What are Swiss influencer ratings good for?

Influencer marketing is increasingly occupying the Swiss market and is now an integral part of many Swiss companies' annual marketing budgets. More and more influencer marketing start-ups are trying to position themselves as experts and are vying for market share with questionable influencer rankings. But what are these rankings good for in practice? Are they really reliable or rather misleading? As soon as personalities such as tennis star Roger Federer, footballer Ivan Rakitic or Instagrammer Debora Gabrielle Cicciolina top such rankings, the largest Swiss influencer agency Kingfluencers has doubts as to whether influencer marketing has been properly understood at the grassroots level. "We also rate our influencers according to various practical and qualitative criteria. Roger Federer would not appear in our top 10 for various reasons"says Fabian Plüss, co-founder of Kingfluencers."Firstly, Roger Federer only signs testimonials or multi-year sponsorship contracts and, secondly, at sums that make no sense for classic influencer campaigns. These are just two of the many reasons why we would not recommend Roger Federer and at least half of this top 10 for any campaign - even though I am an avowed Roger fan"says Plüss.

Beware of false incentives

Another example is the profile of Debora Gabriella Cicciolina. As a brand, it is difficult to identify with the look and feel of Debora's visual world. In addition, such performance-based influencer rankings undermine essential success factors such as the personality, individuality, creativity and therefore authenticity of the influencers and create completely false incentives. This approach forces influencers into a uniform corset and puts them under pressure with unrealistic performance expectations, which in turn favors dishonest performance measures and punishes honest influencers who value quality and organic performance. Fabian Plüss is therefore not surprised that these rankings repeatedly include influencers who performed rather poorly in the SRF data analysis on the topic of fake followers or who have a very high international community share. Kingfluencers evaluates influencers primarily on the basis of qualitative factors:"A professional influencer selection must be aligned with campaign-specific criteria such as brand values, ideals and campaign goals, just as a brand must match the values and imagery of an influencer. This is why we focus on quality rather than quantity in our evaluation, as the sustainable development of the Swiss influencer market and brand-specific performance are very important to us. We also see our main responsibility as representing the interests of brands and influencers, promoting their individuality and protecting them from standardization"explains Plüss.

The Swiss community is more important than the number of followers

Certain influencer rankings take into account the monthly follower growth rate, i.e. the change in the number of followers within a month. This in turn encourages the use of questionable growth methods. Fabian Plüss sees the following difficulty here: "It is unlikely that the top 10 will change significantly within a month without the help of purchased followers or bots. Healthy community growth is usually linear and not erratic. Building a community is a long and arduous process. Likewise, organic growth needs to be analyzed and evaluated over a longer period of time, and the majority of rankings are designed for the short term, which does not guarantee reliable long-term data and may even encourage influencers to buy their reach and performance to make it into the top 10. With so many influencers on the market, the quality of the content and the Swiss community share are also becoming increasingly important. More and more Swiss customers are also paying attention to this. They are now more concerned with the geographical distribution of the community."

Dubious influencer rating

Different evaluation indicators are used for the influencer rankings. The ad/no-ad ratio as one of these indicators provides information on the ratio of the number of posts declared as paid partnerships to the number of undeclared posts. Based on Kingfluencers' experience, only around 50 percent of paid posts are declared as ads. Here too, it is therefore not possible to say exactly how reliably and truthfully the indicator influences the rating system. In addition, influencers who declare their posts honestly and conscientiously are penalized and receive a lower rating in the rankings, and Kingfluencers does not deny that the influencer rankings have a certain entertainment value. However, as far as the professional business aspect is concerned, the rankings are completely useless.