The Benefits of Working with the Right Influencers Far Outweigh the Risks of Not Vetting Influencer Talent

As influencer marketing becomes an increasingly important piece of the marketing mix, beyond social media and into linear TV and other distribution channels, it’s more important than ever for brands to count on reliable creators for their campaigns.

Here are the top 4 reason why brands should only collaborate with brand-safe and professional influencers:

1. Reduce Your Exposure: As a brand marketer, you want your messaging to stand out and cut through the advertising clutter in the best way possible. Working with a brand-safe influencer mitigates your risk of having your brand next to content that may upset or offend your consumers. Besides, a professional influencer will post precisely how and when they need to for your campaign and understands that every sponsored post must be compliant with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). A representative from the FTC recently said that influencer marketing carries serious responsibilities of disclosure and transparency, which can be easily overlooked by “new influencers born everyday.” It seems that although all parties are equally responsible to properly disclose sponsored content, it’s the brand’s duty to educate everybody along the way.

2. Minimize Headaches: Brands and marketers want to work with influencers that will say what they do and do what they say. Influencer marketing content is not a “hand-off” and pray advertising strategy. It involves oversight and management to ensure that your brand is represented in the most authentic way possible. Through a rigorous screening process during influencer casting you can understand how the influencer will work in an unsupervised and in a professionally managed environment depending on the style of your campaign. History of behavior also plays a part including predictive personality characteristics data. For example, WHOSAY Match now analyzes millions of posts across all social platforms and leverages AI and machine learning to calculate and display Influencer personal values and personality traits to assist in matching Influencers to brands.

3. Limit Fake Followers: The creators that understand the value of partnering with brands also understand the damage buying followers and engagement can do to their long-term prospects of working with those brands. Buying fake followers is not worth it, and the real professionals will not do it. Be upfront and ask every influencer if they have ever purchased fake followers or engagements to bolster their numbers. At WHOSAY, we see the highest percentage of follower fraud at the micro-influencer level. “It seems to be easier to get 10 thousand fake followers than a few hundred thousand,” says Harvey Schwartz, President of Talent, WHOSAY. “Vet for any abnormal social handle growth and engagement rates that could be a flag signaling fake activity, commonly bots.”

4. Maximize Your Return: Professional influencers know their audience and are in touch with what they are most interested in seeing. This means that they will generate creative campaign ideas that will engage their audience and work for your brand. Influencer marketing can be authentic and be aligned with campaign objectives. As a whole, authenticity can be difficult to measure in advance. However, one can benchmark organic posts that follow a similar theme to the brand campaign and look to achieve similar results, if one delivers creative that matches. The public ultimately votes in comments and likes. You can then apply an independent sentiment score on all the comments to provide a form of measurement that would have alignment to authenticity.

So how do you find brand-safe and professional influencers? Enter WHOSAY Match, the free influencer platform for discovering brand-safe influencers from micro-influencers to celebrity icons. Trusted by the world's top brands and agencies, WHOSAY Match helps marketers browse and identify the right talent that aligns to the brand’s goals using influencer insights, such as follower count across platforms, fan engagement, top audience locations, AI-driven personality insights and more.  

Every influencer in WHOSAY Match has been vetted by a team of influencer talent professionals that have managed over 500 campaigns for the biggest brands in the world in the last few years. Only the top 10% influencer talent within each segment are reliable and professional creators,” says Schwartz.”That’s why professional vetting is essential to navigate the crowded influencer space, where it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the number of options available.”

Influencer marketing is here to stay, and the safest and most reliable way to reduce exposure, minimize headaches, avoid fake followers and maximize ROI is by partnering with professionally vetted creators.