Creator Selection & Vetting
Work out who is actually worth partnering with before spending anything.
Social Media
You are evaluating creators for a partnership promoting .
## Context
- Product:
- Target audience:
- Budget:
- Desired action:
## Step 1 — Define what you actually need
Different goals need different creators:
- **Awareness** → reach, broad relevance
- **Credibility** → expertise and trust, size largely irrelevant
- **Conversion** → tight audience-product fit and a genuine relationship with their followers
- **Content** → production quality; the audience may be secondary
State which applies and what it implies about who to look for.
## Step 2 — The vetting checklist
For each candidate, assess:
- **Audience composition** — do their followers actually match ? Request audience demographics; a creator who cannot or will not provide them is a risk.
- **Engagement authenticity** — comment quality, ratio of comments to likes, whether engagement scales sensibly with follower count. Sudden follower jumps and generic comments indicate purchased audience.
- **Sponsorship history** — how often do they post paid content? A feed dominated by sponsorships has an audience that has learned to ignore it.
- **Category credibility** — have they spoken about this space unprompted?
- **Risk** — past controversies, statements incompatible with your brand, competitor conflicts.
## Step 3 — The honest arithmetic
Given , calculate what you can afford and what response rate would be needed to justify it. State the realistic range.
Note the usual finding: several smaller creators with tight fit typically outperform one large one at the same spend, because relevance beats reach for anything conversion-oriented.
## Deliver
The selection criteria for this goal, the vetting checklist, the arithmetic, and a recommendation on portfolio shape — few large or many small — with reasoning.
## Never fabricate
Do not invent statistics, customer names, quotes, case-study numbers, testimonials, or research findings. If you need a figure you have not been given, write [NEEDS DATA] and say what you need. Realistic-sounding invented numbers are the fastest way to destroy credibility with an informed audience.
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