Managing an influencer campaign requires a lot of effort and time to track and analyse influencer content across various platforms. Each post, story, or video holds valuable insights, and together they create a big picture of campaign performance.

Tracking the campaign includes capturing the content itself – whether posted or adhering to the brief, its performance and sentiment. By capturing these metrics, you can reveal the content's reach, effectiveness, and audience perception.

Comprehensive content tracking presents challenges, though. Hidden platform analytics, reliance on influencer screenshots, and the risk of missing fleeting content like Stories can make the process complex. Additionally, manually collecting data across various platforms is a significant time investment.

So, what are the specifics of content tracking on every platform and how can you overcome all tracking hurdles? We’ll figure it out in this guide!

Influencer Content Tracking: Challenges We Face

Before diving into solutions, let's acknowledge the roadblocks that hinder influencer content tracking:

1. Each social media platform exists in its own data fortress, making it difficult to get a unified view of campaign performance.
2. Influencers create a diverse range of content – photos, videos, stories, live streams – requiring diverse tracking methods.
3. Collecting data from each platform and influencer manually is both time-consuming and error-prone. Typos, missed entries, or inconsistencies can skew your results and hinder accurate analysis.
4. Some platforms might restrict access to certain analytics or bury key metrics within their dashboards.
5. Relying on influencers to provide screenshots of their content adds an extra layer of complexity. It requires constant communication and coordination, and there's always the risk of them forgetting.
6. Tracking time-sensitive content like Stories or live streams can be tricky. By the time you manually capture the data, the content might have disappeared, leaving valuable insights inaccessible.
7. Manually collecting and analysing data across multiple platforms is incredibly time-consuming. This valuable resource could be better spent on strategic campaign planning or other marketing tasks.

Content Tracking Strategies Across Platforms

Different platforms offer unique features and functionalities, so your tracking approach needs to adapt accordingly. Here's a breakdown of key strategies and tricks for capturing influencer content across the major social media playgrounds.

Instagram – Moderate Difficulty

Instagram offers a good balance between user-friendliness and data availability, providing a decent functionality for tracking. However, hidden demographic data and a limited history of notifications present some challenges. Additionally, Stories that disappear within 24 hours – are the main beast of this platform.

What we’d recommend to use for content tracking:

• Page Tags – the easiest way to spot influencers' activity on a top level. When briefing creators, specify your Instagram handle and make tagging required.
• Use Instagram Shopping tags within influencer posts if promoting products. It allows you to track clicks and purchases driven through tagged products.
• Utilise tools like Bitly to create trackable shortened URLs with UTM parameters. Include these links in influencer posts to track clicks and conversions.
• Leverage built-in Instagram Insights to analyse impressions, reach, engagement (likes, comments, shares), and story views.
• Encourage influencers to use your branded campaign hashtag alongside organic ones. This allows you to filter content and track branded conversations.

TikTok – Moderate-High Difficulty

TikTok offers analytics tools, but some features require a Pro account. Tracking video completion rates and engagement (likes, comments, shares) is possible, the hurdles are hidden demographics data and limited click tracking through captions.

• Include a trackable link in the influencer's bio to measure website traffic or app downloads driven by their content.
• Similar to Instagram, branded hashtags help isolate influencer-driven content and measure campaign reach.
• Access key metrics through TikTok Analytics – like video views, completion rate, profile views, follower demographics, and engagement rate (likes, comments, shares). Requires a TikTok Pro account.

YouTube – Low-Moderate Difficulty

YouTube Analytics provides detailed insights on video views, watch time, audience demographics, engagement (likes, dislikes, comments), and traffic sources (where viewers came from).

• Encourage influencers to include clear branded CTAs in their videos, linking to your website or landing page. Track clicks and conversions driven by these CTAs.
• Add custom UTM parameters to YouTube video links within influencer descriptions to track specific campaigns.

X (formerly Twitter) – High Difficulty

Tracking content on X presents challenges due to limited analytics access and the removal of some crucial functionality in recent platform updates.

• Encourage influencers to use trackable links (Bitly) in their X posts that redirect to your website or landing page.
• If the influencer has a public X account and allows analytics access, you might be able to view some basic data through their profile. This could include metrics like impressions, engagement (retweets, likes, replies), and link clicks (if the influencer included a trackable link).
• Establish a unique campaign hashtag for influencers to use in their X posts. By searching for this hashtag, you can track branded conversations and identify influencer content, even if you can't access detailed analytics.

Important Note: X recently removed access to Audience Insights, which previously provided demographic data about followers. This limits the ability to track influencer audience demographics through the platform itself. But you can access it via influencer vetting tools.

Threads (by Instagram) – High Difficulty

Currently, Threads offers limited native analytics and requires a lot of manual tracking. However, there is one influencer content tracking tool that has functionality for Threads and provides automated tracking, saving and analysis of content.

• Measure engagement by responses (likes, replies) to influencer prompts within Threads to gauge audience interaction.
• While quantitative data collected manually might be limited, focus on sentiment analysis. Are conversations insightful? Does the influencer foster a positive brand perception?
• Try running one campaign at a time, so that if you see spikes in following or engagement, you know it’s from this one.

Companion Auto-Tracking – Effortlessly

To simplify this task and ensure the accuracy of campaign tracking, we recommend using Companion. This tool automatically tracks influencer content across all platforms mentioned above, neatly collects it in a feed, analyses its performance and provides a well-designed post-campaign report in one click.

You don’t need to worry about UTM links, in-app tags or anything else. Companion captures content without tags or hashtags, using AI to find mentions of your brand across those platforms. Stories are also not a problem for this tool - they all will be saved and available to download.

Additionally, you have access to a comprehensive real-time dashboard with over 50 metrics to analyse campaign performance.

Try Companion for free to check whether this tool is helpful for you.

Conclusion

Manually tracking influencer content across platforms is a challenge, but understanding each platform's quirks empowers you to develop a strategic approach. Utilise platform tools and creative tactics like trackable links and branded hashtags.

For ultimate efficiency, consider influencer marketing platforms that aggregate content and data from various social media channels. This saves time, provides a unified view of campaign performance, and allows you to focus on optimising your influencer strategy and maximising ROI, instead of non-stop screengrabbing.