Weibo KOL placement guide (Part 1)

I know that 50% of my advertising dollars are wasted.

But I don't know which half.

For today’s advertising, KOL is an important link that cannot be avoided, but spending money without any effect is also a headache. Especially in the era of traffic anxiety, advertisers who want to obtain effective traffic must weigh various factors when choosing KOLs.

Almost every week, someone asks Xiaowei how to select bloggers? How to tell if a blogger is inflating his or her followers? Can you recommend some bloggers? So I decided to share with you the little tricks I know, the verified conclusions, and the summarized experiences.

This issue is divided into two parts: Part I - the misunderstandings many people fall into when analyzing KOLs; Part II - several key steps in selecting KOLs.

Myth 1: Reading Numbers

Many people believe that the higher the reading count, to a certain extent, it means that more people have seen this Weibo post. Is this really the case?

First of all, the reading number is the number of times, not the number of people. And it is not a statistics of the number of readings, but actually reflects the number of displays. To be precise, the number of readings is the number of times a single Weibo post is displayed on other people’s pages (follow, search, recommend, topic, etc.).

For example, when I open the Weibo platform, the reading counts of dozens of Weibo posts displayed on the page will be +1. If I refresh the page, all the reading counts will be +1 again. If a Weibo post is "reposted", when the reposted Weibo post is displayed, the reading count of both the reposted Weibo post and the original Weibo post will increase by 1. If refreshed, both are +1.

It should be very clear at this point that the number of readings and the actual number of readings are not necessarily related. A high number of readings does not ≠ many people seeing it. Personally, I think this data does not even have much practical significance.

Myth 2: Zombie fans

Many friends are obsessed with zombie fans and want to know how many zombie fans there are among their fans. Some people even hope that we can collect the change in the number of fans from the registration of an account to the present, just to know whether this KOL has bought fans before. This is really unnecessary. Regarding zombie fans, here are my personal opinions:

There are almost no KOLs on Weibo with 100% real fans. Even if we know how many zombie fans there are, it does not mean that the remaining active fans are all sticky. From the Beehive traffic fraud incident, we can know that the fraud of real-person water army to brush interaction is the most difficult to guard against. Instead of wasting time calculating how many zombie fans there are, it is better to spend time analyzing the stickiness of active fans.

Moreover, judging the authenticity of KOL data requires multiple dimensions, and zombie fans are just one of them. The following content of this issue will also share tips on how to judge the “water number”.

Next, let’s talk about a few key steps when selecting KOLs before launching:

01. Clarify the demand for delivery

In the past two years, various marketing campaigns have been shouting "integration of brand and effect", which has caused many advertisers to not consider their own situation at all. They want exposure and conversion immediately, which is simply rogue. I wanted to spark discussion and sell goods, but in the end I didn't accomplish either.

Therefore, before starting any work, you must be clear about your purpose, whether it is to gain exposure and increase visibility , or to achieve sales conversion . For example, if you have a new product with a high customer order volume, don’t expect to generate significant conversions immediately by investing in a few mid-level KOLs.

If this situation needs to be transformed, it is better to cooperate with celebrities and top KOLs. The celebrity effect, plus the fact that fan girls all use RMB to support their idols, at least the traffic and ability to bring goods are somewhat guaranteed. Of course, the premise is that your budget must be able to support your ambitions.

In addition, from the perspective of channels, Weibo is currently more suitable for exposure and phased conversions, while for advertisers who are urgently seeking sales conversions, Douyin and Taobao Live may be more suitable for you.

02. Preliminary selection of the first batch of KOLs

1. Weibo Rankings

Finding high-quality KOLs through lists has always been a good choice. There are various lists on the Xigua Data Weibo version, such as the blogger influence rankings, e-commerce expert rankings, VLOG video rankings, etc.

Swipe left and right to view the picture

2. Find bloggers who have advertised competing products in the past

Find your competitors through product search or product rankings, click on the details to refer to the other party’s advertising bloggers, but be careful to avoid those with very close advertising time, so as not to affect the advertising conversion effect due to the same product type.

Xigua Data Weibo Edition - Blogger Details

3. Accounts that have been used in products with strong product linkage attributes

For example, if you want electric toothbrush products, you can try to find better products that are put into toothpaste; or if you want low-fat food, you can look for breakfast machines. The two have related attributes, but they are not competing products.

4. Some friends will also directly seek cooperation with agencies, but a common mistake is to decide on the placement only based on the KOL provided by the other party. Although the data provided by the agency is very good, if you don’t want to waste your money, you still have to dig deeper to screen out KOLs with good quality that match the product.

03. Screen KOL-matching products

First of all, you need to be clear about who you want to show your advertisement to, and the attributes of the target users of your brand, product or event. Then you need to carefully understand the fan portraits behind each KOL and adapt the two.

Xigua Data Weibo Edition - Blogger Details

The number of active fans, age group, gender ratio, population labels, and geographical distribution are the most basic elements, which can be seen on the Xigua Data Weibo version.

In addition to matching fans, you also need to pay attention to the content.

Based on the content of KOL’s daily tweets, you can tell the blogger’s content tone and whether the content is of high quality. If most of the content is advertising cooperation, then it can basically be excluded. No one likes to see advertisements frequently, and bloggers with too many advertisements are likely to lose the trust of their fans. Those who continuously create content are more likely to attract sticky and loyal fans.

At the same time, one thing we must note is that in the initial stage of promotion , vertical category KOLs should be given priority, and the more the content matches the product, the better. For example: Breakfast Food-Healthy Food Blogger.

04. Determine the authenticity of blogger data

Finally we come to this part. This is the most important point and also a topic that has been talked about many times. Let me share a few methods.

Determine whether the interaction is fake:

1. Weibo monitoring is a very frequently used function and I believe many friends have used it. Simply put, it is to judge whether there is interaction fraud based on the trend of data changes. For specific methods, you can refer to my previous article "Want to know whether Weibo has inflated traffic? Do you really know how to use Weibo monitoring? ”, which explains it in great detail.

2. Check the ratio of retweets, comments and likes of historical Weibo posts and historical advertising Weibo posts. For example, if there are multiple Weibo posts without any benefits (such as retweet prize draws, comment prize draws, etc.), but the number of retweets or comments is still very high, or even close to the ratio of retweets, comments and likes (1:1:1) or the ratio of comments and likes (1:1), there is a high probability that there is a problem.

Xigua Data Weibo Edition - Blogger Details

3. Look at the number of likes on the comments. For a Weibo post with hundreds or thousands of comments, the comment with the most likes is only a pitiful single digit, and most of the comments have zero likes. This situation is likely to have a problem.

Blogger Details-Historical Weibo

4. Open the original blog comments and sort them by time. You will find a bunch of comments were posted at the same time. The content is perfunctory and so fake that it couldn’t be more fake.

Determine whether to buy fans recently:

1. Check the trend chart of the blogger's fans changes (Xigua Data Weibo version provides fans changes for the past 180 days at most). If you find that the number of fans has basically stopped changing after a period of continuous increase , then go to the historical Weibo to find the Weibo posts posted in the corresponding time period. If there are no hot posts or even no posts, then it means that the blogger has bought fans.

Fans portrait-fans changing trend

This method is applicable to most situations, but there are special cases, such as some "celebrities" who suddenly become popular and quickly gain followers due to their fame.

If you look at a few more "water numbers", you will find that they seem to be produced on the same assembly line, and the fake parts are all similar.

Author: Watermelon Jun

Source: Watermelon Jun