Malaysian influencers see lower engagement compared to Indonesia and Thailand

Engagement with influencers in Malaysia is lower as compared to Indonesia and Thailand. According to the Influencer Marketing Benchmarks Report 2019 by InfluencerDB, an influencer marketing technology company based in Europe, the audience quality grade for Malaysian influencers was in the 31.2 percentile, compared to 51.0 percentile and 37.9 percentile for Indonesia and Thailand respectively.The audience quality distribution predicts how likely it is for an influencer’s following to see and engage with posts, typically related to Instagram activity and their number of followed accounts. InfluencerDB said:A good quality distribution suggests an audience that actively uses Instagram, contains little-to-no fake accounts and does not follow more channels than it can consume.The report said that when hiring influencers, it is imperative for marketers to be able to detect audience quality. “While not always available, this information can make or break a campaign. Marketers and advertisers with influencer audience quality benchmark data can easily understand which influencers and markets to prioritise,” it said.Meanwhile, the report found that sponsored posts performed better on Instagram than non-sponsored posts.This can be attributed to reasons such as influencers putting more effort into their content when being sponsored, consumers enjoy seeing their favourite influencers getting brand deals and engage more as a form of support, and algorithms giving precedence to sponsored posts and organic reach is decreasing.In Singapore, the average like follower ratio (LFR) for sponsored posts stood at 1.9% in the first quarter of 2019 compared to the average LFR of non-sponsored posts (1.7%). This was a change as previously, the average LFR for non-sponsored posts always surpassed that of sponsored posts. According to InfluencerDB, LFR is the average number of likes on each post in proportion to the number of followers on an Instagram account.The average LFR has decreased across the beauty, fashion, food, lifestyle, travel, sports and fitness sectors. Although the average LFR for the travel vertical dropped by 3.5%, the report said it still had the highest LFR with a 4.5% average. Coming in second was sport (3.7%) followed by lifestyle (3.6%).“A decreasing LFR with follower growth is old news. But our benchmarks showcase how powerful smaller accounts truly are. Influencers with 1k-5k followers show an average LFR of 8.8%. Double the number of followers and the average LFR is more than halved (3.8%),” InfluencerDB said.According to the report, this may indicate a slow saturation of the market but also emphasises the significance to understand all important metrics. “Marketers who can juggle the numbers and see the bigger picture know how to choose the right partner for collaborations,” it said.Read also:Nearly 80% of the influencers in Asia are micro influencersIndonesia youth ministry urges youngsters to become influencersWhy influencers are shifting away from the term ‘influencer’What do marketers deem ‘absolutely essential’ when working with influencers?Unilever toughens stance on influencers in transparency pushAds beat influencers by about 300% when discovering brandsHow much creative freedom are you willing to give influencers?(Photo courtesy: 123RF)