Choosing the right influencer can make or break your campaign. On LinkedIn especially, it’s not just about who has the biggest following — it’s about who fits your brand, reaches the right audience, and has data you can trust.

Here’s a step-by-step guide.

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1. Start With the Subjective Fit

Before looking at numbers, look at the influencer’s tonality and past work:

• Voice & Tonality: Do they sound authentic, conversational, and aligned with your brand’s style? A fintech brand may need someone who explains clearly; a lifestyle D2C brand may need someone warmer and story-driven.

• Brand Fit: Does their personal brand match the values you want to project?

• Past Collaborations: Have they already worked with competitors or in your industry? That can be both a plus (experience) and a minus (conflicts of interest).

A subjective review tells you whether this influencer is someone your audience will trust to talk about you.

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2. Then, Look at the Objective Data

Numbers matter — but the right numbers matter more. On LinkedIn, these are the key stats to check:

• Follower Demographics: Job titles, industries, locations, and seniority of their audience. If these don’t match your target group, the campaign won’t convert.

• Engagement Rate: Not just likes, but comments, saves and shares.

  • Comments signal depth and trust.

  • Shares signal virality factor, and saves signal value perceived in their content.

• Impressions Per Post: Helps you understand average impressions across organic and sponsored posts, not just one viral post.

  If possible, compare the avg. impressions of their sponsored content vs. organic content. You don’t want to pick an influencer with great reach on organic posts but hardly anything on the sponsored ones.

• Consistency: Do they get strangely steady engagement (possibly due to pods), or are their numbers more aligned with how the algorithm behaves, with hits and misses?

Now, this might be contrary to what you’ve heard before, but LinkedIn behaves differently from Instagram and YouTube. While steady engagement/views/plays are preferred on other platforms, on LinkedIn this is highly improbably due to the nature of what LinkedIn rewards.

This becomes more evident when you compare engagement to the impressions across multiple posts, meaning, 500 likes can lead to 5K impressions, while 90 likes can become 25k impressions.

• Growth Trends: A sudden spike in followers may be a red flag for inorganic growth.

Each pointer above gives you a clearer picture of influence vs. vanity.

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3. How to Discover the Right Influencers

There are three main ways brands find influencers:

• In-house research: Searching LinkedIn manually, using hashtags and industry keywords. Works for smaller campaigns but is time-consuming.

• Agencies: They can manage the process but often rely on surface metrics or screenshots.

• Verified Tools: Platforms like anchors give you verified LinkedIn data, synced from the source, so you’re not relying on inflated screenshots or biased references.

Whichever route you take, the key is this: trust verified data only. Without it, you’re basing your spend on guesswork.

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Final Thoughts

Selecting the right influencer isn’t about chasing the loudest voice — it’s about finding the most relevant one. A balance of subjective fit (tonality, brand alignment) and objective data (audience, engagement, reach) is what delivers real ROI.

On LinkedIn, where professionals scroll for value, not fluff, that balance is even more important.