influence

About influence

If you’re at all familiar with influencer marketing software, you might be wondering how a marketplace platform could double as a social channel. There’s an inherent community to social networks, while marketplaces have a more mercenary quality to them. Brands and influencers alike are only there for themselves and trying to negotiate their best prices. Where does the community fit in?

This is why the creators of influence.co refer to it as the LinkedIn for influencer marketing. There is, of course, the job-seeking element to it: with over 600 live campaigns, brands are trying to find creators to collaborate with, creators are trying to find brands that want to work with them. Meanwhile, the social feed is populated with all kinds of content: influencers can post as a way to show their worth; brands share content or open campaigns; brands can ask for input from influencers, maybe advice on what works and what doesn’t.

Because of the social media functions, influencers are able to create much more thorough profiles for themselves and really showcase their work. With most marketplaces, an influencer profile is automatically populated with data and content that’s ingested through the API. Here, the influencer has a greater degree of control over the profile, able to write their own bio and create a portfolio of their past collaborations across any of their connected profiles. Standard demographic information is shown by default, and brands/agencies with Pro accounts can look at the more advanced demographics that are part of the first-party data influence.co receives via API.

Brands and agencies can also create their own profiles, which work like a company page on LinkedIn. Employees of these companies create their own profiles and become team members for the brand—giving them the ability to post as the company and collaborate on campaigns.

It’s important to understand the primary function of the social aspect of influence.co: it doesn’t take the place of discovery and activation, it complements it. As with any influencer, engagement and authenticity matters. When they’re liking and commenting on posts, brands see influencers as motivated, willing to put in the effort. And while brands can absolutely post their open campaigns to their profiles (and therefore the feed), there are also more traditional methods of doing so. They can use the search function to find influencers by standard criteria like category, followers counts, and social channel. But they can also search for more unconventional things like past collaborations (maybe with a brand’s competitor), or whether or not they have an Amazon influencer shop.

Creating campaign briefs on influence.co will also be a familiar experience for anyone who’s worked with a marketplace before. You can create detailed campaign briefs spelling out your objectives and requirements, accept applications, and message back and forth with influencers who do apply. If you’re on the free plan, this is where your features end. You can still run campaigns outside the platform, using whatever software (or none at all) to manage them as posts go live. For those paying for the Business Pro plan, you’ll get access to the campaign management tools for handling all the applications, communicating with team members, and finalizing content for everything to go live.

Finally, there’s the reporting on your campaigns (for Pro accounts). This is actually the one downer in a series of bright spots. The information you get out of influence.co is minimal, consisting only of publicly available data: total likes, total comments, and a catalog of all the content that’s part of the campaign. You can sort the content by newest/oldest, or most/least popular. And that’s essentially it. No visualizations of the data that it does have, no analysis of when and where, and who is engaging. It’s surprisingly lean for a platform that excels at everything else.