Since Instagram has grown in popularity as a platform for social commerce and influencer marketing, more businesses are taking the time to assess the status of their Instagram influencer team. These “audits” enable influencer relationship managers to assess how well their influencers are performing and indicate any changes that need to be made to their influencer recruiting and campaign planning efforts.
To conduct an effective Instagram influencer audit, you’ll need a dependable method for collecting, organising, and converting results into actionable insights.
Why is there a need to run an Instagram influencer audit?
Audits are not generally thought of as an enjoyable exercise for team members in any industry. But without conducting influencer audits, your team won’t know what’s working and what isn’t.
While doing audits isn’t particularly enjoyable, the insights you may gain from your Instagram influencer audits can be astounding. With this data, you can show a measurable return on investment and fine-tune your influencer marketing plan.
Understanding influencer audit
An influencer audit is a process of assessing an influencer’s impact, quality, and efficacy on a certain social network. In this scenario, we’ll show you how to do Instagram influencer audits.
What are your goals through your influencers?
Before you begin, you must first determine what you aim to accomplish with the help of your influencers. This will help you concentrate on the details that are most important to your influencer marketing approach.
Frequency of running an influencer audit
Most audits are thorough and should only be done once a year or twice a year. However, the better your audit, the less probable it is that you will have to repeat it in a year.
If your business experiences new external conditions, such as a significant upgrade on Instagram, a shift in your overall marketing strategy, or a sudden increase in your influencer marketing budget, the regularity with which you do an influencer audit may alter.
Assistive tools to run an influencer audit
Instagram Profiles
You’ll start with the influencer’s profile page for each Instagram audit. Examining the influencer’s bio, follower count, and posting history will take up most of your audit time.
Fake Influencer Check
Some Instagram users try to buy false followers and engagement in order to gain influencer status faster. Many of these false influencers can be identified by the level of engagement they have.
Instagram Analytics Tools
The account holder has access to many of the greatest Instagram analytics tools. You can ask an influencer for an Instagram Insights report if you feel comfortable doing so.
However, there are some fantastic (and free) Instagram analytics tools that can assist you in obtaining an accurate picture of an influencer’s online success. The following are the two most popular:
- Union Metrics Instagram Account Checkup
- Socialbaker Competitor Analysis
Engagement Rate Calculator
One of the most effective ways to assess an influencer’s efficacy is through engagement. However, not all engagement is equal, and combing through every post of an influencer to assess the quality of their involvement can be laborious.
Check out Cybees’ Engagement Rate Calculator to receive an influencer’s basic engagement metrics and access a complete engagement report to make the process easier.
You can search hashtags (that a certain influencer uses) on Instagram to learn more about an influencer’s target demographic and relevance to your company. Many branded and sponsored hashtags will also reveal how frequently an influencer works with brands in your field.
Hashtag Search and Tracking
On Instagram, you can perform a search on hashtags (that a particular influencer uses) to better understand an influencer’s target audience and relevance to your brand. Many branded and sponsored hashtags will also show how often an influencer collaborates with brands in your industry.
Influencer Lookalike Tool
Finding lookalike influencers is a terrific approach to scaling your programme if you currently have a team of high-performing influencers. This Influencer Lookalike Tool may help you categorize your influencers by kind, size, and style to expedite your recruitment efforts.
Spreadsheets
You’ll need a decent spot to record crucial metrics and compare them to other influencer accounts as you investigate an influencer’s Instagram profile and posts. A spreadsheet is the most effective manual tool for this (Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets).
For a basic audit spreadsheet, you’ll need to record the following information:
- Influencer handle/link
- Influencer name
- Number of posts
- Number of followers
- Engagement rate
- Bio links
- Influencer industry
You should also develop a mechanism to track qualitative indicators like the quality of the influencer’s relationship with their audience, hashtag usage, voice/tone, and brand compatibility. Influencer Mapping is one method of measuring these qualitative measures.
Automation (IRM Platform)
You may need to invest in an influencer relationship management (IRM) platform if you already manage a team of influencers and are becoming bogged down with all the busy work responsibilities. With this level of automation, you’ll be able to execute influencer Instagram audits with fewer clicks and learn more about your present and potential influencers.
Guide for Running an Instagram Influencer Audit for Your Existing Influencers
Step 1 – Define your goals.
Influencers are power users of Social Media who can engage with audiences through genuine, captivating material. Certain influencers and posting strategies will help your business more than others, depending on what you want to achieve with your influencers.
Common influencer objectives are:
- To increase brand awareness
- To generate social proof and brand credibility
- To increase conversions and sales
- To build a library of authentic social media content
- To drive web traffic
- To repurpose influencer content for higher-performing paid ads
- Most likely – a combination of one or more objectives listed above
Step 2 – Perform a GAP analysis for each influencer.
Corporate consultants and accountants regularly utilize a GAP analysis to help their customers align their decision-making with their business goals. A similar impact can be achieved via social media and influencers.
You can immediately see who is fulfilling your objectives and who isn’t by evaluating the performance of your Instagram influencers against your marketing goals and KPIs.
Your audit will show you exactly how and why those influencers who effectively meet your goals are top performers. This information can then be used to fine-tune your influencer recruitment efforts.
A GAP analysis can help you collaborate with those influencers who aren’t meeting expectations to improve performance and achieve better results.
Step 3 – Identify your top-performing influencers.
Take time once you’ve completed your GAP analysis to identify your top-performing Instagram influencers and answer the following questions:
- How long have you been working with those influencers?
- How easy are they to work with?
- What are their audience demographics?
- How large is their audience?
- How might their Instagram bios, post captions, and CTAs set them apart from their peers?
- What tools and guidelines have you provided them that are likely contributing to their success?
Answers to the questions above will help you find more influencers that can replicate the success of your top performers.
Step 4 – Define your most important Instagram metrics.
You should be able to create key performance indicators (KPIs) that track your progress in each campaign based on your goals from Step 1. Attaching your KPIs to what you believe are the most essential Instagram indicators is the greatest way to uncover actual ROI for your influencer program.
The most popular Instagram metrics to measure are:
- Views/impressions
- Link clicks and click-through rates (CTRs)
- Likes
- Comments
- Shares
- Sales/conversions
Step 5 – Request an Instagram Insights report.
Your influencers should have their own Instagram Insights dashboard, which they should be able to access. Many influencers will gladly share their insights with you. In your influencer audits, these reports will save you a lot of time.
Disclaimer: An Instagram Insights report is only available to those who have a Business or Creator account.
Step 6 – Calculate engagement rate.
The engagement rate of an influencer reflects how likely followers are to react, comment, or interact with that influencer’s postings. You can use the formula below to calculate your engagement rate, or you can use our free Engagement Rate Calculator here.
Engagement Rate = Number of likes, comments, and shares / Number of followers
Step 7 – Examine the quality of influencer engagement.
Following the calculation of each influencer’s engagement rate, you should evaluate the sort of engagement. Pulling a few posts and reading all of the comments is a wonderful method to do this.
Fake involvement is easy to notice when looking at post comments up close. Users who pay for followers and engagement frequently leave comments that are either uninformative or have significant language and spelling problems.
Next, you may gain a better understanding of an influencer’s relationship with his or her audience by watching how they interact with their followers. The best influencers usually answer as many comments and queries as possible from their followers.
Step 8 – Take a look at the influencer’s activity on other social media channels.
It’s not always enough to look at an influencer’s Instagram account to get the complete picture. As a result, it’s a good idea to keep track of any other channel where your influencers are active.
This activity will not only assist you in better understanding an influencer’s total reach, but it may also reveal social media opportunities that you were previously unaware of.
Step 9 – Rate the influencer’s posting frequency and consistency.
Professionalism does not apply to all influencers. Serious influencers publish high-quality content on a regular basis, even if it is less frequent than an influencer who shares frequently but without a strategy.
Additionally, you don’t want influencers that just publish when a brand pays them to. Influencers will share photographs and videos that support their values and lifestyle regardless of how often they receive brand sponsorships to maintain authenticity and a strong Instagram presence.
Step 10 – Note the influencer’s ability to leverage Instagram features.
Instagram continues to roll out new features and improvements, such as ephemeral content and augmented reality (AR) filters. While it isn’t required for all of your influencers to know how to utilise every Instagram feature, it is useful to know which of your influencers are particularly skilled with specific Instagram content tools.
Guide for Running an Instagram Influencer Audit Before Recruiting an Influencer
Many of the audit procedures you completed on your existing influencers apply to influencer recruiting as well.
Step 1 – Recap: Define your goals.
You must enumerate your objectives and then transform them into measurable KPIs, regardless of the marketing technique or instrument you utilise.
Step 2 – Examine the influencer landscape.
If you haven’t already, it’s a good idea to familiarise yourself with the influencers in your business. Searching for relevant hashtags is sometimes the best approach to exploring the influencer landscape on Instagram.
You can also navigate to “Tagged” on a competitor’s Instagram page to discover which influencers or ambassadors have tagged that company in their posts.
You can also check your own Tagged posts to discover if any influencers have mentioned you without your permission.
Finally, see who certain influencers are following, especially ones you admire. Each of these strategies will assist you in gaining a better understanding of what’s available and establishing a benchmark for what to expect. If you’re utilising Cybees’ influencer marketing platform, the software will keep track of your Instagram influencer lists for you and allow you to search by keyword, audience, industry, and other criteria.
Step 3 – Identify influencers that you like.
It can help you identify more influencers like them if you can figure out who your ideal influencer is. Answer the following questions to find out what stands out about that influencer:
- What are their audience demographics?
- How large is their audience?
- How might their Instagram bios, post captions, and CTAs set them apart from their peers?
- How often do they promote the brands that they love?
- What influencers do they follow?
Step 4 – Recap: Define your most important Instagram metrics.
By way of a recap, the following are the most popular Instagram influencer metrics that you should track:
- Views/impressions
- Likes
- Comments
- Number of followers
- Shares (posts and hashtags)
Step 5 – Perform influencer mapping for your favorite influencers.
Because Instagram analytics numbers, many of them are quantitative. Non-numerical measures, such as the quality of audience engagement or the influencer’s voice/tone, are equally as essential.
Influencer mapping is a popular approach to incorporating qualitative indicators into your influencer audit. Influencer traits that are more difficult to describe, such as brand capacity, authority, and ability to interact with followers, can be measured using this method.
Step 6 – Recap: Calculate engagement rate.
The formula below can be used to manually compute an influencer’s engagement rate, or you can use our free Engagement Rate Calculator here.
Engagement Rate = Number of likes, comments, and shares / Number of followers
Step 7 – Recap: Examine the quality of influencer engagement.
It’s crucial to keep in mind that some people on social media try to fake participation. Also, even if their interaction rate looks to be high, true influencers don’t necessarily have high-quality engagement. You’ll have a better grasp of how connected that influencer is with your audience if you look at follower engagement more closely.
Step 8 – Recap: Take a look at the influencer’s activity on other social media channels.
Although Instagram is a powerful medium for social commerce and influencer marketing, some influencers can effectively expand their reach by using other channels. Knowing which influencers are multi-channel might assist you in better recruiting and campaign planning.
Step 9 – Recap: Rate the influencer’s posting frequency and consistency.
Influencers that post often for a short amount of time and then disappear for long lengths of time may not be trustworthy for your brand. Professional influencers must maintain a high level of consistency.
Step 10 – Recap: Note the influencer’s ability to leverage Instagram features.
Skilled Instagram influencers may take advantage of a variety of capabilities, like hosting Live events, creating bespoke AR filters, creating stunning video reels, and more.
Look for ways to work smarter, not harder, when you scale your Instagram influencer program.
An influencer Instagram audit is designed to assess your influencer team, their effectiveness, and the particular reasons why some posts perform better than others. Audits are time-consuming, but they yield valuable information that can help you improve the effectiveness of your influencer programme.
It’s critical to develop ways to do more with less in order to avoid tedium. You can run influencer audits considerably faster and have more time to design and execute better campaigns if you use an automation solution like Cybees.