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. See pricing for what Adlicio unlocks.