How to run a creator campaign on X

Follower count tells you the size of a room. It says nothing about who is in it. A creator with 40,000 followers whose audience is engineers at mid-size companies is worth more to a developer tool than one with 400,000 whose audience is a general tech crowd.

Ask for the audience breakdown before the follower number. On K Factor a creator's audience is captured once and shown to every campaign they apply to, so you are comparing the same fields across everyone in the roster.

The second filter is median performance rather than best performance. Every creator has a post that went further than the rest. The median is what you are buying.

A brief that lists talking points produces posts that read like talking points. A brief that explains what the product does, who it is for, and what would make it interesting to that creator's audience produces posts in their own voice.

Say what must appear: the link, the handle, the disclosure. Say what must not: competitor comparisons, pricing claims, anything unreleased. Everything between those two lists is where the creator earns their rate.

Attach the brief as a document the creator can reread. A brief that lives in a DM thread gets misremembered by both sides.

The draft step is the one that gets skipped when a campaign is running late, and it is the one that causes every downstream argument. A post that goes live without approval is a post nobody agreed to.

Give the creator a decision rather than a discussion. Approve it, or ask for a specific change. Open-ended feedback on a draft costs a day and produces a worse post.

Record the approval against the campaign. The stage that follows depends on it, because payment should be released against something that was agreed rather than something that was posted.

Impressions in the first hour tell you about the algorithm. Impressions over two weeks tell you about the post. Judge on the second, and hold the campaign open long enough to see it.

X discards organic metrics after 30 days. Anything you have not recorded by then is gone, which is why campaign reporting assembled at the end of a quarter is usually a reconstruction rather than a record.

Track link clicks and profile clicks alongside impressions. A post with modest reach and high click-through did the job a post with the reverse did not.