Edition #15

Happy Friday — hope you’re all having a great start to April and getting ready to enjoy some nice weather.

To all the new readers — welcome! Every month, Ellie & I (& the rest of the team helps too!) put together a round up of news, highlights, tests and things we’re exploring around the creator economy as it relates to the progressive/impact space at Social Currant.

If you were forwarded this email, subscribe here. If you want to learn more about the work Social Currant did in 2023, view our impact report here.

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Alright, so — let’s dive in to some of our updates:

• [COURSE] We just launched an awesome course with Brad @ the Center For Digital Strategy. We’re doing 6 sessions on how to build a strong creator program.

• [CREATOR DATABASE] In the next few weeks, we’ll be launching a searchable database on the platform that will allow you to search through creators on the platform and classify them by cause, issue and more.

• [HIRING] Are you hiring for creator / digital roles? We’ve got a good pool of candidates that we can send your way!

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Today, we’re going to focus on one of the most important parts of building a creator program — the CREATORS. Read on to learn a little more about how to find creators, evaluate creators, vet them and more:

[FINDING CREATORS] If you’re trying to find creators effectively, here are some tips, tricks & best practices:

• On Tiktok:

  • TikTok is the easiest to search one. Use keyword based searches to find folks creating videos around your issue, location or any other identifier you’ve got.

  • Once you find one ideal creator, use their profile as a way to find more.

  • Go through their following, comments, stories, tags and more. Likeminded creators tend to interact with each other and it might help you find more creators.

  • Mobile searching is the easiest for TikTok.

• On Youtube:

  • Use keywords to find ONE ideal creator.

  • Then, go through their videos and the recommended videos on those videos to find similar creators.

  • Desktop or Phone works fine.

• On Instagram:

  • Use specific searches, like ‘insert state blogger‘ or ‘insert issue.‘

  • Once you find one ideal creator, use their profile as a way to find more + do everything you’re doing for TikTok on Instagram too.

  • Desktop or Phone works fine.

• Use platforms: The quickest way to find creators is to use platforms that are sourcing creators for you. Note, we didn’t say database! It’s important to make sure that platforms or creator networks are opt in and not just a massive list of names. We’ll have this on our platform soon!

[EVALUATING CREATORS] A few tips on how to decide whether a creator is right for you or not:

• Metrics: Look at their metrics like likes, views, shares, comments, engagement rate and more. Try to see whether they have consistent reach vs just a few videos reaching a lot of people.

• Budget: Think through your budget. If you’ve got a smaller budget, don’t try to find the largest creators reaching hundreds of thousands of people on the platforms.

• Platforms: Go to a creators other platforms. If you found them on TikTok, look at their Youtube or Instagram. If they’re not able to drive their audience amongst different platforms, they may find it harder to drive them to take an action for you.

• Community: Explore the creators community. Are they responding to comments? Is there interaction? Are they organizing their community someplace? This can be a sign of whether a creator has an engaged audience or not.

• Sponsored Posts: Look at past sponsored posts of a creator and whether they performed well or not. How did the audience react?

• Brand-Fit: And most importantly, ofcourse — ensure that the creator is a brand-fit based on the type of content they create, the things they’ve said and any other factors important to your organization.

[VETTING CREATORS] It’s important to vet creators you work with, but also to understand that working with a creator does not mean you are signing off on every single thing they do. A few vetting tips:

• Use AI tools to run through their content and map out if they’ve said anything around your issue.

• Use vetting forms to ask them a series of questions to understand what they think on various issues that your organization may care about.

• You can host calls — some creators might not want to do this without a firm offer.

• Check their Twitter / X, you’d be surprised at how easy it can be to find red flags on someones Twitter.

[WORKING WITH CREATORS AGAIN] And finally, if you’ve worked with creators and are trying to understand who to work with again, use the following factors to start making that decision:

• Performance: Did the collaboration go well & help you meet your goals?

• Content: Was the content creative and did it test well?

• Communication: Was the communication easy? Was the creator responsive?

• Creator-Issue Fit: Did the creator want to learn more about your issue? Did they engage with it in a deeper way?

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weekly roundup of what’s going on in the creator economy:

• The big update, coming out of March, is that social platforms are just not friendly to creators, especially political creators. Meta is limiting how much political content users see by opting audiences out of political content. Read more here.

• The House passed a bill that could result in TikTok getting banned & creators are not happy about it. Once TikTok’s favorite Congressman, Rep Jeff Jackson is taking a lot of hate on TikTok around his vote in favor of a TikTok ban. Read more here.

• TikTok used it’s own platform as an advocacy tool, urging users to reach out to their representative to get them to vote No on a ban. In some respects, the move might have backfired as it resulted in many offices getting calls from underage users. Read more here.

• LinkedIn is having a moment with creators and creator agencies. Read more about how the platform is becoming home to more content and creators.

• Learn more about why Pinterest is so popular with Gen Z and how young people are using the app to shop & organize things more effectively. Read here.

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Anecdotes, observations & what we’re hearing from creators: We recently hosted a call with some creators and had a bunch of interesting anecdotes from creators:

• Creators Are Worried/Scared: With the possibility of a TikTok ban, Meta limiting political content and Youtube payouts on Shorts still being slow — creators are worried. It’s harder than ever to monetize, especially if you’re a political creator. At Social Currant, we’re also tracking whether the Meta ruling prevents new creators from talking about politics to avoid accounts being shadow banned. It’s still an evolving situation, but goes to show that an audience on a platform is never truly yours until you take them to a community // email.

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FAQs from the month:

Should we be working with creators multiple times? The short answer, like with everything creator related is depends. The long answer is yes, but only if it’s the right creator. We always recommend starting slowly and working with a larger number of creators a few times before selecting some that you want to build deeper relationships with. On the flip side, it can be hard to see results immediately and you want to make sure you give your creator partnerships some time before deciding it’s not the right fit.

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If you made it all this way - thank you! For reading, trusting creators and me. I'm building Social Currant to make an impact and you all are a part of this journey. Until next month!

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