Vetting creators before you pay them
Twenty minutes of checking prevents most bad creator buys.
The short answer
Before paying a creator, verify audience geography and age against your customer, check engagement authenticity in the comments, review brand safety across recent content, ask for results from past partnerships, and confirm content quality is consistent rather than occasional.
Key takeaways
- Ask for audience insight screenshots; a real creator provides them without fuss.
- Read the comments — genuine engagement looks obviously different from bought engagement.
- Check whether they have promoted a direct competitor in the last quarter.
- Ask for results from two previous campaigns, not just a media kit.
Follower count is the only metric in this channel that can be bought outright, which is precisely why it is the one most campaigns are priced on.
The five checks
- 01Audience geography and age. Ask for the insights screenshot. If most of the audience is outside the cities you serve, the rate is irrelevant.
- 02Engagement authenticity. Read fifty comments. Generic single-word and emoji comments in volume indicate an engagement pod or bought engagement.
- 03Brand safety. Scroll six months of content. You are looking for anything you would not want your brand adjacent to, and for whether they promoted a competitor recently.
- 04Past performance. Ask for the results of two previous brand campaigns. Creators who track their own performance are the ones worth rebuying.
- 05Consistency. One viral post and forty quiet ones means you are buying the forty, not the one.
The contract
- Deliverables and dates, specifically — 'one reel and two stories, live by the 14th'.
- Usage rights: the right to run the content as paid advertising for a defined period.
- Whitelisting, if you want to run ads from their handle.
- Exclusivity: no competitor promotion for a defined window.
- Disclosure: paid partnership tagging, which is required and also protects both sides.
- Approval process with a stated turnaround, so review does not become an open-ended negotiation.