The Many Dimensions of an Influencer

Influencers all possess multiple dimensions to their content; it’s what makes content unique. For each specific brand or campaign, taking a closer look at an influencers tone, personality, and professionalism will make the difference between mediocre and excellent results. To help understand the dimensions of our influencers, we apply a considerable amount computing power to the various elements that make up an influencer profile. These figures can then be measured and compared between influencers.

These tangible, data driven metrics make the job easier for marketers, helping them find their perfect match. This also rewards influencers with work for creating great content, managing themselves professionally, and delivering value to marketers.

Here are the four key themes that we look at when ranking influencers in our search results, ultimately helping marketers in their identification process:

Persona – The personality, biography, and location of the influencer

Audience – The age, gender, and location of their followers and fans across various media channels

Content – The type, tone, and performance of content, measured by the engagement rate of their audience, relative to similar influencers

Work ethic – The reviews from brands and agencies that have worked with the influencer in the past, together with their profile completeness and typical response time to requests

To get a better picture of this, let’s have a look at what some basic examples of these dimensions would look like and how you can use them.

Persona

Each influencer has their own identity, biography and digital track record. Webfluential aggregates content from all of the influencer’s linked channels, and With Watson, generates a personality sunburst that gives us a visual representation of their best attributes.

It also helps us understand what kind of consumer each influencer is – Are they interested in owning a car? What type of music and movies do they like? It even tells us about other consumer behaviors like shopping online and using a credit card.

Audience

The audience that follows, reads and engages with an influencer is important to marketers. Webfluential looks at the age, gender and location of an influencer’s audience. Further, we can understand their behaviors like their engagement, time spent on websites and repeat visits to an influencer’s blog.

This tells us more about the relationship between an influencer and their audience, it gives us an idea of the level of trust that they have built up, which in turn shows us who has the key to a specific audience.

From there we can easily identify those influencers who are in the best position to work with a brand looking to drive awareness and credibility with a particular audience.

Content

The passion of an influencer is captured in their content. Their writing, their videos, and their images are all expressions of their opinions and are held in high regard by their followers. Webfluential analyses the impact of content on an audience and compares this to the content of similar audiences, as well as the historical performance of an influencer’s content. This helps us to spot trends over time like the newest rising stars, the most consistent content creators and the latest “trending posts” and helps match them to the brands working with influencers.

Work Ethic

Influencers working with brands take their jobs seriously. Webfluential filters out the cream and minimizes time that would be lost trying to engage with influencers who aren’t really into it. To achieve this we look at several dimensions, but the result mainly hinges on the ratings they’ve earned from previous work done. The more good work influencers do, the easier it is for a brand to trust them, so we encourage influencers to do their bookings on Webfluential and gain positive reviews and a track record.

Additionally, we look at their profile completeness, their consistency in keeping their account up to date, and of course, how much time it takes them to reply to a marketer request.

Summary

In the same way that Google manages its search results dynamically through their Page Rank algorithm, which changes over time, we’ll keep adding insights and changing up the weighting so that our search benefits our platform for both influencers, the best of which get surfaced first, and for marketers, so that they can succeed when choosing the right influencers.

*This post was written by Wati Mbewu

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