What KPIs Are Key? Evaluating Performance Metrics for Social Media Influencers

Measuring the impact of social media communication is a prominent and pertinent challenge; the commercialization of social media influencers (SMIs) in the form of so-called influencer marketing makes this effort even more complicated. Companies that embrace influencer marketing have limited control over content and context, so they must evaluate both the SMIs and the content they post, prior to and during their collaborations. Although quantitative success metrics (e.g., number of followers, number of likes) are readily available, it remains unclear whether such metrics offer appropriate proxies for evaluating an SMIs or the outcomes of an influencer marketing campaign. By combining secondary data on influencer marketing campaigns from Instagram with an online survey among marketers, this study finds that professionals generally rely on an SMI’s reach and number of interactions as success metrics. When they must trade off across multiple metrics, these professionals predominantly rely on comment sentiment, indicating their implicit awareness that the commonly used metrics are inadequate. A regression analysis affirms that only the sentiment measure correlates positively with professional content evaluations, so this study both challenges the use of common quantitative metrics to evaluate SMI content and emphasizes the relevance of content-based metrics.