How to Judge an Influencer – in 6 steps

Step 1 - Trends

Check them out on SocialBlade. You want to see an upward trend in their page growth graph. A red flag? Big spikes in followers and in unfollows. If you see big spikes – ask them, maybe they had a giveaway or were promoted by another bloggers (that’s fine). See a downward trend? That’s a dealbreaker.

All good?

Step 2 – Using 3rd party tools to get more stats

Time to deep stalk, go ahead, search them on Trend Hero, LiveDune, HypeAuditor. Feel free to use any tool that can show you mass following or fake vs. real engagement. Remember: the minimum requirements DIFFER for ER for big bloggers and small bloggers. The bigger the influencer the smaller their ER will be (exception: viners, tiktokers, pages with very young audiences).

All good?

Step 3 – First hand Stats


How to Judge an Influencer How to Judge an Influencer How to Judge an Influencer

Contact your prospective influencer and ask them to send you the following Insights

  • Posts Insights from the LAST 2-3 regular posts – ask them to show FULL insights: engagement, reach, clicks, where the followers came from, profile visits, etc.
  • Post Insights from 1 promo post (as we know, promo posts always get less engagement, so you need to know what to expect).
  • Stories Insights – Ask them to send you A VIDEO of the Insights (so it can’t be photoshopped). They need to go to their Insights and record the screen while scrolling down through the Insights. Yessss, be that crazy jealous girlfriend with trust issues.
  • Get a screenshot of their audience demographics: gender, age and locations – it should match your target audience. If your business is local, your city should be in first place on their location graph.

All good?

Step 4 – Manual check

Let’s get into the weeds. Do a manual check of the posts they sent you Insights for:

  • Check out the comments (whether they come from followers or not, whether they are related to the post or just “you are hot”-like comments).
  • Check the likes – do they come from followers? If not, go back to post Insights and see the potential source of those likes – did the post go viral or showed up to new people in hashtag search?
  • Stories Insights – Ask them to send you A VIDEO of the Insights (so it can’t be photoshopped). They need to go to their Insights and record the screen while scrolling down through the Insights. Yessss, be that crazy jealous girlfriend with trust issues.
  • Check the followers – just scroll their followers and randomly open some of them. Do they look real? Do 70% of the followers you opened look real?

Step 5 (for most meticulous)

Super manual check… some real FBI thing.

  • Find recent collabs that were done by the blogger. See what they were promoting. If they were promoting an account of a particular brand, check SocialBlade statistics of the brand – did they get the spike in followers on that day?
  • If they were promoting a coupon code and driving followers to the brand’s website (not IG page),
    don’t be lazy – contact the company and ask whether they are happy with the results.

Step 6 – Calculations
You know their price per post/Stories. You know their average Post/Story Reach. Calculate average CPM you can expect:

How to Judge an Influencer
How to Judge an Influencer

So are you satisfied, you sneaky stalker? If so, sign the contract!

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