Follower count is one of the easiest numbers to see when choosing influencers for a campaign. It is public, simple to compare and useful for understanding the potential size of an influencer’s audience.
It is also easy to give that number more weight than it deserves.
A large following cannot tell you whether an influencer suits your campaign, how their content is likely to perform or whether your budget could deliver better results elsewhere. For brands investing in influencer marketing, choosing the right influencers means looking beyond audience size.
Does Follower Count Matter in Influencer Marketing?
Follower count still provides useful context. It can indicate the potential scale of an influencer’s audience and help marketers understand their presence on a particular social platform.
But two influencers with similar-sized audiences can produce very different campaign results. Their content, audiences, engagement, previous performance and cost can all differ, even when their follower counts look almost identical.
The reverse can happen too. An influencer with fewer followers may be better suited to a campaign because of who they reach, the content they create or how they have performed previously.
Follower count is useful information, but it cannot answer the bigger question: Is this the right influencer for this campaign?
What Should Brands Look for When Choosing Influencers?
The right influencer depends on what the campaign needs to achieve.
Brands should consider whether the influencer suits the campaign and product, who their content reaches and how their previous content has performed. The cost of working with them also matters, particularly when marketers need to decide how to distribute a limited campaign budget.
Useful factors can include:
- Audience and brand fit
- Content category and platform
- Previous campaign performance
- Engagement and reach
- Cost efficiency
- Campaign objectives and requirements
Looking at these factors together gives marketers a more complete picture of what an influencer could contribute. It also helps avoid choosing someone simply because their follower count makes them appear to be the safest option.
Why Manual Influencer Selection Can Miss the Full Picture
This is where influencer selection becomes more complicated.
Reviewing an influencer’s profile can tell you about their content style and public engagement. When you are comparing dozens or hundreds of potential influencers, however, manually searching through profiles and weighing different metrics becomes much harder.
There is also information that is difficult to judge from a profile alone. Past campaign performance, predicted performance and cost efficiency can provide useful context when deciding whether an influencer makes sense for a particular brief.
AtisfyReach uses this wider set of information to allocate influencers to campaigns based on campaign fit, predicted performance and cost efficiency. Brands provide the campaign requirements, while the platform handles influencer allocation without requiring them to manually search through profiles and manage DMs.
Brands provide the campaign requirements, and influencer allocation is based on what the campaign needs. This also removes the individual outreach that usually follows manual selection.
Should Brands Choose Nano, Micro or Macro Influencers?
There is no follower tier that is automatically right for every influencer campaign.
A nano influencer may be well suited to one brief, while a micro influencer may perform strongly for another. A macro influencer may make more sense when greater audience scale is needed, and some campaigns may benefit from a mix of all three.
Starting with a preferred follower tier can narrow the options before marketers know which influencers are actually best suited to the campaign.
A better approach is to start with the campaign objective, requirements and budget, then determine which combination of nano, micro and macro influencers gives the campaign the strongest chance of delivering the intended results.
Choose Influencers for the Campaign, Not the Number
Follower count is a useful reference point, but it should not make the decision for you.
Influencer selection becomes more meaningful when brands consider campaign fit, performance and cost alongside audience size. With better data behind those decisions, marketers can focus their budgets on influencers selected for what they can contribute to the campaign rather than how impressive a number looks on their profile.
AtisfyReach helps brands plan, launch and manage influencer campaigns with performance-based influencer allocation built into the process.
Book a free demo to see how we can support your next campaign.
