There's a super interesting key indicator in Stellar that you should look into whenever you are looking for an influencer 🕵🏼
It's the Audience Credibility Score and you can find it in the Influencers module!
The Audience Credibility Score (ACS) is a 1 to 100 metric (from red to green, passing by orange), a benchmark to measure the overall quality of an influencer's audience in the influencer marketing industry.
The ACS thus reflects the percentage of followers that we can certainly define as real people (i.e. that are not bots or fake accounts).
This score is established for historical followers by taking into account multiple factors: profile pictures, bio descriptions, the number of posts, as well as the follower vs following ratio.
How should this metric be used?
Too often, agencies make wrong assumptions regarding the real value of each influencer based on the Engagement Rate level only. It is quite a major pitfall for brands since ER is not an indicator of authentic comments and likes; in other words, it does not guarantee followers' quality.
The ACS provides that information. Influencers with ACS 100 are most likely to have a high-quality audience. Nevertheless, having an ACS of 50-60 is not a disaster, more like a warning, an indication that you need to keep an eye on their audience statistics. The accounts with ACS 30 and less belong to a low-quality group of influencers who are highly unlikely not have any impact on the level of sales. ACS is distributed consistently, it's a rare case to spot some boundary value here.
If you've recently spotted a gradual decline in an ACS level, it's in your interest to tackle this issue quickly by checking the Followers Evolution and Following Evolution patterns. The usage of so-called follow-unfollow methods (Mass Followers) to artificially boost follower count is also important to take into account. At the same time, the implementation of such inauthentic methods in practice will bring the Audience Credibility level down quite drastically.