I just want to go through six quick factors that we look at when analyzing influencers.

First, reach and more specifically Verified Reach. We make sure that a person's reach is above average for their tier. Meaning, when you hit publish on a post, you're reaching more people with that post than most of your colleagues at the same following level as you. That is a non-starter for us. If you don't have Verified Reach, it is very unlikely that we will work with you. If you are an influencer who hasn't worked with us and you're frustrated and you don't know why and you haven't applied for a Verified Reach, that is probably why.

Number two. Engagement. You might say, "You just told me not to care about engagement and engagement doesn't matter." When combined with reach stats, engagement is a telling indicator of how engaged someone's audience is. For us, engagement without reach is worthless because it's so easy to purchase but when we have the reach numbers and we can see engagement, it lets us know what to expect from this influencer and how they're going to perform within the confines of the algorithm as well.

Number three is audience demographics. You can have amazing reach, you can have a huge following, you can have crazy engagement, if your audience isn't the right people that we're trying to reach, we're not going to work with you. A lot of times I get people coming to me and saying like, "Hey, I worked with this influencer. They had half a million followers and it totally didn't work." I look at the influencer and it is clear that the demographics are just completely off. Their audience is too young, they're the wrong gender, they're in the wrong income brackets. Whatever it might be it is important that the demographics match our goals. We'll look at that every single time.

Number four. We want to work with influencers who are growing their following. There are a few greater indications of success with an influencer than a following that is growing.

Now, you might say, "Wait, what about people who are doing giveaways?" Do you think we're complete morons? Obviously, we can tell when people are growing their following using giveaways. If they are adding followers to their account but those people aren't actually engaged with their content, it means that the algorithm won't serve their content to those people it means that their reach will be below average. It means they won't have Verified Reach. It means that we won't work with them.

Number five. Percentage of sponsored content. If 50% of your content is sponsored, we're not going to work with you. If 40% of your content is sponsored, we will think twice about working with you. You can't have everything in your life be sponsored. There is no way a single person can like that much shit. I don't want to see a fucking commercial every single time I open Instagram. This is a whole existential threat for Instagram in general as it shifts from this entertainment and destruction tool-like engine into a shopping and advertising platform.

I think it loses some of its soul. You just can't have half of your posts be sponsored. We tell influencers, under 25% is a good number to aim for. Go through your feed, go through the last 30 days, see what percentage of your content is sponsored. Pay attention to that and try and keep it under 25%.
The next is we look at how much sponsored content you're doing inside of that product category v. If you have promoted four fragrances in the last month, we are not going to be the fifth. We're not idiots. Again, we absolutely look at how much sponsored content you have done inside a specific category vertical or a specific product. You can do a lot of beauty posts but if you've done three long-wear foundation sponsored posts in the last month, again, we're not going to be the fourth. Thank you very much.

Think about how much you're doing inside of specific verticals and understand that if you oversaturate that, you make it all less effective and brands should and will stop working with you inside of that vertical. I would say, for me, once a month in a specific vertical is the absolute max. I would prefer once a quarter. Again, I don't think you can fall in love with a new fragrance every month. I'm sorry, I just don't think you can. Again, as a beauty influencer, can you try a new mascara every month? Absolutely. Less expensive products that have less loyalty attached to them lend themselves to that.

But most products, I think once a quarter is probably a good baseline. That is the sixth things that we will always look at. There are obviously a lot of other factors. I want to say the last and maybe most important one that while we have powerful technology that helps us do this stuff really quickly, end of the day it always has a human eye on it. The last part of this process there's always a person looking at it, understanding your tone and the image quality and the way you talk about things, the length of your captions.