How to Spy on Instagram Influencers: Determine If It’s Worth Working with an Instagram Influencer in Under 5 Minutes

Before working with Instagram influencers to promote your brand or product, you have to do your “due diligence”.

I’ve spent thousands of dollars on Instagram influencers in the last few weeks alone.

And along the way I’ve learned a few things.

But more importantly, I’ve discovered some insanely helpful tools that I personally use to spy on Instagram influencers. One of these tools is Keyhole. It gives you all sorts of insights and statistics for any Instagram page, even if you’re not the owner of the page.

And that’s really important, because most Instagram statistic tools require you to login to your account. Unfortunately you can’t use any of these tools to spy on Instagram influencers.

But Keyhole is different.

The Awesome Little Tool I Use to Spy on Instagram Influencers

All you have to do is go to http://keyhole.co.

Make sure you select the “@account” tab and that the Instagram checkbox is checked. Then simply type in the name of the Instagram page you want to spy on.

You don’t even have to set up an account to do this.

The first thing you’ll see is this:

Pretty cool huh?

The Most Important Instagram Influencer Metrics You Should Keep An Eye On

The first thing you want to look out for are the average likes per post.

In this example each post gets 8,146 likes.

The second metric to look out for, which is even more important, are the average comments. Sometimes Instagram influencers use bots and other tactics to get fake likes in order to make it appear like their posts are getting a lot of engagement. So you always want to keep an eye on the comments.

This Instagram influencer gets 173 comments on average for each post, which isn’t too bad.

Now, before buying a sponsored promotion from an Instagram influencer, you’ll also want to look at the comments and make sure they are legit.

How To Spot Fake Comments from Engagement Groups

Influencers are sneaky and use engagement groups (groups where a bunch of influencers comment on each others newest posts in order to boost everyone’s engagement). Obviously, you want to make sure there are mostly real people commenting and not other Instagram influencers from engagement groups.

How do you know?

If you see a comment and click on the name, and they have 20,000-200,000 followers or more, this is another Instagram influencer from an engagement group.

Usually these comments are very generic and short like “Cool”, “Awesome” or “I need this”.

Anyway, here’s the next thing you’ll see.

Is the Influencer Engagement Decreasing or Increasing?

Take a look at the following graph.

This will give you a rough idea of how much engagement an Instagram influencer is getting per week. You can spot upward or downward trends to determine if it’s a good time to buy a promotion or not.

In the top right you can also toggle between “Engagement”, “Likes” and “Comments”.

If the overall engagement seems to be declining, maybe it’s not a good time to buy a promoted post. The page might be losing a lot of followers or the attention is declining for some other reason. As you can see in the graph above, end of October the engagement spiked. After that the engagement took a small dip but increased again in November, even though the influencer posted less on his page.

However, this isn’t the coolest feature of Keyhole.

There’s more to come.

3 Things You Can Learn from Spying on the Post with the Most Engagement

The most helpful feature is that you can see the best performing post on the page. This allows you to get a feeling for the type of sponsored post you want to craft if you decide to buy a promotion. You’ll see which picture or video got the most likes and comments and you can spy on the caption, too.

As you can see, the picture of the baby “Pug” got the most engagement and likes.

So what can you learn from this?

Three things:

1. There’s lot of people following this page who like Pugs.
2. The post with the most engagement was a picture and not a video
3. It was posted October 11th which was a Wednesday, so maybe you should book a post on Wednesday.

It’s awesome how much we just learned about this page.

If I’d be the owner of a dog brand, I’d try to buy a shoutout and sell a Pug related product.

I would try to use a similar image and schedule the post for a Wednesday.

This is in a nutshell how I use Keyhole to spy on Instagram influencers. It’s now part of my regular research and “due diligence” before buying a sponsored post from an Instagram influencer. The tool can also be used for Twitter influencer marketing and has some additional features I haven’t fully explored yet.

Let me know in the comments what you think of this little tool? 🙂