3 things to look for in an influencer & how to find fake ones & which are good

Lesson Details:

Video Transcription: In this video I'll share you the three things that you need to look for in every potential influencer that you look to hire and if one of them is not present you don't you probably do not want to hire the influencer the three things are this video is brought to you by Appy Pie Academy so the first one is they have to be really well targeted to what your audiences the second is they have to get a significant volume of traffic and they have to have significant engagement on their posts because if they don't it's playing it's a sign that maybe they're buying traffic or they're faking the size or the quality of their audience and of course you have to gauge these three items and they're not black and white they're a grey area so you sometimes don't know how well targeted are some account it's not the precise science how much engagement are you gonna get on the post where they're gonna promote you well that's gonna happen in the future you don't know so it's an inexact science it's a grey area so let's look at how to gauge influencers and also of course once you gauge them how to tell how much it's worth for you to promote through them so let's look at my youtube channel first I'm not promoting my YouTube channel here this is just for me to give you an example that I know really well so if we look at my youtube channel it's reasonable at the moment of this filming I have over three million views and I have over 30 a thousand subscribers so you can say okay Alex is an a-okay influencer in business right I'm not like Bill Gates or Mark Cuban but I have some audience so once you have that what you want to do is look at the videos you go to the videos and you need to see how many views are recent posts getting so you see one day ago I posted one I got 76 views well we could go and I got a 95 two weeks ago I posted I got an 83 so it's like 100 views let's say early and then the next one I posted was 8 months ago so you can say oh Alex is not regularly active on this that's it that's a bad sign in a way it's not a killer but it's a little bit of a bad sign and you do see that I consistently get for the older videos I consistently get over at like a thousand or more views in fact this one has 14,000 this one has 24,000 so some of the videos they get pretty good numbers of views and then some videos don't right so like some videos but like this one with the 15 law firm marketing strategies has 10,000 views and it's going strong but most of them are just okay so you can probably like to expect a thousand people over a year let's say that that would be reasonable and then first of all, you compare that well to get a thousand people through ads how much is that what's the equivalent how much would you pay so that kind of gives you a barometer, of course, to have an influencer promote you is a little more costly because unlike with ads with me comes a little branding and things like that so my views are more targeted they're warmer views because supposedly it's my traffic they trust me so my views are worth more they're better traffic than cold ad traffic but compared to what you could get through ads is an initial barometer after that what you want to do is you want to click on any video or usually in your case, you will click on like the last few and what you would do is see how many people are commenting on the videos if nobody's commenting that's a bad time in my case see I have four comments and then like I reply to them and all that right so it's an early video and I have some comments now you don't know but actually I encouraged people to comment so these are not like organic comments I just ask them, hey guys please comment so you don't know if I bought views let's say for this 14,000 viewed times you video or this video with 24,000 you don't know if I bought the views and you also don't know if I asked people to comment to fake engagement you see and what most professional influencers do is whether they get traffic to their content or not they run ads if it's on Instagram or Twitter or Facebook whatever they run adds to their content so that it looks like every piece of content gets a good engagement so if you are a naive buyer of their influencer traffic you're like oh yeah cool you know they get a lot of views to let's but let's go for it and so sometimes the rates are expensive so like for me some of the videos here they are actually influencer marketing videos where people hired me and I charged something like two hundred dollars two hundred fifty-three hundred dollars to create the video and post it sometimes it's worth it sometimes it's not worth it sure I usually take the money but you want to be careful I also what you want to do is take a look at what the channel was about if you look here I talked about apps I talked about you to me I talk about business planning books I talked about passive income SEO it's not focused so these 30,000 subscribers there is not a single focus remember how I was talking about targeting there's not alike I don't target people well it's a little bit too broad so if you wanted to promote books well only a section of my audience is about that so my channel I actually would honestly say is not a good one to get hired as an influencer because once there's not enough traffic and two it's not that well-targeted it's a little bit all over the place and also there's a big range in the videos the one reason to hire me is that some of my videos do get like 50,000 views 20,000 views 50,000 views so if over five years if you're open to having that possibility I can actually do that and I've done that for some people but that's rare and that's if you're taking a chance I can't guarantee that's me now let's take a look at like some Instagram people that we don't know and let's see if we'd like to advertise with them so I was clicking through the Instagram directory and I found random people that I don't know I've never seen this person until before today let's examine them and see if we want to advertise they have this Haiti world I don't know who they are they don't quite put their face on it but at the same time you see it's like it's a promotional Instagram right they promote what looks to be men's accessories like watches wallets some kind of like jewellery maybe it's not just men's but looks like mostly for men's alright so it's men's accessories if you're a stylish man all right this is for you now what happens if we look at one post and by the way, so they have a lot of posts which looks like they're trying hard and and maybe they're getting paid to do them and I think you should they have their contact information so that I think it does look like they are they're open to advertising other people's products so let's see that a post like this 11 hearts 10 hearts 13 hearts 12 hearts out of 37,000 people that's unreal looks really fake right, on the one hand, it looks great like pictures are very nice everything's great products looks pretty professional but the level of engagement is what you would expect if they had about a hundred followers not 37,000 followers, so I would not advertise here this person looks like a total fake yeah because you can tell there's no engagement I just keep scrolling and it's about the same amount of engagement 12 hearts twelve hearts now they could have bought this right they're just not smart enough to have bought the engagement because they could have run ads to this and if they have fewer posts fewer posts they have way too many posts because they cannot buy engagement for all the posts but if they had fewer posts wavey were posted but each post had like maybe a hundred likes or 200 likes or something like that first of all those likes could go to their traffic I mean those likes could also become their followers if they ran ads but also I maybe have a higher chance to fall for it and I paid to them to post a product to post a promotion for my product so these guys didn't really hide well that they're faking let's look at another one so here's another random account again 37 thousand followers looks pretty good but look at this it's funny right follow us for funny stuff funny everybody likes funny there's it's not targeted so entertainment funny stuff if you have a specific product it might not be a match if you're a comedian great or if you have your own funny channel maybe this is good but it's not targeted it's all over the place now if you look at again the engagement we see that oh there's more likes and some of the posts have commented it actually looks like a much more real audience and they're engaged now they're not engaged incredibly so if I'm looking for traffic I pay maybe ten twenty thirty dollars for this person to promote just because I know that probably I'm not gonna generate any sales but I know that if I'm looking for maybe a little bit of a boost in my social sharing a little bit of a boost in my followers and boosting little metrics like that I probably pay for that but I wouldn't go further let's look at another one now here's another account which I actually know the person who runs this and that person, he posts every day and he loves MLS so this account is this week in MLS and he's got a lot of posts and he's got a really true natural engagement let's look at it so a post he made recently look at this a thousand likes hearts and 23 comments almost the same age menhir I almost the same engagement here except there's like a lot of engagement so as you see this is real this is a real account with a real strong follower base and you'll notice that the number of followers are approximately the same as those fake accounts that we just saw but this is actually a real one and this person I know he actually gets sponsors from legitimate brands and he promotes them at times so you're gonna be able to get sales if you let's say you have something soccer-related or MLS related you're gonna get sales now if you promote tennis you're not gonna get any sales even though it's sports it's not that targeted and certainly if you promote something about cooking this is just not going to be a fit they're not gonna take you on as a client but if you tell anything like soccer-related MLS related anything like that it's very likely that if you pitch them you will be able to work with them and pay them I don't actually know what their rates are but if you can get a post for like $100 $200 probably worth it because of this audience is engaged the only question for you is to do what you offer to make sense for their audience if it makes sense for their audience some of their audience will probably take an interest in buy if it does not make sense for their audience their audience will ignore this because it doesn't make sense so it's actually sometimes not the fault of the influencer it's the fault of the buyer of the traffic because the buyer just advertised in the wrong account to the wrong traffic so remember that targeting one of the three points to look for extreme accurate targeting and that's your job the influencer they'll take your money so you actually have to make sure that the audience that is getting is a really strong fit for the audience you're targeting otherwise your promotional the post is gonna fail you're gonna wonder why but it actually wasn't the influencers fault and often the size of the audience is not the deciding factor it's the level of engagement that's actually more important and the narrowness of the targeting like if this was about all soccer it's much broader than just MLS soccer which is United States soccer so this is actually quite narrowly targeted and that's why if you have something for United States Soccer related this would be good but if you're promoting something like in Europe well half of the audience probably maybe doesn't care half of the audience probably does but you know as soon as you step away from the bull's eye of the targeting your the promotional post will begin to lose effectiveness and that's something that you really have to be careful of.