Influencer marketing has become a core element of many brands’ social‑media strategies. A survey by Sprout Social found that 81 % of U.S. social marketers consider influencer marketing an essential part of their strategy. At the same time, most marketers track engagement metrics like likes, comments and shares to secure internal buy‑in for campaigns. While these numbers matter, they don’t tell the whole story. Emotions, context and conversation themes are equally important for understanding how audiences feel about a campaign. Lit’s new Advanced Reporting feature bridges this gap by combining traditional metrics with AI‑powered social listening. Here’s why this matters for agencies and brands.
What is Lit’s Advanced Reporting?
Lit is an influencer marketing platform based in South Africa. Its new advanced reporting feature automatically pulls data from influencer posts and delivers a comprehensive report for each campaign.
- Reactions; Comments; Shares; Saves; Views. These numbers provide a quick snapshot of the campaign’s reach and engagement.
- Clicks: both total and unique clicks are reported, enabling brands to link influencer content to traffic and conversions.
- Sentiment: The platform automatically analyses every comment across campaign content, classifying sentiment at scale. Using AI, it identifies the overall emotional tone of conversations, summarising patterns such as excitement and gratitude around deals, alongside moments of frustration related to factors like pricing pressure or product quality. Sentiment is then visualised over time and segmented by platform, making it easy to see how audience reactions differ between channels such as TikTok and Instagram and how they evolve throughout a campaign.
Metrics dashboard
The metrics dashboard offers a unified view of how a campaign performs across multiple posts and platforms. Engagement metrics such as reactions, comments, shares and saves are displayed alongside views and clicks. These indicators are critical: according to Sprout Social, tracking reach, impressions and engagement helps brands benchmark campaigns, determine ROI and pivot quickly when needed. By aggregating these numbers automatically, Lit eliminates manual reporting and ensures agencies have the latest data at their fingertips.
AI‑powered sentiment analysis
Where the platform really shines is in its social listening capabilities. Traditional metrics can show how many people saw or reacted to a post, but they can’t reveal how audiences feel about it. Sentiment analysis fills this gap. Lit’s system crawls every comment on each post and uses natural‑language processing to determine whether the sentiment is positive, negative or neutral.
Industry experts agree that sentiment analysis is crucial for influencer marketing. Clutch.co notes that while metrics like views and engagement are useful, they don’t paint the full picture; sentiment analysis allows brands to look into the hearts of their followers and understand the emotional response to campaigns. HypeAuditor explains that AI‑powered sentiment analysis provides fast, scalable monitoring of public reactions, offering context to metrics like reach and clicks. It can help refine messaging, improve brand safety and guide future partnerships.
Conversation phrases and AI insights
Another innovative part of the advanced report is the Conversation Phrases section. Here, AI extracts high‑impact keywords and phrases from the campaign’s comment threads. This allows brands to see what themes resonate with their audience and spot emerging issues or opportunities. The system also surfaces top comments and summarises them, highlighting both praise and criticism.
For agencies, this level of granularity means they no longer have to manually scroll through thousands of comments to identify trends. AI‑generated phrases and summaries provide quick qualitative insights. As HypeAuditor points out, AI sentiment analysis can process enormous volumes of data quickly and highlight what matters. This frees up time for strategists to focus on creative and strategic decisions rather than manual data gathering.
Why this matters for agencies and brands
Data‑driven decision making
Real‑time reporting enables marketers to make agile decisions. Impact.com highlights that real‑time tracking helps brands adjust campaigns instantly and optimise their strategies. By seeing which content generates the most engagement and positive sentiment, agencies can double down on winning messages and tweak underperforming posts. Advanced reporting also helps identify top‑performing influencers, enabling brands to build long‑term partnerships with creators who resonate with their audience.
Measuring ROI and securing buy‑in
Comprehensive reporting is critical for demonstrating return on investment. Sprout Social emphasises that tracking key metrics is essential for benchmarking influencer campaigns and proving their impact on business goals. Engagement data such as likes, shares and comments remains a vital metric for marketers, and Lit’s dashboard collates these metrics in one place. Combining these with sentiment analysis and click data provides a holistic view of performance, making it easier to justify influencer spend to stakeholders.
Understanding audience sentiment and context
Numbers alone can’t reveal how people feel about your brand. Sentiment analysis offers a window into emotions. Emotional responses to advertising are often faster and stronger than rational ones.
By measuring sentiment, brands can detect whether campaigns are creating excitement, confusion or backlash. This information can inform future messaging, help avoid missteps and protect brand reputation. Sentiment data provides context to metrics like reach and clicks and can help refine messaging and improve brand safety.
Social listening and product insights
The Conversation Phrases feature acts as a real‑time focus group. Extracting phrases can alert you to quality concerns or demand for specific products. Similarly, mentions of certain phrases may suggest nostalgic attachment to previous promotions. Recognising these themes helps brands adjust their offerings, pricing or messaging. This aligns with HypeAuditor’s insight that AI‑driven sentiment analysis is an efficient way to monitor audience reactions and emotions and is becoming a secret weapon for crisis management and product improvement.
Delivering value with Lit’s advanced reporting
Lit’s advanced reporting feature provides a holistic view of influencer campaigns by blending quantitative metrics with qualitative insights. Agencies and brands can:
- Save time: automate the collection of views, likes, comments, shares and click data, eliminating manual reporting.
- Access deeper insights: use AI‑powered sentiment analysis and conversation phrases to understand how audiences feel and what they’re talking about.
- Respond faster: act on real‑time data to optimise campaigns, shift budgets or address negative feedback before it escalates.
- Prove ROI: compile a unified report that links engagement and sentiment metrics to business outcomes, helping secure investment in influencer marketing.
Conclusion
As influencer marketing matures, brands need more than vanity metrics to gauge success. Lit’s advanced reporting offers agencies and brands a powerful toolset such as automated metrics, AI‑powered sentiment analysis and conversation insights. These turn raw social data into meaningful stories. By embracing this feature, marketers can make smarter decisions, create more authentic campaigns and deepen connections with their audiences.