How many accounts do an influencer's followers follow? The answer impacts how well your sponsored posts will reach their audience.

Introducing: audience reachability.

What is influencer audience reachability?

Influencer audience reachability helps you understand how likely it is that a creator’s audience will see their posts. 

To determine reachability, you need to know how many accounts a creator’s followers are following. If they follow only 100 accounts, there’s a good chance they’ll see every post from the accounts they follow. If they follow 1k+ accounts, their feed will be quite cluttered, and they’re less ‘reachable’.

How to check influencer audience reachability

I’ll show you how to do it in just a few clicks using Modash, a tool for finding & analyzing influencers.

Here's the TL;DR:

• Search for an influencer (either with filters, or by entering their username)
• Open their creator profile analysis
• Scroll down and you’ll find audience reachability data

It looks like this:

Keep scrolling to get the step-by-step of how to do it, or grab a 14-day free trial and try it for yourself. No credit card needed.

Step-by-step walkthrough

After signing up for Modash, you’ll land in the Discovery tab. Here, we have two options. You can either start applying search filters to narrow down a database of over 200M influencers, or if you already have a creator in mind, you can enter their username directly. Let’s start with the latter.

Searching a specific username

To look for one specific creator, scroll down past the filters, and find the ‘Search by Username’ field. Make sure you’re on the correct platform too (see Instagram/TikTok/YouTube at the top).

The profile will appear below; simply click to open it.

You’ll land on the creator’s profile analysis. There, you’ll find a bunch of information: top audience locations, age & gender breakdowns, top content, influencer lookalikes, engagement rate, fake followers, and… audience reachability.

Search for new influencers, then check reachability

If you didn’t already have creators in mind, you can use Modash’s influencer discovery tool to search for new ones. The database includes every creator on Earth with 1k+ followers on Instagram, TikTok, and Youtube – so no matter your niche, there’s definitely some partners in there for you.

Here’s what it looks like:

Think about who you’re looking for. Shown above, here’s some ideas for starting criteria:

• A specific follower range, e.g. 3k - 5k followers
• Influencer location and other demographics like gender, language, etc.
• Keywords used in bio, in posts, or hashtags used

🗒️Quick note: Test out 1 to 2 filters at a time and keep narrowing your search until you shortlist a few influencers who best fit your brand.

With these search filters, Modash has given me 49K+ profiles. Next, I could:

• Open up profile summaries to analyze their audience & check their content (and reachability!)
• Add prospective influencers to a shortlist ready for outreach
• Narrow the search further

From here, the steps are the same as before. Simply open the profile, and check the data.

What to look for in audience reachability

For an influencer’s audience to be as ‘reachable’ as possible, you want their followers to be following as few other accounts as possible. Look for a high percentage of followers following 0-500, and 500-1k accounts. Once you start to get above 1k accounts followed, the chances of them seeing your sponsored posts becomes lower & lower.

Are there any other methods of checking audience reachability?

You could also look at the creator’s paid post performance. The question you need to answer is: “How well does this creator’s paid posts perform in relation to their regular posts?”

It’s not the same metric, but the goal is the same – you want to know how much of the creator’s audience you’re likely to reach with a paid collaboration. In Modash, that number is available as a percentage:

For example, if an average post gets 10,000 likes, and an average paid post gets 6,364 likes, the paid post performance would be 63.84% as above.

Without software, you can feasibly spot check this. Search through a creator's posts that contain ad disclosure hashtags like #ad, #sponsored (etc.), and manually look at how they’ve performed, then compare to other recent posts. Harder, but doable.

Other than that, theoretically, you could check reachability manually – checking a handful of followers one by one. Definitely not worth the time though, and nearly impossible for larger accounts.

Lastly, you could check influencer engagement rates. Engagement rate doesn't directly show reachability, but again, the outcome is similar -- a high engagement rate means you're going to reach a higher percentage of their following. Here's a free engagement rate caculator you can use, too.

High reachability isn’t enough

In case it isn’t obvious, there’s a lot more to check during your influencer vetting process than just reachability. For more on analysis, read: How To Vet & Analyze Influencer Profiles. Here’s the summary of things you should be checking:

• Fake followers
• Engagement rate
• Audience demographics
• Content quality
• Follower growth rate
• Paid post performance
• Brand alignment

Modash can help with most of these, but remember that some are qualitative & subjective (e.g. content quality/relevance/alignment). Add a step in your influencer selection process to answer: do I want my brand to be associated with this creator?

For all the data you need to find & analyze influencers at scale, try a 14-day free trial of Modash 🙂.