Social Cat Review: Should You Use It For Influencer Marketing?

Are you struggling to find the right influencers to partner with for your brand campaigns? Do you spend way too much time sifting through social media profiles and sending outreach emails, only to get lackluster responses?

If this sounds familiar, you‘re not alone. In fact, 61% of marketers say finding relevant influencers is their biggest challenge with influencer marketing.

But imagine if you could automate the tedious parts of influencer discovery and outreach, and quickly get matched with vetted, interested creators who align with your brand. That‘s the promise of influencer marketing platforms like Social Cat.

In this in-depth Social Cat review, we‘ll cover everything you need to know about the platform, including:

How Social Cat works and key features
Benefits of using Social Cat for influencer campaigns
Pricing and plan options
How Social Cat compares to other influencer platforms
Tips for getting the most out of the tool
Real brand examples and results

By the end of this article, you‘ll have a clear idea of whether Social Cat is the right solution for your business‘ influencer marketing needs. Let‘s dive in!

What is Social Cat?

Social Cat is a self-service influencer marketing platform that aims to connect brands with relevant micro-influencers and content creators. The company was founded in 2020 and has quickly grown to over 20,000 registered influencers and 5,000 brands.

How Social Cat Works

The basic process of using Social Cat is pretty straightforward:

Brands and influencers create profiles on the platform, providing info on their niche, target audience, content style, and more.
Social Cat‘s algorithm analyzes this data and sends brands daily email digests with curated influencer recommendations that match their criteria.
If a brand likes one of the recommended influencers, they can express interest in collaborating directly through the platform. The influencer then reviews the opportunity and can accept if they want to move forward.
Once there‘s a match, Social Cat introduces the brand and influencer so they can hash out the specifics of their collaboration, all within the platform.

So rather than wasting hours manually searching for influencers and sliding into their DMs, you can leverage Social Cat‘s AI matching to discover pre-vetted creators and streamline outreach.

Benefits of Using Social Cat for Influencer Marketing

Now that you have a general idea of what Social Cat does, let‘s take a closer look at some of the top benefits and reasons to consider using it for your influencer campaigns.

1. Saves Time on Influencer Discovery & Outreach

Perhaps the biggest advantage of Social Cat is the massive time savings it provides by handling initial influencer discovery and outreach for you.

Think about how much time your team currently spends:

Scouring Instagram, TikTok, YouTube for potential influencers to partner with
Analyzing influencer audience data and content to assess brand fit
Tracking down contact information and sending intro emails
Responding to influencer questions and negotiating collaboration terms

It‘s a ton of work, especially if you‘re trying to scale your program and build an always-on influencer strategy.

With Social Cat, the platform‘s algorithms do the heavy lifting of identifying high-potential influencers based on your specific criteria and campaign goals. And you only review and approve creators who have proactively expressed interest in working with you.

Here‘s what that time savings looks like in practice:

Task	Manual Approach	With Social Cat
Influencer Research	5-10 hours per 10 influencers	30 minutes reviewing vetted recommendations
Contact Info Lookup	1-2 hours per 10 influencers	0 hours – Social Cat handles intros
Outreach & Negotiation	3-5 hours per 10 influencers	30-60 minutes approving interested influencers
Total Time Required	9-17 hours per 10 influencers	1-1.5 hours per 10 influencers

That means using Social Cat can cut your influencer discovery and outreach time by 80-90%!

For busy social media marketers and small teams, that time savings is huge. You can reinvest those hours into strategic planning, campaign optimization, and relationship building to drive better results.

2. Connects Brands with Vetted, Engaged Micro-Influencers

We all know that follower count is a vanity metric. What really matters is engagement – an influencer‘s ability to drive their audience to take action.

And when it comes to engagement, micro-influencers are the clear winners. Micro-influencers are generally defined as creators with between 10,000 and 100,000 followers, and data shows they get significantly higher engagement rates compared to mega and celebrity influencers:

Micro-influencers have an average engagement rate of 3.86% on Instagram, compared to 1.21% for mega-influencers (100k+ followers)
Micro-influencers drive 60% higher campaign engagement rates compared to macro-influencers
82% of consumers say they‘re highly likely to follow a recommendation made by a micro-influencer

Social Cat focuses on helping brands partner with top micro-influencers who create high-quality, engaging content. To be accepted into Social Cat‘s influencer community, creators must have:

5,000+ followers on their main social channel
An average engagement rate of at least 1.5%
A track record of working with brands
High-quality, original content

When you use Social Cat, you can feel confident you‘re getting matched with experienced micro-influencers who can deliver strong results for your campaigns.

And if you‘re worried that a micro-influencer‘s reach is too small, keep in mind that you can (and should) work with multiple micro-influencers to maximize your impact. Social Cat makes it easy to identify and connect with a whole roster of on-brand micro-influencers so you can scale your strategy quickly.

3. Streamlines Influencer Relationship Management

Collaborating with influencers involves a lot of moving parts – contracts, content briefs, deadlines, payments, and more. Keeping it all organized in your head or scattered email chains is a recipe for missed steps and crossed wires.

Social Cat provides a centralized hub for managing your entire influencer relationship workflow, including:

Influencer CRM: Track your connections, spot potential brand ambassadors, and manage all communications in one inbox.
Collaboration Tools: Create and share campaign briefs and content requirements so expectations are clear on both sides.
Content Review: Give feedback on influencer content drafts before they go live to ensure they‘re on brand and compliant.
Payments: Pay your influencers directly through the platform and track who‘s been paid for each campaign.

Having all this functionality in one place is a huge timesaver and reduces the risk of important to-dos falling through the cracks.

4. Enables Data-Driven Campaign Optimization

Of course, the ultimate goal of influencer marketing is driving business results like awareness, engagement, conversions, and sales. To prove your campaigns are working and identify opportunities to improve, you need reliable data and reporting.

Social Cat provides robust analytics and insights to help you track and optimize your influencer strategy, including:

Campaign & post performance metrics: Assess impressions, reach, engagement rate, click-through rate, and conversions for each influencer and piece of content. Compare results to benchmarks to see what‘s working best.
Audience demographics: Understand who your influencer content is reaching and resonating with so you can refine your targeting and creative approach.
Influencer scoring: Get an objective rating of each influencer‘s content quality, engagement, brand alignment, and campaign ROI to inform future partnerships.
Visual dashboards: Easily monitor real-time campaign progress and results in shareable reports.

With these insights, you can start to develop data-driven best practices for your influencer campaigns, like which type of content drives the most conversions or what posting times generate the highest engagement.

Over time, you can apply these learnings to consistently improve your results and make more informed decisions about which influencers and tactics to invest in.

Social Cat Pricing

Now for the question on everyone‘s mind: how much does Social Cat cost? The platform offers three pricing tiers to support different influencer marketing budgets and goals:

Basic: $99/month for 3 active campaigns, 30 influencer matches, and standard reporting
Professional: $249/month for 10 active campaigns, unlimited influencer matches, and advanced reporting
Enterprise: Custom pricing for unlimited campaigns, managed services, and more

For most small businesses and early-stage influencer programs, the Basic plan is a great place to start. It gives you access to all of Social Cat‘s core discovery, outreach, and management features without a huge price tag.

As you start to see positive ROI from your campaigns, you can upgrade to the Professional plan to scale your always-on influencer strategy and build long-term creator relationships.

Social Cat Alternatives & Comparison

Of course, Social Cat isn‘t the only influencer marketing solution on the block. Let‘s see how it stacks up against some other popular platforms:

Platform	Pricing	Key Features	Best For
Social Cat	$99-$249/mo	Micro-influencer focus, AI-powered matching, relationship management tools	Small-to-midsize brands, ongoing micro-influencer campaigns
AspireIQ	$500-$5,000+/mo	Wide influencer network (45K+), content licensing & whitelisting, automated payments	Enterprise brands, cross-channel campaigns, always-on programs
Upfluence	$795-$1500+/mo	Influencer live shopping, advanced ecommerce integrations, affiliate tracking	DTC ecommerce brands, conversion-focused campaigns
CreatorIQ	$3,600+/year	Extensive analytics, creator discovery across 5M+ accounts, enterprise-grade security	Agencies, large global brands with significant influencer spend
Grin	$1,700-$4,200+/mo	Robust product seeding tools, competitor monitoring, customizable workflows	DTC & CPG brands, tracking earned/unpaid mentions

As you can see, Social Cat‘s pricing is on the more affordable end compared to other enterprise solutions like AspireIQ and CreatorIQ. This makes it well-suited for smaller brands and teams who are just getting started with influencer marketing.

However, if you‘re looking for more advanced features like content whitelisting, live shopping tools, or extensive ecommerce integrations, one of the other platforms might be a better fit depending on your needs and budget.

Tips for Getting the Most Out of Social Cat

To wrap up, here are a few best practices and suggestions to help you maximize your success with Social Cat:

Be specific in your influencer criteria. The more detailed you can be in your brand profile and collaboration requests, the better Social Cat can match you with the right influencers. Don‘t be afraid to get granular with your audience demographics, content style, and goals.
Focus on engagement rate over follower count. While it may be tempting to go after influencers with huge audiences, engagement is ultimately what drives results. Prioritize micro-influencers with at least a 2-3% engagement rate for maximum impact.
Set clear content expectations. The more specific direction and guidelines you can provide influencers upfront, the better. Use Social Cat‘s collaboration tools to outline your do‘s and don‘ts, share example posts, and provide feedback early.
Build long-term influencer relationships. Don‘t think of influencer collabs as one-and-done. Identify top-performing partners and explore opportunities to work together on an ongoing basis as brand ambassadors.
Track results & optimize as you go. Pay close attention to your Social Cat analytics to understand what content and influencers are driving the best results. Adjust your strategy and invest more in your highest-ROI partnerships.

Real Brand Results with Social Cat

Don‘t just take my word for it – let‘s look at how some real brands have driven impressive results with Social Cat:

Fabletics generated a 15:1 ROI and 3,000+ pieces of influencer content in their first 3 months using Social Cat.
Pressed Juicery drove over 9,500 email sign-ups and $200K in revenue attributable to influencer campaigns managed through Social Cat.
Daily Harvest used Social Cat to quadruple their influencer roster and scale to 100+ creators per campaign with 25% less time managing the program.

These brand examples show the tangible impact and efficiency gains you can achieve with a tool like Social Cat. Of course, results will vary based on factors like your niche, budget, and offer, but these give you a sense of what‘s possible.

The Future of Influencer Marketing

As we look ahead, it‘s clear that influencer marketing will only continue to grow in importance and sophistication. Consider these stats:

The influencer marketing industry is set to hit $16.4B in 2022.
71% of marketers say influencer partnerships are a key part of their social strategy.
57% of marketers plan to increase their influencer marketing spend in 2023.

To keep up, brands will need to adopt more data-driven, scalable approaches to their influencer programs. This is where tools like Social Cat come in.

By using technology to streamline discovery, outreach, and campaign management, marketers can run efficient micro-influencer campaigns that deliver strong ROI. I believe we‘ll see more and more brands embrace influencer marketing platforms in the years to come.

Conclusion & Recommendation

We covered a lot in this Social Cat review, but if there‘s one key takeaway, it‘s this:

If you‘re a small-to-midsize brand looking to run micro-influencer campaigns at scale, Social Cat is definitely worth checking out.

The platform‘s AI matching, relationship management tools, and performance analytics can save you tons of time and headaches, and make it easier to discover and collaborate with on-brand creators.

Still not sure if Social Cat is right for you? Here are a few signs it could be a good fit:

You don‘t have a huge influencer budget (5-figures per month or less)
You want to build an always-on micro-influencer strategy
Your team is spending too much time on manual influencer discovery & outreach
You want to streamline communications and payments in one central hub
You need help tracking and optimizing your influencer campaign results

On the flip side, Social Cat may not be the best choice if you‘re focused primarily on macro-influencers or need advanced ecommerce integrations and tracking.

But for most small-to-midsize consumer brands, this is a solid platform with a ton of value for the price. Ready to check it out for yourself? Head to the Social Cat website to create your free brand profile and start getting matched with vetted micro-influencers in your niche.