Analyze Influencers and Influencer Campaigns with These Social Metrics

How can we use influencer analysis to better prove the success of their campaigns?

In 2023, according to Impact, the price tag for influencer marketing ranged from $500 to $40,000 per post. Regrettably, the evaluation of influencer success often hinges solely on superficial, short-term metrics such as likes and shares for social influencers.

It's not merely about the quantity of individuals who hastily clicked the like button or the number who hit the share button.

The key questions to address the value are:

1. Are your influencers marketing to 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 to determine that your message has resonated?
4. Are we seeing an overall lift in key metrics for our brand?

To gain deeper insights and create a more thorough analysis of influencers, it's crucial to leverage social listening and delve into the conversational analytics within the post comments. This article will introduce you to the essential metrics required for planning and evaluating your influencer marketing efforts. It will also present a real-world case study of a prominent agency that helped guide endorsement matchmaking for Odell Beckham Jr.

Let's begin by exploring the metrics that should be employed to gauge ROI in influencer campaigns:

Engagement

Engagement metrics with social listening go much further than basic social media monitoring tools. Yes, it’s nice to be scroll-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

You can go further than just positive or negative comments with social listening. Taking a look at how your audience feels about a particular piece of content will help you gather even more pertinent insight on the success of your influencers.

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

Consideration

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 insight brief, From Hype to Havoc, we were able to track how an influencer event turned to a riot in New York City. All from mentioning a giveaway on one of his streams that was then spread on other social channels.

Twitch's second largest streamer, Kai Cenat, held an impromptu event in Manhattan's Union Square Park. Initially, post volume metrics showed small muted spikes indicating that his announcement generated little buzz. But, in figure 1, we see that as news of the event spread across social media platforms, thousands more people showed up. We see that volume spike as a nearly vertical increase.

^{Figure 1: Post volume related to Cenat (August 1, 2023 through August 6, 2023); Infegy Atlas data.}

The only problem was that Cenat's team hadn't applied for permits, hired security, or built event infrastructure. Within hours, the event turned into a riot. Our social listening tool, Infegy Atlas, charted the crisis by the millisecond and showed how quickly the conversation shifted from jubilant to violent. (Figure 2)

^{Figure 2: Top Emotions related to Cenat (August 1, 2023 through August 6, 2023); Infegy Atlas data.}

Without the proper infrastructure in place, this event could have hurt brand reputation and trust. Also, if we just looked at topline engagement metrics, it would look like a successful social activation. So, to recap, it’s important to go beyond likes and shares when analyzing influencer campaigns, or evaluating the use of influencer marketing. Be sure to review conversational engagements, emotions, and considerations expressed by audiences, in real-time.

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

Real-world example: Collective 12 guides endorsement matchmaking for Odell Beckham Jr.

When Collective 12 was tasked with providing market research and strategy to BLVCKOPS for their client, Odell Beckham Jr, they enlisted Infegy Atlas. For this project, Collective 12 and BLVCKOPS’s goal was to pair NFL wide-receiver Odell Beckham Jr. with brands that weren’t just successful, but that also fit the personal goals and social footprint of the athlete. Infegy Atlas equipped the team to gather the data they needed for audience comparisons and sentiment analysis, across several entities, with speed and efficiency. In order to develop a thorough and cross-examined understanding of Beckham Jr.'s social footprint, Ryan McCarty, Founder and Lead Analyst for Collective 12, organized his discovery under three key pillars:

• Fan sentiment towards Beckham Jr.
• Beckham Jr.’s potential reach for 3-4 different product categories
• Competitive intelligence for each of the potential product categories

With the data collected by Infegy Atlas, Collect 12 was able to construct strong consumer profiles and vital revelations regarding the consumer interests of Beckham Jr.’s fan base.

Related: Read the Collect 12 case study here.

Influencers can create a buzz even when they’re not directly involved with the brand they’re promoting. A good example was the mentions of Rolex, Casio, Ferrari, and Twingo in Shakira’s song about her ex-husband.

Conclusion

The most essential role of social listening metrics like the ones outlined in this article are finding out how the audience receives 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. Additionally, they can help you find the right influencer or product as an influencer as with OBJ.

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.