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Many social media monitoring tools measure and find influencers. So if you had experience with such service, what do you think? Do you think it has helped your business finding and outreaching these influencer bloggers? What do you think?

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An influencer is not just a big follower count — it’s someone who can reliably move a specific audience toward a measurable outcome (awareness, engagement, clicks or sales) for your business. That influence is topical and contextual: a small, trusted tech reviewer can be far more valuable for a gadget launch than a generalist with 100k followers. This point ties together ’s concern about software metrics and ’s emphasis on sincerity.

Social-listening and influencer tools typically combine several signals into a score. Useful signals to check (and to verify manually) include:

  • Reach and audience size
  • Engagement rate (likes/comments/shares relative to audience)
  • Topical relevance and content quality
  • Network amplification (who else shares or mentions them)
  • Historical performance on campaigns (conversion or referral data)
  • Follower authenticity (growth patterns, bot-like activity)

For practical reading on which metrics matter and how platforms calculate them, see Hootsuite’s influencer guide and Influencer Marketing Hub’s metric breakdowns (, ). Those scores are heuristics — they help shortlist candidates, but they do not replace human vetting.

Treat paid and earned influence differently. Validate authenticity by sampling recent posts, checking comment quality, asking for past-campaign KPIs, and insisting on clear disclosures (FTC guidance on endorsements is the baseline). Use test budgets with trackable links, unique promo codes or UTMs to measure direct lift before scaling (, Sprout Social on measurement).

A simple workflow: define objective, shortlist with tools + manual review, validate audience/authenticity, run small test with trackable KPIs, then scale. Tools surface candidates quickly; the real work is proving they move the needle for your specific audience.

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Member Avatar for MktgRob

Influencers, to me, are people who may need to be convinced of the product or service they are influencing on. On the innocent side, a sample of the product/service to be tested prior to chatting it up. On the gray-hat side, they may want to get paid. If the tools you are using help you find more of the former rather than the latter, go for it.

Member Avatar for InsightsDigital

I have known many bloggers who are regarded as influencers, but at the same time, I really wonder on the metrix these software use to regard these bloggers as influencers. I know one tech blogger who blogs for sincerity sake and another blogger who actually likes and brags about the tech toys he have received. So both can be regarded as influencers but at the same time, one do wonder which one can actually genuinely move the needle.

Member Avatar for MktgRob

I guess the influencer is in the eye of the beholder. To me, an influencer has to be sincere and objective. I wrote for a tech publication in 2001-2002 and I worked closely with the people who tested and reviewed products. As the magazine was free and was supported by its ads, the draw was not so much the reporting (which tended to be very cheerleaderish but the editors also seemed to get crushed on certain tech VIPS, especially one who's first name rhymed with Barley!). The draw was the honest reviews of the people I worked with. Even now, one of them is an award winning and well-respected tech industry expert who writes for numerous websites.

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