Metrics and measurement
Audience audit
An audience audit checks whether a creator's followers are real and relevant, looking for bought followers, engagement pods, and mismatches between the audience's location or age and the brand's market.
Also called fake follower check, audience quality, follower audit.
The signals worth checking are cheap to look at. Sudden vertical jumps in follower growth, comments that are generic emoji from accounts with no posts, engagement far out of line with similar creators, and an audience concentrated in countries the brand does not sell in.
Relevance usually matters more than authenticity. A creator with entirely real followers who live in the wrong country, or are the wrong age to buy the product, will underdeliver just as surely as one with bought followers.
Common questions
- How can you spot fake followers?
- Look for follower growth in sudden vertical steps rather than a steady curve, an engagement rate far below others of similar size, comments that are single emoji or generic phrases from empty accounts, and an audience location breakdown that does not match where the creator's content is made or spoken.
Related terms
- Engagement rate
- Engagement rate is the share of an audience that interacts with a post, calculated as total engagements divided by a chosen denominator, most often followers or reach, expressed as a percentage.
- Influencer tiers
- Influencer tiers group creators by audience size: nano (roughly 1,000 to 10,000 followers), micro (10,000 to 100,000), mid-tier (100,000 to 500,000), macro (500,000 to 1 million), and mega or celebrity (over 1 million).
- Creator discovery
- Creator discovery is the process of finding creators who fit a brand: searching by niche, audience, location, and performance, then shortlisting the ones worth approaching.
Distinct is the workspace where brands and creators run the work behind these terms. For brands, for creators, or back to the full glossary.