The vocabulary of creator scoring
Every metric and aesthetic the INFLU archive tracks, defined once and linked to live examples — 53 terms across scoring, platform metrics and fashion vocabulary.
Scoring & rank
Influ Rank
Influ’s public composite standing for a fashion creator — one number that condenses engagement quality, audience credibility and posting consistency into a comparable rank.
Viral score
A per-post score measuring how far a piece of content outperformed the creator’s own recent baseline — not raw views, but performance adjusted for audience size.
Outlier score
A measure of how statistically unusual a post’s performance is for its creator — the signal that separates a genuine breakout from a normal good week.
Momentum phase
The direction-of-travel label for a creator — whether their recent performance is accelerating, holding steady or cooling relative to their own history.
Velocity
The rate of change in a creator’s engagement or following over a rolling window — how fast they are moving, independent of how big they are.
Lifecycle stage
Where a creator sits on the discovery arc — emerging, growing, established or declining — which changes what a brand should expect from a partnership.
Breakout creator
A creator whose recent velocity and outlier frequency signal an inflection point — the ones brands want to find before follower counts catch up.
Consistency score
How reliably a creator’s posts perform at their baseline — low variance is the difference between a dependable partner and a lottery ticket.
Audience quality score
An estimate of how much of a creator’s following is real and engaged versus bought, botted or inactive — the audit metric behind every honest rate card.
EMV (earned media value)
Earned media value — the estimated ad-spend equivalent of organic mentions and posts about a brand, used to price influencer impact against paid media.
Engagement rate
Interactions (likes, comments, saves, shares) divided by audience size or reach — the default quality metric for influencer evaluation.
Reach rate
The share of a creator’s followers a post actually reaches — increasingly low on algorithmic feeds, which is why follower counts overstate distribution.
Amplification rate
Shares and sends per reach — how often viewers pass content onward — the metric that captures distribution beyond the original audience.
Share of voice
A brand’s or term’s share of the total tracked conversation — the market-share metric for attention rather than revenue.
Growth rate
The percentage change in a creator’s following over a defined window — the headline acquisition metric, meaningless without a quality check beside it.
Decay
How quickly a post’s engagement falls off after publishing — the half-life that separates evergreen content from a one-day spike.
Platform metrics
Impressions
Total times a post was displayed, counting repeat views by the same account — the volume metric, not the unique-audience one.
Reach
The number of unique accounts that saw a post — the metric that actually describes audience exposure.
Plays
Video start count — Instagram’s headline Reels metric. A play is a start, not a finish, so it overstates real viewing.
Watch time
Cumulative seconds viewers spent on a video — the ranking input Instagram’s recommendation system optimises hardest for.
Completion rate
The percentage of viewers who watch a video to the end — the strongest per-viewer quality signal for short-form content.
Saves
Bookmark taps on a post — for fashion, the strongest intent signal available, because people save outfits they plan to copy or buy.
Shares
Sends and reposts of a post — the metric Instagram’s own leadership has named as a core ranking input.
Share rate
Sends per reach — the normalised form of shares that lets a 50K-follower post compete with a 5M-follower one.
Reels
Instagram’s short-video format and its primary discovery surface — the only format that routinely reaches large non-follower audiences.
Stories
Instagram’s ephemeral 24-hour format — a retention and relationship surface for existing followers, not a discovery engine.
Carousel post
A multi-image post viewers swipe through — consistently the highest save-rate format in fashion content.
Explore page
Instagram’s recommendation surface — where the algorithm redistributes content to non-followers based on predicted interest.
Hashtags
Topical labels on posts — a declining but still nonzero discovery channel, and a useful indexing signal for content classification.
Follower count
The headline audience-size number — the weakest single quality signal, since reach, engagement and audience quality all modulate what it means.
CPM
Cost per mille — price per thousand impressions, the paid-media unit that earned media value benchmarks influencer impact against.
Engagement benchmark
The expected engagement rate for a creator’s size tier and niche — the baseline that turns a raw percentage into a verdict.
Fashion vocabulary
Streetwear
The sneaker-and-hoodie fashion culture built around drops, logos and limited releases — the largest single style cluster in the tracked index.
Quiet luxury
Logo-free, fabric-first dressing that signals wealth through cut and material rather than branding — the anti-hype aesthetic.
Gorpcore
Technical outdoor gear — shells, fleeces, trail shoes — worn as everyday fashion; the aesthetic that put performance brands on runways.
Blokecore
Vintage football shirts, jeans and trainers — the pub-to-runway aesthetic that turned retro kits into fashion objects.
Office siren
The fitted corporate aesthetic — pencil skirts, slim tailoring, narrow glasses — that reframed 90s office wear as a style statement.
Mob wife
The maximalist glamour aesthetic — faux fur, leopard print, heavy gold — that ran as the loud counterpoint to quiet luxury.
Clean girl aesthetic
The minimal, polished aesthetic — slicked hair, gold hoops, neutral basics — that dominated fashion-beauty crossover content.
Old money aesthetic
The inherited-wealth look — preppy tailoring, loafers, quiet palettes — adjacent to quiet luxury but more costume-coded.
Y2K fashion
The 2000s revival — low-rise silhouettes, baby tees, baguette bags — that moved from nostalgia niche to mainstream cycle.
Capsule wardrobe
A small set of interchangeable staple pieces — the anti-haul philosophy that drives some of fashion’s highest save rates.
Drop culture
Scarcity-driven releases — limited runs announced and sold out in hours — the engine of sneaker and streetwear hype cycles.
Haul
The bulk-purchase showcase format — creators displaying a pile of recent buys — fast fashion’s signature content genre.
OOTD (outfit of the day)
Outfit of the day — the foundational fashion-post format and tag, still the default unit of personal-style content.
Fit check
A short video panning or walking through a full outfit — streetwear’s native Reels format.
GRWM (get ready with me)
Get ready with me — the routine-format video where creators narrate an outfit or look coming together.
Deinfluencing
Creators telling audiences what not to buy — the anti-consumerist genre that paradoxically builds the trust that sells later.
Fashion week
The seasonal show circuit — New York, London, Milan, Paris — that produces fashion’s highest-concentration content windows.
Microtrend
A fast-cycling niche aesthetic measured in weeks rather than seasons — the -core suffix economy that TikTok and Instagram accelerate.
Knitwear
Knitted garments — jumpers, cardigans, vests — a seasonal category whose content peaks reliably each autumn.
Workwear (fashion)
Chore coats, duck canvas and utility silhouettes — the trade-work aesthetic that crossed into mainstream streetwear.
Archival fashion
Collectible past-season designer pieces — Raf, Margiela, early Helmut Lang — treated as cultural artefacts rather than used clothing.