Vet a creator's engagement before you pay them.

Engagement rate is the share of an audience that actually interacts with a post: likes plus comments plus saves, shares, or reposts, divided by followers. It is the fastest public check on whether a creator's audience is real and paying attention, which is exactly what you are renting in a UGC or influencer deal. Follower counts alone stopped meaning anything years ago, the rate is what separates a live audience from a purchased one.

Read it in two ways. Rate by followers is the vetting number, computable from public data before you ever message a creator. Rate by reach divides by the accounts a post actually reached, so it is truer to performance but needs analytics only the creator can share. Shortlist on the first, confirm finalists with the second. And always average 5 to 10 recent posts, one viral hit tells you nothing about the baseline.

Calibrate for size and platform. Under 1% is low, 1% to 3% is average, 3% to 6% is good, and 6% and up is excellent, but smaller accounts skew higher and TikTok runs hotter than Instagram because the For You feed reaches past followers. Then read the comments themselves: specific product questions signal buyers, emoji walls signal pods.

A high rate gets a creator on your shortlist. What they say in the ad is what makes it convert, and the best lines come from scraping what your customers actually say.