In influencer marketing, reputation is everything. When you work with an influencer, it’s essential to carry out an audit of their online presence. If you don’t, the collaboration can backfire and negatively impact how people perceive your brand. After all, you wouldn’t hire someone without checking their resume and references, right?
Influencer couple Olivia and Lunden Stallings recently came under fire for racist posts published years before their high-profile collabs. That’s bad news for the big-name brands who have worked with them, like Abercrombie & Fitch, UGG, Dior, Maybelline, Tarte Cosmetics, and Dyson. The lesson to be learned here? Conduct a thorough audit of the creators you work with.
Keep reading to find out how to do an influencer audit, the best influencer audit tools to use, and what to watch out for.
What is an influencer audit?
An influencer audit is an important step in the influencer discovery process. It helps you determine if an influencer aligns with your brand’s standards and values. An influencer audit provides insight into:
- Previous collaborations: If you’re a health brand, and a creator promoted a cigarette company, that’s not great. Similarly, if they already worked with competitors, this could influence your choice of whether to work with them.
- Previous content: It’s important to collaborate with influencers who truly share your values, and this should reflect in their content. That could mean living a healthy lifestyle, promoting sustainability, and celebrating diversity.
- KPIs and metrics: You might want to consider the percentage of branded content, engagement rate, follower count, and more, so you can evaluate the content performance.
- Audience insights: Do they have fake followers? Are their followers based in the country you’re targeting? Do they speak the same language as you? Demographic insights are key to ensuring you get the results you are hoping for.
What is an influencer audit tool?
An influencer audit tool is a specialized software designed to assess the credibility and effectiveness of influencers.
An influencer audit tool analyzes key metrics like audience engagement, authenticity, and brand alignment to ensure a genuine fit for IM campaigns. These tools help brands make informed decisions by providing in-depth insights into who an influencer is and who they can influence.
Do you need an influencer audit tool?
The short answer is yes, especially if you're looking to maximize your return on investment (ROI) and avoid associating your brand with the wrong influencers.
With more than 50 million influencers out there (according to Forbes’ estimation), it’s harder than ever to find influencers and figure out who is a truly great fit for your brand.
Influencer audit tools are essential for evaluating and selecting influencers. They help you avoid ineffective collaborations and focus on influencers who truly resonate with your target audience.
At the end of the day, if you work with influencers who aren’t a good fit for your brand, the best scenario is you waste your money. At worst, you could end up working with someone who actually damages your brand because their negative actions become associated with you.
How to conduct an influencer audit
Let’s say you’re a DTC fashion brand. You’re looking for trendsetters who care about sustainability for a campaign in Germany and the U.S.
Now, let’s walk through how you can find and vet influencers using the leading influencer audit tool, Storyclash.
- Search for influencers who meet your criteria
First, open Storyclash and navigate to the Discovery tab.
Filter for relevant countries, pick a gender if needed, and adjust the follower range to suit your needs. Then, enter keywords describing the kind of influencer you are looking for - like “sustainable fashion.” Then, click “Apply.”
Tip: If you’re not a Storyclash customer yet, you can use storyclash.ai for free to search for influencers using keywords.
- Get a first impression and review essential KPIs
Next, you’ll see a list of influencers corresponding to your criteria, along with key KPIs like follower count, engagement rate, and the percentage of branded content. You’ll also see a relevance score to help you evaluate how closely the influencer meets your requirements.
Click the arrow to see an overview of an influencer’s most recent posts:
After a little browsing, you decide green creator Charlotte Schüler could be a great fit. So, you click on her profile to learn more:
- Explore the influencer’s content
Time to do a quick check of the content quality. Do their recent posts appeal to you? Are they in line with your brand standards?
Be sure to check not only their recent posts, but also Instagram stories. Usually, stories disappear after 12 hours, but Storyclash enables you to view the stories of any influencer, anytime:
You’ll want to check their content across all platforms. Even if you’re running your campaign on, say, Insta, it’s important to be sure that their actions and content align with your brand values everywhere where they have a brand presence.
Click the TikTok and YouTube icons to check out their content on those channels:
- Check the influencer’s previous collaborations
Okay, so your first impression of their content is positive. They seem well aligned with your values, and you’re impressed with the content quality. But who else have they worked with?
It can be tricky to get a complete history of an influencer’s previous collabs. Luckily, Storyclash’s collaboration feature makes it really easy to get this information.
Just click “Brand Collaborations.” You’ll see an overview of who Charlotte worked with, and when (just click “Show more” to see the complete list):
Scroll down to see the top branded posts and KPIs:
Scroll down again to see a complete list all brand collaborations, including the number of posts, estimated reach, engagement rate and estimated influencer media value:
Click the arrow to see the content associated with the brand. Like this collaboration Charlotte did with McDonald’s:
- Gain audience insights
Now, you have key insights into an influencer’s content and previous collaborations. There is one key thing left to check: their audience.
Open the “Audience” tab to gain a better understanding of who follows an influencer. In this case, we can see that Charlotte has an audience quality score of 6.2 and that her audience is made up of 71% real followers.
Under “Audience Status” you can see a more specific breakdown. 6.8% of her audience is other influencers, 13.9% are mass followers, and 8.1% are suspicious accounts.
You can also see that her audience is 90% female, and the median age is 31.
- Reach out to the influencer you’re interested in
You decide that Charlotte seems perfect for your sustainable fashion campaign. So, you decide to reach out.
At the top of the page, click the Email icon to send Charlotte a personalized email.
An influencer outreach tool is a lot easier than contacting influencers manually. With Storyclash, you can contact several influencers at a time using automated personalization, and save templates for later. And their info is saved in the influencer CRM, so your data is all in one place!
Try Storyclash, the leading influencer audit tool
Storyclash makes it easier than ever to find and verify the perfect influencers for your brand. As an all-in-one platform, Storyclash streamlines influencer search, vetting, and outreach.
With unparalleled insights into creator content, collaborations, and audiences, you can enter new collaborations with confidence. Book a demo to see Storyclash in action.