Creator content performance has become increasingly unpredictable in recent years, with posts from the same account often varying from thousands to millions of views. But a virality coefficient should help.

A virality coefficient? The virality coefficient measures an influencer’s ability to consistently reach beyond their follower base. It calculates how often their content achieves more than double their follower count in views, indicating their potential to generate viral reach. This metric helps quantify an influencer’s ability to create content that spreads beyond their immediate audience. This isn’t Math 101, but rather the creator economy being reinvented in terms of intelligently tracking content performance.

As Fohr founder James Nord notes, traditional influencer platforms still average usual content metrics, potentially misleading brands about expected campaign results. This gap between current measurement systems and actual creator performance affects how brands evaluate and select partners for their campaigns.

To address this, Fohr launched a new creator marketing platform, built from insights managing $300 million in campaigns, introducing the industry’s first “virality coefficient” to measure the actual probability of breakthrough content. The system tracks how often creators exceed their baseline audience by 2x or more, replacing misleading averages with predictive analytics.

This shift in measurement methodology arrives as brands are increasingly placing creator partnerships at the center of their marketing and communication strategies. The platform launched on February 20, with tools previously reserved for enterprise campaigns now accessible to businesses of all sizes.

Insights from Internships

The catalyst for Fohr’s platform transformation came from direct market research. “I went last year and created a little microsite that I was going to intern at people’s companies,” explains James. “From those six internships, I came away with a few key issues that I felt were lacking in our technology and the whole industry.”

What James discovered was a fundamental shift in social media performance patterns. “It used to be that if an influencer usually got about a thousand likes on a post, you could look at that over the course of six months, and most of their posts would be between 800 and 1,200 likes,” he explains. “Now, if you look at it, performance is all over the place. You have videos with millions of views; you have videos with thousands of views right next to each other.”

Inside Fohr’s New Analytics Engine

This shift in creator performance patterns demanded an entirely new approach to measurement, James points out. To address these challenges, the platform introduces several innovative frameworks designed to capture the dynamics of modern creator performance:

Virality Coefficient

James draws a distinction between different virality types. The first is the platform-wide virality, which James describes as “something that you could talk to almost any person on social media and they would be aware of,” adding that it’s impossible to predict.

The second is product virality. “Products can go viral because thousands of people are talking about them… but it has less to do with one individual kind of piece of content,” James notes.

Last, but not least, there’s individual virality, which James says is different for every person. “We define it as getting two times your follower count in viewership.”

To measure these, Fohr has introduced something they internally call the “virality coefficient.” As James shares, “It shows how frequently and how likely it is that an influencer is getting two times their follower count in views.”

This metric helps brands quickly assess a creator’s breakthrough potential.

Performance Distribution Analysis

The platform moves beyond simple averages to provide detailed performance breakdowns. “If a creator generated 10 million views last month, that would be great. If nine and a half million of those views were from two viral posts,” James explains, “it’s going to change your understanding of what is happening and what you can expect if you work with that creator.”

Trend Detection

James emphasizes the importance of recent performance: “If a post does well, if you go viral, you overperform, and you have a higher percentage probability of the next post doing well, the next one doing well. We find that often this is over performance clusters, and you can see that creators have days, weeks, and months where their content is doing well.”

Video-First Architecture

While these new measurement frameworks aim to change how brands evaluate creator performance, the platform’s foundation itself required a complete rebuild to address what James identifies as a critical industry shift: “90% of what we do is video. So, the first thing we had to do was rebuild for video platforms. That meant new metrics, that meant new ways of being able to understand and view the content.”

He notes that many influencer platforms were built in an era of social media dominated by photos and captions. “I was astonished at how bad the experience was because the platforms were built for photos and captions,” he adds.

How the Platform Works

The platform’s workflow begins with creator discovery, where brands can search across 300,000 creators using both traditional metrics and Fohr’s new performance indicators. 

“You’ve got access to the platform with 300,000 creators on it and the ability to filter and search through them, go on those profiles, look at all of their metrics that we talked about, view their content, search their content, look at their demographic information,” James explains.

For campaign execution, brands move through a structured process that Nord details: “You can add them to a group, you can then brief them, you can send them an offer, execute a campaign with them.” The platform provides dedicated dashboards for tracking brand mentions and live campaign performance.

The virality coefficient appears directly on creator profiles, displaying as a numerical score that indicates viral potential. “If you looked at my profile, you would see that I never go viral, so my coefficient is very low,” James illustrates. “But you look at another creator, and they might have an eight or something, and you could look at that and say, ‘Okay, this person’s content is overperforming frequently.’”

Performance tracking extends beyond individual posts to analyze broader patterns. “We have dashboards to track how often brands are talking about or how often influencers are talking about your brand,” James notes. “There’s dashboards to live track how your campaigns are doing.” 

These tools, previously available only to Fohr’s internal team, now power the platform’s campaign management suite. The freemium model provides immediate access to basic platform features with a business email, while paid tiers unlock advanced analytics and full campaign management capabilities. 

“We believe the software speaks for itself,” Nord emphasizes, explaining why Fohr departed from the industry’s typical sales-first approach. “I’m excited to turn over software that has run $300 million of campaigns to smaller brands that couldn’t afford to build this themselves.”

Future Development

While James positions the platform’s current capabilities as a significant advance in creator marketing technology, Fohr’s roadmap involves AI integration. 

“You’re going to see many more product innovations more quickly,” he promises. “We’ve got a whole slew of AI-driven products that will be coming out shortly. A chat-based kind of GPT type interface where you can just talk to the platform and ask questions.”

Industry Implications

As these AI-driven novelties prepare to reshape creator marketing technology, the platform’s launch comes at what James sees as a pivotal moment: “I don’t think the industry has fully absorbed the change of influencer moving to the center and replacing brand storytelling as the foundational base of how a brand communicates their value proposition to the market.”

Early testing has validated this approach. “We’ve been doing client testing for about six weeks now, and it’s been overwhelmingly positive,” James reports. “People are incredibly excited. It was nice to see how excited our customers were and how much they felt heard and seen.”

James believes the platform’s ability to capture and analyze the complex reality of modern creator performance positions it as a potential catalyst for more sophisticated, data-driven creator partnerships. 

As he emphasizes, “We’re still very much at the beginning of that transition…the budgets, the structure of the teams, the importance of influencer in the marketing stack that has not shifted as dramatically as it will over the next couple of years.”