How to Get Influencer Data

Finding the right influencer for your brand requires more than just scrolling through Instagram and picking a profile with a lot of followers. To run a successful campaign with a real return on investment, you need accurate, meaningful influencer data. This article guides you on how to find, analyze, and use that data to make smart marketing decisions, covering everything from manual, boots-on-the-ground research to powerful automation tools.

Good Data vs. Bad Data: Why It Matters for Your Brand

Before hunting for stats, it's helpful to understand what separates valuable information from a simple vanity metric. Choosing an influencer based solely on a high follower count is like buying a car because it's shiny - you have no idea what's under the hood. A massive audience means nothing if it’s full of bots, people outside your target demographic, or unengaged users who never see the content.

Good data tells a story about an influencer’s community and their ability to genuinely connect with it. It looks at three core things:

• Engagement: Do people actually care about what this person posts?
• Audience: Are their followers the right people for your brand?
• Authenticity: Does their content feel genuine and foster trust?

Nailing these three areas is the foundation of a campaign that doesn't just generate "awareness" but actually drives action.

The Manual Method: How to Gather Influencer Data for Free

If you're on a tight budget or just starting out, you can gather a ton of useful data yourself with a bit of time and a simple spreadsheet. This process helps you understand what to look for and builds a foundational skill for vetting partners.

Step 1: Set Up Your Influencer Tracking Spreadsheet

Open up Google Sheets or Excel and create a tracker. This will be your home base for comparing potential collaborators. Your columns should include:

• Influencer Name & Handle
• Platform (Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, etc.)
• Follower Count
• Average Likes (last 10-15 posts)
• Average Comments (last 10-15 posts)
• Calculated Engagement Rate
• Content Niche
• Audience Vibe (Subjective notes on who the community seems to be)
• Past Brand Collaborations (List some examples)
• Notes/Contact Info

Step 2: Calculate the Engagement Rate

The engagement rate is one of the most honest metrics you can find. It shows you what percentage of an influencer's audience is actively interacting with their content. A celebrity with 10 million followers might get 50,000 likes on a post, while a niche creator with 50,000 followers might get 5,000 likes. The smaller creator has a much higher engagement rate and often a more dedicated community.

Here’s how to calculate it manually:

1. Pick 10-15 of their recent, non-giveaway posts.
2. Add up all the likes and comments from those posts.
3. Divide that total by the number of posts you analyzed (e.g., 10). This gives you the average engagement per post.
4. Now, divide that average by their total number of followers.
5. Multiply by 100 to get the engagement rate percentage.

The formula looks like this:

((Total Likes + Total Comments) / Number of Posts) / Total Followers * 100 = Engagement Rate %

What’s a good number? It varies by platform and niche, but generally, anything over 2% is considered strong, and 1% can often be a good floor. If you see rates under 1% on accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers, proceed with caution.

Step 3: Analyze the Qualitative Data (The Human Element)

Numbers only tell half the story. Now, you need to be a digital anthropologist. Go through their content and especially their comments section to answer these questions:

• Who is commenting? Are the comments genuine, thoughtful reactions from real people? Or are they generic ("Great post!", "🔥🔥🔥") and possibly from bots or engagement pods? A healthy community has conversations.
• How does the influencer interact? Do they reply to comments? Do they answer questions? An influencer who engages with their audience is actively cultivating a strong community that trusts them.
• What is the overall sentiment? Is the tone of the comments positive and supportive? You’re trying to find brand advocates, not partners with controversial or toxic communities.
• How do they handle sponsored posts? Find past ads (#ad, #sponsored). Did they just copy-paste the brand's talking points, or did they integrate the product into their content authentically? Check the engagement on these posts specifically. A big drop-off compared to non-sponsored content is a sign their audience doesn't respond well to ads from them.

Step 4: Request a Media Kit

Once you’ve done your initial homework and have a shortlist, it's time to reach out and ask for their media kit. This is an influencer’s professional resume. It will contain self-reported data that can fill in the gaps for you.

A good media kit should include:

• Audience Demographics: This is the jackpot. Look for screenshots from their platform’s native analytics showing audience breakdowns by age, gender, and top countries/cities. Make sure this aligns perfectly with your target customer.
• Past Campaign Performance: Some will include case studies with metrics like reach, impressions, link clicks, and even conversion data from previous brand deals.
• Services and Rates: They’ll outline what they offer (e.g., one Reel, a set of Stories, a blog post) and how much they typically charge.

Always treat this data as supplementary. Cross-reference their stated stats with your own manual research. If their kit claims a 5% engagement rate but your calculations show 0.8%, something is off.

Working Smarter: Tools to Automate Influencer Data Collection

Manual research is incredibly valuable, but it isn’t scalable. Once your influencer marketing efforts grow, dedicated tools can save you hundreds of hours and provide data points that are impossible to find by hand.

Basic Calculators & Chrome Extensions

These are a good first step away from the purely manual process. Tools like Phlanx's Engagement Calculator or Social Blade let you quickly plug in a username and get an instant engagement rate or follower growth history. They're great for quick spot-checks when you're first discovering an influencer and want to see if they're worth a deeper look. Look at the follower growth chart - does it show steady, organic progress or suspicious, giant spikes overnight? The spikes often suggest they bought followers.

Influencer Discovery and Analytics Platforms

This is where things get serious. Platforms like Upfluence, GRIN, or CreatorIQ are powerful databases and analytics engines built specifically for influencer marketing. You can use them to find and vet influencers at scale.

Here’s the kind of data they typically provide:

• Advanced Audience Lookups: Beyond basic age and gender, many tools can show you audience interests (e.g., they also follow sports brands), brand affinity, and even estimated income levels.
• Fake Follower/Audience Credibility Audits: These platforms have algorithms that analyze an influencer’s followers and flag suspicious accounts, giving you an "audience credibility" score. This is one of their most valuable features, protecting you from wasting money on influencers with inflated, fake audiences.
• Historical Performance Data: You can see how an influencer’s content has performed over time, not just in the last few weeks. Has their engagement been declining? Is video content performing better than static images?
• True Reach and Impressions: Instead of guessing, these platforms (with influencer permission) can pull actual reach and impression data from the platform APIs, giving you a much more accurate picture of how many people are actually seeing their content.

Social Listening Tools

Tools like Brandwatch or Sprout Social play a slightly different but very important role. You can use them to find "proto-influencers" - people who are already talking about your brand or your industry. They might not have huge followings yet, but their posts show genuine enthusiasm and organic advocacy.

Set up a listening stream for your brand name, key industry terms, or your competitors' names. You’ll uncover passionate creators who can become your most authentic - and effective - partners, all because the data showed you they already loved what you do.

Key Metrics and Red Flags Summarized

As you collect data from various sources, keep your focus on what truly drives results. Don’t get lost in a sea of numbers.

Focus On These:

• High Engagement Rate (>,2%): Shows a dedicated, active audience.
• Audience Demographic Alignment: Do they reach the people you want to sell to?
• Authentic Comment Section: Filled with conversations, not spam.
• Consistent Content Quality: A feed that aligns with your brand’s aesthetic.
• Steady Follower Growth: Indicates organic growth and true influence.

Watch Out for These Red Flags:

• Low Engagement Relative to Follower Size: The classic sign of a vanity audience.
• Sudden Spikes in Follower Growth: Suggests followers may have been bought.
• A Feed Overloaded with Ads: Can indicate their recommendations aren't taken seriously by their audience.
• Negative or Spammy Comments: You don’t want your brand associated with a toxic community.

Final Thoughts

Sourcing influencer data effectively is a blend of science and art. It starts with hard numbers like engagement rates and audience demographics but ultimately relies on your ability to evaluate qualitative factors like authenticity and brand fit. By combining manual research with smart tools, you can replace guesswork with confidence and build partnerships that create real value.

Once you’ve partnered with the perfect influencers, managing the content they create alongside your own social media calendar can get complicated. At Postbase, we built a visual calendar that gives you a complete overview of all your scheduled content - both organic and influencer-generated - across every platform. This makes it easy to spot gaps, prevent overlaps, and get a clear picture of your entire content strategy in one place, helping you stay organized long after your influencer campaigns go live.