Working with YouTubers and Instagram influencers in 2015

Instagram passed 300 million monthly users at the end of last year. YouTube reaches more 18 to 34 year olds in the US than any cable network, by Google's own count. Vine's six-second loops have produced a generation of creators with tens of millions of followers, and Snapchat and the new Periscope app are adding formats faster than brands can learn them. Meanwhile, use of ad blockers keeps growing among younger audiences, and display click-through rates on desktop have sat below a tenth of a percent for years. A creator with a trusting audience is one of the few ways to reach these people in a form they chose to watch.

Follower count is the least useful number available to you. Work through these instead.

1. Audience fit. Ask for a screenshot of the creator's audience demographics from YouTube Analytics or, for Instagram, their best estimate plus a look at who comments. A beauty channel whose audience is 70 percent teenage girls is a poor fit for a $200 kitchen appliance, however large it is.
2. Engagement rate. Divide average likes plus comments by followers. On Instagram, 3 to 6 percent is typical for mid-sized accounts; under 1 percent on an account with a large following suggests purchased followers. On YouTube, look at views per video relative to subscribers, and whether the comments are real conversations.
3. Content quality and consistency. Watch ten posts or three videos. Would you be comfortable with your brand appearing in any of them?
4. Previous sponsorships. How were they handled? Did the audience react well, or complain? A creator who has done one sponsored post a month for a year is practiced. One who has never done it may need more guidance and more approval rounds.
5. Overlap. If you are booking several creators, check whether they share an audience. Five creators in the same friend group reach the same people five times.

A useful rule: for a first campaign, three to five mid-sized creators with strong engagement will usually teach you more and cost less than one large name.

Put it in writing, even when the fee is small. The agreement should cover:

• Deliverables. Number of posts or videos, platform, format (dedicated video, integration, Instagram post, story on Snapchat), and dates.
• Content requirements. Key messages, what must be shown, what must not be said, and whether you get to approve before publishing. Keep this short; over-scripted content performs badly and creators resent it.
• Disclosure. Exactly how the sponsorship will be labeled, in the caption or on screen and in the description.
• Usage rights. Whether you may re-share the content on your own channels or in ads, for how long, and whether that costs extra. It usually does.
• Exclusivity. Whether the creator may work with a competitor, and for how long.
• Payment. Fee, timing, and whether any part is tied to performance, such as a commission through a tracked link or code.
• Links and tracking. The URL with its UTM parameters or the discount code they will use.

Treat these as orientation, not a price list. Rates shift by category and by how much the creator wants to work with you. Some will accept product-only arrangements; many good ones will not, and that is fair.

The FTC's endorsement guides apply to any paid or gifted relationship, and the May update to its guidance FAQ was explicit about social platforms. Clear and conspicuous means:

• On Instagram, a disclosure such as #ad or #sponsored at the start of the caption or clearly visible without tapping "more," not buried at the end of twenty hashtags.
• On YouTube, a verbal or on-screen mention in the video itself, not only in the description, because many viewers never open the description.
• On Vine and Snapchat, where space is tight, a visible label in the video or overlay.
• #sp, #spon and "thanks to" are not considered adequate on their own.

The responsibility sits with the advertiser as much as the creator. Put the disclosure requirement in the contract, check that it was met before you pay, and keep records. Beyond legal risk, audiences generally react better to honest sponsorships than to ones they feel were hidden from them.

Decide what the campaign is for before you brief it, because that determines what you can measure.

• Awareness. Views, reach and engagement are fine here, but set a cost per view or cost per engagement target and compare it with what the same money buys in Facebook or YouTube ads.
• Traffic. Give each creator a unique tracked link and look at sessions, bounce rate and pages per session in Google Analytics. Expect a sharp spike in the first 48 hours and a long tail for YouTube.
• Sales. Unique discount codes per creator are the simplest attribution available. They undercount, because some people will buy without the code, but they are consistent across creators.
• Content value. If you have usage rights, count the re-use. A good creator video repurposed as a Facebook ad often outperforms the brand's own production.

Report at 30 days, not the next morning, and compare cost per outcome across creators. You will usually find that one or two performed far better than the rest. Book them again.

• Picking creators from a list sorted by follower count.
• Sending a script. Brief the outcome and let the creator find the voice.
• Skipping the contract because the fee is small, then arguing about usage rights later.
• Forgetting the disclosure, or accepting a weak one.
• Measuring with likes alone and declaring victory.
• Running one post and judging the channel. Treat the first campaign as a test with three to five creators and a defined budget.

Creator partnerships work when they are tied to the rest of the brand and growth plan rather than bolted on. Discover means understanding who the audience is, which platforms they actually use, and what the brand can credibly say through someone else's voice. Plan sets the objective, the creator shortlist with audience and engagement checks, the budget split, the contract template including disclosure and usage rights, and the tracking. Build is the briefing and the production support, plus landing pages and codes the web team puts in place so traffic has somewhere to go. Improve is the 30-day review and the decision about who to work with again, with content rights fed back into the paid and organic social program.

The product launch engagement is the representative pattern. A consumer brand bringing a new product to market combined a small group of mid-sized YouTube and Instagram creators with paid social and a launch landing page. Each creator had a tracked link and code, disclosure language was written into the agreements, and the best-performing creator video was licensed for re-use as paid advertising. The launch window delivered measurable traffic and orders by creator, and the comparison showed clearly which partnerships to continue.