How we helped two aspiring entrepreneurs launch an influencer marketing mobile app using React Native & Laravel?

The client, an aspiring entrepreneur still in college, came up with an idea to launch an integrated influencer marketing platform. The platform would connect influencers and brands to run campaigns on Instagram and solve the problem of finding the right client/influencer all the time.

With our team’s help, the client realized their dream of launching an influencer marketing marketplace for Instagram with plans to add more channels/mediums in the future.

Building a credible app that fetches data from social media for authenticity is hard. And when it comes to Instagram, getting API access is next to impossible.

The client wanted to build the app where brands could run such campaigns where influencers can pick up a contest, post about it on their Instagram feed and the influencer with maximum engagement (likes, comments), can be declared a winner and be paid.

We started building this app in 2019 and till then, there was no API that allowed directly posting or fetching post data to a third-party app. So, creating an influencer marketing platform that could analyze the post activity was tough.

Also, a lingering question was raised on how would the winner of the campaign be declared if two or more influencers had the same number of likes and comments on a post.

The lack of a reliable API for fetching engagement data didn’t stop our team from finding viable solutions. We developed an in-house crawling system for Instagram that periodically crawled an Instagram post (by influencer). This allowed us to validate the reported engagement and made it easy to find a contest winner for brands.

Internal validation logic was also devised to ensure that influencers post only the content provided by a brand and that the campaign doesn’t look off-brand at any given point.

Separate rules were created and implemented for exception handling in the case of two influencers reporting the same level of engagement for a particular campaign. In this case, the brand owner can decide which influencer to reward (and how much).

We also built a dedicated library for content/image comparison by the brand so that posting/verifying influencer marketing campaigns can get more accessible for the brand.

All these features along with an intuitive UI and clean wireframes helped us create a stunning and easy-to-use influencer marketing platform as per the client requirements.