Influencer Screening: The Ins and Outs of Vetting Influencers

Marketing trends have evolved over the years, and we can’t ignore the prevalence of influencer marketing, especially with consumers increasingly making purchasing decisions based on the recommendations of the influencers they trust. This presents a powerful opportunity for brands, but also a significant risk. When influencers promote a product, they become an extension of the brand itself, making thorough influencer vetting essential to avoid potential reputational damage.

The scale of influencer marketing only adds to the challenge. More than half of B2C brands work with 6-10 influencers at a time, meaning businesses must screen multiple individuals across various social media platforms. With new and emerging networks constantly reshaping the digital landscape, outdated vetting methods leave brands vulnerable to oversight.

That’s where social media screening technology comes into the picture. By analyzing an influencer’s entire online presence, across both mainstream and rising platforms, these tools help brands identify risks early, ensuring every partnership aligns with their marketing goals and helps strengthen their reputation.

A Brief History of Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing may seem like a modern phenomenon, but its roots trace back much further than the rise of social media. The concept of leveraging influential figures to promote products has been around for centuries, evolving alongside technology and consumer behavior.

Before the era of social media, brands turned to endorsements from influential figures to build credibility. This goes as far back as the 1850s when Queen Victoria endorsed Cadbury, which showcased how companies could align themselves with royalty and public figures to boost consumer trust. Similarly, other brands use celebrity athletes in advertising, like the early days of Nike partnering with Michael Jordan in the 1980s. By the early 20th century, Hollywood stars and sports icons became the go-to endorsers for brands, appearing in print ads and TV commercials to promote everything from soft drinks to luxury goods.

The early 2000s brought the rise of blogging and YouTube, allowing everyday individuals to build loyal followings and establish themselves as trusted voices in specific niches. Platforms like Instagram and Twitter further shifted marketing power from celebrities to content creators who built credibility through authenticity rather than fame. By the mid-2010s, brands recognized that these social media personalities had strong, engaged audiences, making influencer marketing a key strategy for reaching consumers in a more organic way.

Today, influencer marketing is a multi-billion-dollar industry, with brands investing heavily in collaborations across platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. But with this rise comes new challenges. Brands must navigate issues like brand safety risks and shifting audience expectations. Among those challenges, brands also need to ensure that the influencers they choose to partner with are able to amplify the company’s brand reputation through the reach of that online creator. 

What is Influencer Screening?

During those early days of influencer marketing, brand partnerships were built on trust, intuition, and a surface-level review of an influencer’s content. A few scrolls through an Instagram feed or a quick check on follower count seemed like enough to gauge brand alignment. But now, during a time when every post, comment, and interaction leaves a lasting footprint, surface-level vetting is no longer enough.

Influencer screening, also known as influencer vetting, goes beyond the highlight reel. It’s a data-driven process that evaluates influencer behaviors online to uncover potential risks such as hate speech, discrimination, inappropriate behavior, or controversial engagements that could harm a brand’s reputation. AI-powered screening tools analyze years of public content, ensuring businesses don’t unknowingly partner with influencers whose past actions could spark backlash.

The Importance of Thorough Influencer Vetting

While brands can do a lot to curate their desired brand image, that image, ultimately, is only as strong as the people who represent it. With that in mind, influencers are more than just marketing channels, they’re an extension of the brand itself. When an influencer gets caught in controversy, brands that partner with them don’t just risk negative press; they face real financial consequences. 

We’ve seen it happen before: an influencer’s past problematic post resurfaces, and suddenly, the brands they’ve worked with are scrambling to distance themselves (remember when Shane Dawson’s YouTube career was on thin ice due to previous racist and abusive comments?) The fallout? Sponsorship deals were pulled, ad campaigns scrapped, and a flood of crisis management efforts that could have been avoided with proactive screening.

Beyond risk mitigation, social media screening also helps brands identify the right influencers who authentically align with company values and messaging. An influencer’s past engagement, audience sentiment, and the themes they promote on social media offer valuable insights into how well they might represent a brand. 

Unlike agency pitches, media kits, or curated highlight reels and portfolios, social media offers a real-time, long-term record of how an influencer engages with their followers and the public. This makes it a crucial tool for brands looking to assess whether an influencer aligns with their values and poses any potential risks to their reputation. 

3 Considerations for Influencer Screening

The importance of influencer screening can’t be underestimated when it comes to avoiding risks tied to influencer marketing efforts. In order to prevent unwanted backlash or protect brand image, screening helps brands ensure that an influencer’s web presence supports their messaging goals. With that in mind, there are a few things to consider when vetting influencers for marketing partnerships. 

1. Value Alignment

Successful influencer marketing isn’t just about reach. Rather, it’s about alignment. When brands partner with influencers who genuinely share their values, campaigns feel authentic, resonate with audiences, and drive real engagement. But alignment isn’t something that can be determined by a quick glance at an influencer’s latest posts. It requires deeper analysis of their online history to ensure their values, past actions, and audience interactions support the brand’s long-term goals.

2. Competitive Promotions and Conflicts of Interest

Beyond value alignment, brands need to understand whether their influencers of choice are able to promote their brand in an ethical way. That means there aren’t any problematic brand, product, or competitive promotions that would unknowingly put your brand in an uncomfortable position. A comprehensive screening of past social media history can surface these mentions, allowing marketers to understand the influencer’s promotion and partner history that could impact their brand. 

3. Risk Management

An influencer’s past behavior can become a liability overnight. Problematic content, whether it’s offensive remarks, discriminatory behavior, or engagement in illegal activities, can resurface and create a brand crisis. Even if an influencer has deleted posts, resurfaced screenshots can still put a brand at risk.

Take for instance, the backlash surrounding the “Emilia Pérez” movie. Lead actress Karla Sofía Gascón’s old derogatory and offensive social media posts were resurfaced during the press tour, including misogynistic and homophobic language. Although some of the posts were made years ago, their reemergence sparked widespread criticism and raised serious questions about accountability and past online behavior.

For companies associated with Gascón, these posts present significant risks. Brands seen as endorsing or aligning with individuals who have a history of harmful or offensive conduct can quickly find themselves at the center of public backlash. The damage can extend beyond social media outrage, impacting brand loyalty, consumer trust, and even revenue.

To avoid these reputational pitfalls, brands must take a proactive approach to influencer vetting. One of the most effective strategies is implementing a risk-based screening process that goes beyond surface-level checks and analyzes an influencer’s digital footprint to identify:

• Patterns of misconduct, such as hate speech, harassment, or promoting illegal activities.
• Potential controversies that could harm brand reputation.
• Audience sentiment and engagement, ensuring influencers attract the right kind of attention from a desired audience and demographic.

Influencer marketing is built on trust, both between the brand and the influencer and between the influencer and their audience. When brands partner with influencers, they’re associating themselves with everything that influencer has said and done online, even if it was years ago. Even if an influencer has a seemingly clean online presence today, past posts or interactions can come back into the spotlight, sparking backlash that directly impacts the brands they represent.

How Social Media Screening Tools Simplify Influencer Screening Practices

While it might not be everyday that you encounter discrimination, trolling, threats of violence, or sexual harassment online, it’s still critical that businesses are aware of just how much misconduct is out there on social media. In fact, 47% of influencers have shared content that could potentially harm the brands they represent. On top of that, nearly 6 in 10 brands that work with influencers have already been victims of influencer fraud.

This emphasizes why robust social media screening is no longer optional when evaluating influencers for partnerships. While influencer marketing has become an incredibly effective tactic, the stakes are higher than ever (especially because 43% of younger consumers say they’d make a purchase based on an influencer’s recommendation.) The value influencers deliver has increased significantly in recent years, but so has the potential for reputational damage when partnerships aren’t thoroughly vetted. 

“It only takes one bad viral post to derail the positive influencer impact and harm a brand’s reputation along with long and short term sales.”

One of the biggest challenges in influencer screening is scale. Modern social media platforms have expanded to video-based content, like TikTok and Reels, it’s important to be able to review text, image, and video-based content efficiently. Similarly, the number of platforms many brands are on is growing, with the rise of new platforms like Threads and Bluesky, where 52% of brands have already established a presence. Having the ability to screen across various types of content on numerous platforms is critical. . Social media screening tools simplify the process by scanning content across both established and emerging platforms, evaluating everything from video captions to comment threads and blog posts. They provide brands with a comprehensive view of an influencer’s online presence, both past and present.

The most effective screening tools continuously adapt to new patterns of misconduct, leveraging AI to recognize evolving language, behaviors, and engagement trends across several platforms as user behavior continues to shift. By doing so, brands can stay ahead of reputational risks and confidently partner with influencers whose online presence aligns with their values.

Do You Need to Vet Influencers?

To get straight to the point, yes! Failing to vet influencers thoroughly can have serious consequences for a brand’s reputation, and the fallout can happen fast. In 2024, Doritos pulled out of a campaign after discovering that an influencer they partnered with, Samantha Hudson, had a history of making offensive remarks on social media. What was meant to be a celebratory, inclusive marketing initiative quickly turned into a PR crisis, forcing the brand into damage control mode.

Thanks to the recent Netflix show “Apple Cider Vinegar,” Belle Gibson is making headlines for her influencer scandals. Gibson, a wellness influencer, built a massive following and secured brand partnerships by falsely claiming she had cured her terminal cancer through natural remedies. When the truth came out, not only was her credibility destroyed, but the brands that had endorsed her faced backlash for failing to verify her claims. This highlighted how a lack of due diligence can lead to public outrage, lost consumer trust, and long-term reputational damage for brands associated with deceptive influencers.

Both of these situations highlight the real risks of inadequate influencer screening. Without a deep dive into an influencer’s online presence, brands leave themselves vulnerable to controversy, consumer backlash, and financial losses. The issue isn’t just about what an influencer posts today. It’s about their entire history of online behavior, which can resurface at any moment and put a company in the spotlight for all the wrong reasons.

By leveraging AI-powered tools to analyze data gathered from years of online content, businesses can make informed decisions about who they trust to speak on their behalf. Instead of relying on surface-level checks or media kits, these tools analyze years worth of publicly available content across multiple platforms, flagging patterns of misconduct, controversial statements, and other risks that could jeopardize a brand’s reputation.

The Belle Gibson scandal, the “Emilia Pérez” story, and the Doritos incident serve as powerful reminders: Brands can’t afford to take influencer vetting lightly. And that’s only one example of an influencer marketing campaign gone wrong. The good news is that those negative consequences are easily preventable with social media screening technology from Fama. 

Fama’s social media screening tools analyze more than 10,000 online sources, including emerging social media platforms like BlueSky. This helps brands remain flexible and evaluate risk factors from influencers wherever their online presence is. Ultimately, it’s thorough vetting with Fama that keeps brands protected from lasting damage. 

To learn more about influencer vetting with Fama, get in touch today to book a demo!