers (pink). Doubtful followers are accounts that are either inactive or bots. Generally speaking, an influencer should have at least an 80% quality rating.
Another great tool for avoiding doubtful influencers without having to analyze each individual profile is running a search on the Discover page. Just select the ‘Only credible accounts’ filter then run your search. That way, only influencers with an 80% Nice Follower Quality rating will be included in your results.
How Can it Benefit Your Influencer Marketing Campaigns?
Calculating an influencer’s audience quality score can have a huge impact on the success of your influencer campaign. The main reason for this is that if an influencer doesn’t have a quality audience, then the quality of your campaign will be poor, too.
The best way to make a positive impact with your campaigns is to collaborate with influencers that have a large audience of real accounts that will interact and engage with your brand. You need to work with an influencer who has organically grown their audience over time because their followers have a genuine interest in what they have to say.
In turn, if you leap into a collaboration with an influencer without conducting the right checks because you trust their high follower count on face value, then your campaign runs the risk of falling flat. You might get lucky, but if an influencer has grown their audience by purchasing fake accounts and bots, then you won’t generate any interaction during your campaign and your ROI will be minimal at best.
Conducting a thorough analysis of an influencer’s performance and influencer analytics, including their audience quality score, is the safest way to ensure that your campaign will reach an audience of real people with a genuine interest in what your brand has to offer.
