u/PlasticTop9034

Hi everyone, would really appreciate some feedback. We are planning a trip in August for 2 weeks and I need someone to take care of my kittens while we’re away. They will be 6 months old when we travel. Does anyone have experience with Coco Pets and can tell me if they’re good? Or a recommendation for another pet sitting company in Bahrain? Thank you!!

Okay so a bit of context first. I worked at a company where influencer selection was basically vibes with a spreadsheet on top. Someone would pull up a list, there'd be a Mega influencer at the top with like 2 million followers, everyone would nod, budget gets signed, campaign underperforms. And then we'd call it "brand awareness" and move on.

I watched this happen enough times that I just couldn't anymore. So I built a scoring system from scratch. I want to share the whole thing here because honestly most brands are making the same mistakes and the fix isn't that complicated once you see it.

First, the actual problem

Most teams build shortlists by tier. Everyone goes into the same spreadsheet, tagged with their tier: Nano, Micro, Mid, Macro, Mega. Then someone filters by tier, looks at each group separately, and picks the "best" from each one. Then they combine the picks and call it a shortlist.

But here's the thing. The second you filter by tier first, you've already decided that size is the main variable. Everything else, quality, brand fit, actual performance, becomes a tiebreaker within the tier group.

So a Nano with a way better audience never gets compared to a Mega with a mediocre one because they were looked at separately, against different expectations. That's not a shortlist. That's a beauty contest organized by weight class and I mean that in the least flattering way possible.

The 9 KPIs I actually use

I split everything into Scale and Quality. Most of the data comes from HypeAuditor, some of it is manual scoring.

Scale:

- Followers (market-adjusted, more on this in a sec)

- Growth Rate

- EMV (Earned Media Value)

- Reach (HypeAuditor gives you a low and high range, I take the average)

- CPM (you don't have this at scouting stage, you fill it in during negotiation)

Quality:

- AQS, which is HypeAuditor's Audience Quality Score out of 100

- Exclusivity (are they already partnered with a competitor?)

- Ad Performance (how their sponsored posts actually perform vs organic)

- Content Quality (I score this high/mid/low)

- Brand Fit (same, high/mid/low)

For scoring I use a simple 0-10 scale. The qualitative stuff maps like this: very poor = 0, poor = 2, average = 4, good = 6, very good = 8, excellent = 10. For Exclusivity, Ad Performance, Content and Fit: High = 10, Normal/Mid = 5, Low/None = 0.

Simple enough that you can actually do it consistently across a team.

The weighting by tier, this is the part that matters

Okay so this is where most scoring systems fall apart. They weight every creator the same regardless of tier and then wonder why the rankings feel off.

The reason you can't do that is because what makes a creator valuable is completely different depending on their size. A Mega's job is reach. A Nano's job is trust and conversion. If you score them on identical weights you're comparing apples to something that isn't even fruit.

So I built four different weight models:

Mega (1M+): Scale is 60% of the score, Quality is 40%. Within Scale, Followers carries 20%, CPM is 15% (cost efficiency matters a lot when the fees are huge), EMV and Reach are 10% each, Growth is only 5%. On the Quality side, AQS is 15% because with these follower numbers you really need to check how many of them are real.

Macro (500K-1M): Very similar to Mega but Brand Fit and Content start pulling a bit more weight because you're relying more on genuine endorsement than pure reach.

Mid (100K-500K): This is where it evens out. 50% Scale, 50% Quality. You're betting on both reach and performance now. Ad Performance and Brand Fit start carrying real weight.

Micro (10K-100K): Flips to 40% Scale, 60% Quality. Growth Rate becomes the most interesting scale metric at this size because raw follower count doesn't tell you much. Ad Performance, Content Quality, and Brand Fit each carry 15% of the total score. You're here for the audience relationship, not the numbers.

Nano (under 10K): Same logic as Micro. Quality dominates. Brand Fit matters a lot. Reach is basically irrelevant as a standalone metric, what you're buying is a genuine community with a specific interest and trust in this person.

What happened when I ran the actual data

When I scored our full list through this model the results were not what anyone expected.

The top two ranked creators were both Nanos with under 5K followers. A Micro ranked third. The top nine spots were all Nanos and Micros.

The Mega with 5.6 million followers ranked 56th. Another Mega with 1.5 million followers ranked 89th out of the full list.

And look, that's not because big influencers are useless. It's because for our specific campaign objectives (performance, conversion, niche category) the smaller creators had dramatically better scores on the things that actually predict success: AQS, Ad Performance, Brand Fit.

When I showed this to the wider team the reaction was "we can't go to the board with someone who has 3,000 followers." I get it, I really do. But that's a culture problem not a data problem and it's also kind of the point of the whole exercise.

Practical stuff if you want to build this yourself

Get HypeAuditor (or something similar). Most of the hard data, AQS, reach ranges, growth rate, EMV, comes from there. I am not advertising HypeAuditor by the way 😂 It's just my go to tool for influencer research. You pull the data manually into a spreadsheet. It's tedious but it's the difference between guessing and actually knowing.

Adjust followers for your local market. Raw follower count is misleading if the creator has an international audience but your campaign is local. HypeAuditor shows you audience geography. I applied a market relevance factor to get effective local followers. A creator with 400K total followers but 60% in your target market is worth more than one with 1M followers spread across 50 countries.

It's one tab, with creators grouped by tier within it, but the scoring makes cross-tier comparison possible. Each creator has a tier tag and the formulas apply the right weights based on that. Because the weighting adjusts per tier, the scores are actually comparable across groups. So even though a Nano and a Mega are sitting in different sections of the same sheet, you can sort the whole thing by score and get a meaningful unified ranking.

Score the qualitative KPIs before you look at the ranking. This one is important. If you score Content Quality and Brand Fit after you already know who's at the top, you'll unconsciously push the numbers toward confirming what you already thought. Score first, rank second.

Add CPM during negotiation. You won't have the fee at scouting stage obviously, but once you're in talks you fill in their quoted rate plus expected deliverables and the CPM calculates itself. Suddenly the expensive Mega looks a lot less competitive. This is often the moment that changes minds more than any other number.

Use Exclusivity as a near-hard filter. If a creator is currently partnered with a direct competitor they get a 0 on Exclusivity which tanks their Quality score. I personally wouldn't proceed with someone in that situation regardless of everything else, but the scoring reflects it either way.

The one metric everyone ignores: Audience Quality Score

AQS is HypeAuditor's 1-100 benchmark score for overall influencer quality. It's built from 15 underlying metrics across four categories: engagement rate (what share of followers actually engage), quality audience (what percentage of followers are real people vs bots/ghost accounts), follower and following growth patterns (detecting abnormal spikes that suggest bought followers), and comments authenticity (what share of comments come from real accounts rather than engagement pods).

So it's not just "how many real followers do you have." It's also "are those real followers actually engaging, and does the engagement look organic." That's why I prefer this tool, but you can get most of the data from other tools as well. You can even simplify your scoring and leave some of the KPIs out. Depends on the campaign your are running/the company you are working for.

In my data I had creators with 900K followers and an AQS of 31. And Micros with AQS of 91, 96. The Micro with 91 will drive more real results than the Mega with 31, pretty much every time.

The industry has known follower inflation is a problem for years. It's still almost universally ignored at the shortlisting stage because follower count is visible on the profile and AQS requires actually opening HypeAuditor and doing something. Laziness is expensive.

TLDR for the people who skipped here

- Stop sorting by tier first, score everyone and then rank

- 9 KPIs: Followers, Growth, EMV, Reach, CPM (Scale) + AQS, Exclusivity, Ad Performance, Content Quality, Brand Fit (Quality)

- Most data from an influencer research tool

- Weight by tier: at Nano/Micro level Quality is 60% of the score; at Mega level flip it with Scale at 60%

- Score the qualitative KPIs blind before you run the ranking

- Add CPM during negotiation, it reframes everything

- AQS is the metric that should disqualify people. Use it.

Happy to answer questions. How are you currently selecting influencers?

One thing I'll say honestly: the spreadsheet behind all of this is a mess. It's got a ton of interdependent formulas and it breaks constantly. Like, you add a new creator and something somewhere stops calculating correctly and you spend 20 minutes figuring out why. It works, but it's not fun to maintain.

I ended up building a proper tool around this methodology because I got tired of fixing the spreadsheet every other week. Happy to share it if anyone's interested, not trying to advertise anything, I just know some of you will hit the same wall I did.