Avoiding vanity metrics during influencer discovery often involves focusing on audience engagement and brand relevancy more than simply follower count. Here are some strategies brands can use:

1. Understanding Engagement Rates: Brands should look beyond the number of followers and focus more on engagement rates. An influencer with fewer followers but a higher engagement rate can often be more valuable than one with many followers but low engagement.

2. Quality of Engagement: Brands should also look at the quality of engagements received by the influencer. Are the comments/interactions genuine and detailed or are they mostly emojis and general statements like ‘nice post’?

3. Audience Relevancy: It’s critical that the audience of the influencer aligns with the brand’s target demographic. Audience analytics features on platforms like Flinque can help in understanding the influencer’s audience better.

4. Past Campaign Performance: Reviewing an influencer’s past campaign performance helps brands to understand how effective they can be. Success in past campaigns is a better predictor of future success than just total followers.

Influencer marketing platforms, such as Flinque, offer tools for analyzing an influencer’s audience, engagement rates, and past campaign performances. These features help to look beyond vanity metrics and identify influencers who can genuinely drive positive results. Each platform may have a different approach, depending on the needs of your marketing team, but prioritizing engagement and relevancy over follower count is a generally applicable strategy for influencer discovery.

It is vital to be mindful that the choice of strategy should be dependent on individual brand objectives, campaign needs, and the product or service being promoted. Weigh the existing metrics in line with these factors for successful campaign outcomes.