What’s the best value in influencers?

We all know there’s a trade-off with influencers: the bigger their reach, the more expensive they usually are to work with. And when they’re reeeeally big, they might just be famous people and not “endemic” or super-relevant to your audience, so engagement might drop off.

So what’s a brand to do? A suite of scholars from Europe crunched some numbers they got from social media marketing companies:

+ 802 campaigns across fashion, beauty, jewelry & other stuff from 2017-2020
+ 1,738 influencers
+ 6,422 posts & 6,178 stories 
+ 775MM impressions, 49MM likes, and 1.4MM comments

They found that cost per like actually drops a little bit as follower count goes from 10K to 1MM, but then it does indeed increase quite a bit above 1MM followers. 

Meanwhile, post engagement peaks around 1.2MM followers.

So the 1MM follower zone seems like a Goldilocks sweet spot for influencer value.

Caveats? Of course! F’rinstance, engagement’s great (I love all my likers and commenters!), but reach might be a better metric for gauging business impact. (That’s a question for a different post.)

But if you’re unable to do a bunch of fancy analysis on which influencers to work with, and you’ve got a limited budget, then “a million followers-ish” seems like a good rule of thumb to work from. 

And read the paper! DOI: 10.1177/00222429221125131