Is your goal to have barter or paid collaborations with brands? Do you know what is crucial for negotiating the conditions? You think, of course, the audience size. But in reality…

The number of followers you have is just one part of the equation, one metric next to dozens of others. In this chapter, we will dive into metrics and analytics for influencers, to help you understand what is most important when it comes to collaborations. 

Track metrics, as it helps you optimise your work, as well as gives you insights into what brand representatives want to know.

1. Engagement Rate

Engagement rates are the currency of the social media marketing industry in 2020. 

300 likes per post! Is that a lot? It depends! What if you have an audience of 1,500 followers? That means one fifth of your audience gave you a like, your engagement rate is 20% and that's awesome! If your audience is 10k, then 300 likes means your engagement rate is 3% and that is, unfortunately, very poor even if the number of likes remains the same. 

An engagement rate puts metrics (likes, reactions, shares, comments, clicks, votes, brand mentions, etc.) into a more reliable perspective. That’s why engagement metrics might be used as your selling points in social influencer media kits, or to gauge a social campaign’s return on investment.

The rate is a percentage of “engagements” from your total audience. Engagement rate is a formula that measures the amount of interaction your social content earns relative to the number of followers you have. You can also count the engagement rate relative to your reach.

Do you know that Instagram posts with hashtags averages 12.6% more engagement than posts without them? Hashtags also help reach a wider audience.

2. Reach of Your Posts and Stories

Reach is the number of unique users that saw your content. It’s unlikely that you’ll organically reach all of your followers. Try to maximize this metric to increase your profile/ brand awareness. 

Where can you find your reach on Instagram? First of all, you need to convert your profile to a Business Profile. After you've converted to a Business Profile, you'll get access to Instagram Insights.  You’ll also be able to view insights from a post where you can see Impressions, Reach and Engagement. 

If you dig deeper into your Insights, you can learn more about your audience and the people interacting with your content.

Instagram

To view your general insights: Go to your profile and tap Insights. 

To view insights of a post: Go to your profile. Tap an image you'd like to view insights on. Below the image, tap View Insights. 

Viewing Insights from your stories. Stories are automatically sorted chronologically, to help reflect how people engage with your content. Insights from your stories will be available for up to 14 days after they've been created.

3. Follower Loyalty 

Higher quality content will lead to a more loyal fan base. Those with more followers and who have built a better relationship through consistent and high quality content, will have more influence over what their audience chooses to buy. When your audience is like a cult and really trusts you, any recommendation you make, the audience will buy.

How can you measure this? Ask your audience! Make them “certify” they bought a certain product by sending you a picture, use a special UTM for your link, get creative and do whatever you can to find out what works best to prove your influence.

4. Audience Demographics

This is something you will find in your Insights too. To see the demography of your audience on Facebook, you need to switch to a Business Profile and then tap Insights in your profile. What about Instagram? Go to the Insights section and then choose the tab called Audience. You will find your followers in this tab. This will include demographics data, such as users by country, city, age and gender.

5. Audience Growth 

Yes, you should also track how fast your audience number is increasing or, sadly, decreasing. How? It's simple. You can count how many new followers you gained in one week and then express the newbies in a percentage of your total audience.

If there are no new followers, then check your total number of followers and make sure you are not losing them. If you truly are losing followers, analyze your online behaviour to avoid another loss.

6. Engagement Quality

How does your audience engage with you? Do they message you to start a conversation? Do they answer your questions? Do they send you content? Or do they just give you likes or send emojis? Always try to engage them as much as possible. Don't forget to answer their questions once they react to your posts! The more interactions you get, the more conversations, tags, answers, whole sentences, etc., the better.

7. Goals and Achieving Them

Do you already have some kind of collaboration with a brand and their product? What was the goal of your campaign? Did you bring as many (or more) visitors to a brand's profile as you had originally aimed to? Was your post super engaging? Did your followers buy anything via your link? YES? Then, tell the world you have the power of influence!

Remember that you won’t become an influencer overnight and that building a loyal audience will take time. If there is any other metric you find relevant and important, let us know.

These 7 metrics are a great place to start when it comes to tracking your success. What about monetizing it? Read about the business side of things in our following article. 👌