Instagram Marketing Influencer: Beyond Follower Count Vetting

Delaney Henson, Head of Brand Social and Influencer Talent Marketing at Oura (previously at Peloton), walks through exactly how her team vets creators before saying yes. She argues that follower count is one of the least reliable signals, because millions of followers can still produce weak performance metrics, and the real work is confirming audience quality by checking the ratio of legitimate versus spam accounts.

Her team prioritizes average engagement rate above most other numbers, partly because Oura is a higher-priced product that needs repeated impressions to convert. Geographic audience data matters too, since Oura operates globally and wants creators whose followers are concentrated in markets the brand is actively trying to penetrate.

Beyond the spreadsheet, Henson makes a case for one softer filter: whether a creator has genuinely used the product, shows up to calls with two or three original content ideas, and is simply pleasant to work with.

For anyone building an Instagram marketing influencer program and wondering how to separate real candidates from inflated profiles, this video gives you a practical vetting checklist from someone running it at scale.