Analyze Influencers and Influencer Campaigns with These Social Metrics

You might be asking: How can you analyze influencers better? What analysis can be done to better prove the success of influencer campaigns?

In 2020, influencer marketing will cost $1000 to $1 million per post. And too often influencer success measurement relies solely on short term vanity metrics for social influencers such as likes and shares.

It isn’t just about how many people took a tenth-of-a-second to like a post or the amount of people who pressed share.

The questions you should be answering are:

1. Are your influencers influencing the consumers of your brand in the way you want them to?
2. Is the message they’re giving in their post the correct based on the ask?
3. When you analyze the comments on the post, are they responding in a way that helps you determine if your message resonated?
4. Are you seeing an overall lift in key metrics for your brand?

Insights with social listening provide you with new metrics that go beyond the typical likes and shares and help you better measure success by analyzing the conversational analytics available within the post comments. That way you can go much further than the average influencer analysis tool.

In this article, we will show you the metrics you need to plan and analyze your influencer marketing and advertising efforts. Then you’ll see a real world use case of a major shoe brand effectively measuring influencers using these metrics. And we’ll leave you with a couple of key considerations.

Let’s start by discussing the better metrics to use for influencer campaigns to show ROI. Here are the new metric types you need to measure influencers: 

Engagement Metrics

Engagement metrics with social listening go much further than basic social media tools. Yes, it’s nice to be thumb-stopping or get a ton of likes on your Instagram influencer campaigns. But what you want to know is who is talking, what people are saying, and why.

Engagement metrics provided by social listening go the extra mile to bring you actionable insight. Here’s a guide to the engagement metrics you’ll need to step up your influencer game:

Emotion Metrics

You can go further than just positive or negative comments with social listening. Taking a look at psychology-based emotions expressed by your audiences will help you gather even more pertinent insight on the success of your influencer marketing.

Here’s a look at the types of emotional analysis can be done and what each metric provides:

Consideration Metrics

Last but not least, you can take these influencer metrics further to find out if your influencers are pushing people to act or behave in a certain way.

Consideration metrics show you whether audiences’ comments related to certain campaigns showed markers of key intent-based actions like intent to purchase, recently purchased, loyalty or churn. 

Here’s the guide to consideration metrics within social listening:

For example, in our recent social insights report on Gen Z purchasing behaviors, we compared three different influencers against each other by analyzing the comments on the individual influencer post. 

Here you can see that each influencer post generates different levels of engagement. Kendall Jenner’s post about Adidas drove the lowest amount of purchase intent conversation while Summer McKeen’s post drove the most with 13% of the comments on the post talking about making a purchase.

So, to recap, you need to go beyond likes and shares to analyze conversational engagements, emotions and consideration expressed by audiences.

Next, we have a few more considerations you must take into account:

Real-World Example: Run Happy Influencer Campaign From M Booth and Brooks Running

When strategy agency M Booth reported on the success of influencer campaigns for Brooks Running, they used social listening with Infegy Atlas to perfectly spell out how well the Run Happy Ambassadors performed:

It’s clear here that the influencers were following through on the ask and, in doing so, were generating positive buzz from the campaign.

With social listening tools, you can do more than just get analytics on the campaign. You can actually understand what audiences do and how they act in response to the campaign. Let’s briefly discuss this important capability.

When we looked at how people discussed Brooks Running from one month to another after growing their influencer campaign, you could see that the Brooks Running brand started to push ahead, increasing their share of voice against competitors’ influencers from 46% to 50%:

Something else for you to consider: more than just measuring share-of-voice, you can use the metrics listed earlier to conduct in-depth analysis on the audience’s reactions to the campaigns.

Social listening allows you get the engagement, emotion and consideration data discussed in this article for the actual comments on the influencer posts. 

This enables you to find out:

• Which types of people are commenting? What are their lifestyles, interests, pain points?
• Did audiences respond positively or negatively?
• Do they use specific emojis or positive phrases?
• Do they “love” the influencers? Does the product bring them joy?
• Do they ask, “where can I buy this?!”

This a major reason for going further than the typical influencer marketing tools to use social listening to diagnose how audiences actually behave in response to the influencer campaign.

Doing so will allow you to get a much better understanding of the influencer campaign ROI.

Conclusion

The most essential role of social listening metrics like the ones outlined in this article are finding out how the audiences receive your influencer campaigns, and more importantly how they act.

Too many influencer tools focus squarely on the vanity metrics of likes and shares to analyze influencer campaigns. And while knowing these numbers is surely a good starting off point to measure the success of influencers, these numbers certainly don’t tell the whole story.

Utilizing the many insightful metrics provided by social listening analysis, you can understand how the influencer campaigns moved audiences to act in a certain way, and make predictions about the potential business impact of the campaign.

You can look at:

• Did the amount of brand mentions or positive sentiment increase overall for the brand or influencer?
• When you analyze the comments on the influencer’s post, what are people saying?
• Do audiences mention specific actions like purchase intent, recently bought the product, or that they plan to switch from one brand to the other?

• Did social share of voice improve compared to competitors? Is the brand breaking though?

All of the metrics mentioned here that cover engagement, emotions and consideration help you get a much better influencer campaign analysis so you can measure the success of your influencer campaigns and plan better ones. You'll want to add these metrics to your social media analytics process.

Ready to get better influencer insights? Go get a free demo with our team today to see how social listening can transform your influencer campaigns.