How to determine creator HOTNESS
Summertime guide to assess creator impact
Welcome to Creator Campaigns, a deep dive on Paid Partnership into a specific aspect of building a creator marketing campaign.
Get your Love Island-pilled minds out of the gutter, we’re not here today to talk about physical attractiveness but rather that nearly unquantifiable quality of HYPE.
From “15 minutes of fame” to the forever-vague “IT,” select creators occupy a certain space within the ecosystem that allows them to capitalize on their moment - Your goal is to assess how best to jump in while the water is warm (and the temperature outside is 100 degrees Fahrenheit).
To get to the bottom of this, we have to go Full Moneyball Mode (F.M.B.M) to think differently and build a roster of undervalued, overdelivering creator prospects poised to break out this season.
This exercise is similar to the trend-spotting work you/your larger social team undertakes on a weekly basis, except in this case the trends are creators - The same macro rule applies: Don’t get trapped into Sisyphean game of chasing “x brand/team hosted y creator so we MUST do the same asap.” Take a step back, evaluate the creator based on some of the themes below, then approach with confidence.
Virality Does Not (Always) Equal an Engaged Community
Given the state of social media platform algorithms in 2025, more new audiences are getting served creator content than ever before. A quick scroll through your own Instagram will reveal some ~40% of in-feed posts are either suggested content or paid ads.
While this update may be great for both you and the creator to reach new audiences, it’s difficult to determine whether the HYPE surrounding a popular/well-performing creator is due to one viral hit or whether a core community of engaged followers has propelled it into a new sphere. Although one answer isn’t necessarily better than the other depending on your business objectives (KPI of total views may match well with the viral hit that’s less engaged for example), it’s good to know that just because a video is over indexing doesn’t always instantly equate longer-term success.
What I’m often seeing on social are creators who have ~20 videos with 1k views then the next with ~10M views. One perspective is the creator finally figured out the best format/production/hook/etc. to be successful after endless iterations, while the other take suggests that creator’s core audience is not engaged (and it’s only when the algorithm expands the reach to fresh eyes that success follows).
Either way, this unpredictability “Heat Check” is tough when trying to commit to a creator from the brand side - forecasting how their content will perform when they partner with you. Even if the creator is hyped at the moment, riding high off a couple viral smash hits, it may be valuable to dig deeper into each post to really learn what’s going on under the hood.
Quality Comments (QC) Test
*New metric founded by Paid Partnership*
Move over sentiment analysis, hellooooo QC check.
Quality Comments testing is more than just positive/negative review - I’d encourage you to look to see whether commenters are engaging with creator beyond the surface content level. Examples of surface level comments would be “🔥🔥🔥” “sick!” etc. where fans are simply reacting to what they see in that EXACT video, as if they are seeing it for the first time. As mentioned above, this is not inherently bad but can help peel back the curtain toward demystifying “hot” creators at the moment.
Conversely, take a creator like Timm Chiusano who we interviewed HERE. In every, single video Timm publishes, he’ll have 20-50 well thought out comments sharing their own thoughts not only on the themes featured in that video but reflecting on their own life, connecting that video’s message to Timm’s previous videos, and more.
Timm shared insight on his community and their comments in our chat:
And in the cliché sense of “your best content ideas are in the comments,” I started to see people saying, “I came for the sneakers, stuck around for the wisdom” or “You make growing up a little less scary” or “Tell me more about being married for 20 years.” That’s when I realized—it’s the whole thing, not one specific piece, that resonates.
This foundational support affords Timm the backbone of a community that shows up for him daily and will be there just as quickly when one of his videos goes viral.
Content Series/Inside Jokes/Crowdsourcing of Ideas
Another aspect of QC checking which I find fascinating (and sometimes frustrating), is the reciprocal nature creators with highly engaged communities foster beyond the latest hyped trend. Whether this is anticipation of the next video in a content series “drop the xyz video now!” or inside jokes within the fandom, creator audiences show they’re invested well beyond a single TikTok by engaging in this manner.
Crystal Sorem (who we shouted out in our 5 Creators to Watch in 2025 article) is the queen of having her audience waiting for her next move. Crystal’s dating life is speculated on AT LEGNTH in the comments section of each video, which Crystal then uses as an idea generator for future Q&A/response-type videos. It’s clear that fans of Crystal care way deeper about her as a human and creator beyond a two-emoji comment that you drop randomly while not watching that random movie playing in the background.
Taking a cue from our social listening champions, UGC about creators falls into this category as well. You know a creator is on the hype train when you come across an unaffiliated, lay citizen video referencing them directly. I came across this video of a woman asking her boyfriend if he knew about the Milk Mob crew - they’ve transcended and the hype is real.
Diamond in the Rough
Counter to most of the above, there’s also a mindset to invest early and create your own hype.
There’s no better feeling than growing alongside an up-and-coming creator, both reaching for common goals.
Introducing your brand audience to a new creator (and/or the other way around) needs a little more thoughtful planning but can yield dividends as creators with smaller followings often have more engaged communities, are less expensive to work with, and generally more excited to collaborate.
Hope this article helps guide you the next time you’re scrolling and come across the NEXT BIG THING YOU MUST WORK WITH ASAP.
In this same light, I’m forever fascinated by the lifecycle of the most-hyped creators (like does Big Justice keep booming away TikToks until he’s a 60-year-old man) but we’ll save that investigation for another time.