If you’re considering an influencer partnership and want to assess the potential value of an influencer to your business or brand, then its better to look at their (audience) engagement rate than the number of followers they have.

Audience engagement is a measure of how active an influencer’s audience is, or how much the audience engages with their content. Depending on the platform, audience engagement could include likes, shares, reactions, comments, video views and more.

If you’re forming a commercial (i.e. paid) partnership with an influencer, then you want to ensure you’re getting return on investment – and the best way to do this is to make sure that the content that promotes or features your business or brand, encourages this engagement.

Put simply, it doesn’t matter how many thousands of followers an influencer has, if their audience simply scrolls past and pays no attention to the content that promotes your brand. Limited engagement equals limited value.

There are a bunch of handy tools available that can help you assess the indicative engagement rate of influencers (just Google Instagram engagement calculator). While these calculators aren’t always entirely accurate, they do provide a good enough indication to help you shortlist potential influencers.

And if you’re wondering how to measure, an engagement rate of between 2% – 3% (approx.) is considered good.

If you want to learn more about influencer marketing, then check out our Influencer Engagement 101 manual which will teach you everything you need to know in order to create strategic and mutually beneficial influence partnerships for your business or brand. Good luck!