Creator discovery and vetting

Purpose

Creators are easy to find and hard to judge. Follower count is the easiest number to see and the least useful for B2B. This skill finds creators whose audience contains the buyer, and vets them on fit and engagement first, so the shortlist is worth paying for.

When to use

• A campaign needs creators and the team does not have a shortlist.
• An existing shortlist is large, and needs to be cut to the creators with real fit.
• A creator has been suggested and the team needs to know whether to pay them.

Route elsewhere when:

• The question is the strategy and tier. Use creator-program-strategy.
• The question is the rate. Use creator-rate-band.

Inputs

• The exact buyer: role titles, seniority, and topic proximity.
• The problem language the buyer uses when searching.
• Competitor or adjacent brands that have sponsored creators.
• Any marketplace the team already uses.

Procedure

Start with the buyer

Define the buyer first: the role titles, the seniority, and the topics they care about. Then work backwards to who they read. A creator who speaks to the buyer's problem is more useful than one who has the buyer's job title but does not discuss the problem.

Five ways to find creators

1. Mine engaged audiences. Take the people who comment on the last twenty relevant posts in the space. They already engage with the topic, and some of them are creators.
2. Search on problem language. Search narrow phrases that describe the buyer's problem, rather than the category name. Note who posts on those topics consistently.
3. Analyze second degrees. Look at who the strong creators in the space engage with. Smaller accounts with sharp commentary often outperform larger names.
4. Read competitor sponsorships. Public sponsored posts show which creators already reach the target market.
5. Use a vetted marketplace. Filter by topic and audience. Marketplaces are useful for booking, but they do not replace the vetting below.

Vetting order

Check in this order, and stop early if a creator fails a step:

1. Audience fit. Read the comments on recent posts. Are the commenters the buyer? If not, stop.
2. Engagement quality. Are the comments substantive, from real people in the role? Reactions alone are weak evidence.
3. Consistency. Does the creator post on the topic regularly, or only occasionally?
4. Authentic voice. Does the creator sound like a practitioner, and do they disagree with things sometimes? A creator who only praises is harder to trust with a sponsored post.
5. Follower count. Consider last, as one input among the others.

Sequence

1. Define the buyer and the problem language.
2. Run the five discovery methods and collect candidates.
3. Vet each candidate in the order above, recording the evidence for each step.
4. Build the shortlist of creators that pass steps one to four, with the evidence for each.
5. Record a reason to skip for every candidate that fails, so the decision can be reviewed.

Output

• A shortlist of vetted creators, each with the evidence for audience fit, engagement quality, consistency, and voice.
• A list of candidates skipped, with the reason for each.

Quality bar

Sourcing starts from the buyer. Every shortlisted creator has audience evidence from comments. Follower count is not the basis for inclusion. Terms of use for any data gathering are respected. Watch for shortlists built from follower count, creators with only reaction-level engagement, and no record of why others were skipped.