The Network Effect: How creator connections shape brand momentum
The creators most likely to talk about your brand are often connected to people who already do. We set out to measure that network effect.
Relationship marketing through creator networks
Creator marketers often focus on the individual: Who has the right audience? Who creates the right content? Who is the right fit for our brand?
But creators don’t exist in isolation. They’re part of interconnected communities that influence what they discover, talk about, and ultimately choose to advocate for.
At Kin, we think about relationship marketing at the network level. We look at the spheres of influence around each creator: who they know, who they interact with, and where a brand already has a foothold.
When people in a creator’s circle mention a brand again and again, that brand becomes more familiar and relevant. It starts to feel like part of the conversation, rather than an interruption from outside it.
Think about your own social circle. You’re more likely to try a restaurant, watch a show, or buy a product when the people you know are already talking about it. Creators are no different.
So we set out to understand what these creator-to-creator connections could reveal about how creators engage with brands.
What is a Network Score?
We created the Network Score to measure how connected a creator is to other creators within a specific brand’s community. It counts how many unique creators someone tags who have already mentioned that brand. If a creator tags five people who have talked about a specific brand, their Network Score for that brand is 5. A creator’s own brand mentions (or lack thereof) don’t affect their score—it reflects their connections to other creators who have mentioned the brand.
5
What Network Scores tell us about creator behavior
We analyzed 177,007 brand mentions across 40,000 creator-brand pairings over a six-month period, alongside 24,441 campaign-creator outreach observations, to understand whether a creator’s connections to a brand’s community were associated with how they engaged with that brand. Across the data, three clear patterns emerged.
42%
more likely to respond to brand outreach
2.6x
more frequent brand mentions
1.5x
more active posting months about the brand
Highly connected creators were 42% more likely to respond to the brand’s outreach
Kin helps teams manage personalized creator outreach across email and Instagram DMs. We looked at response data from that brand outreach to see whether a creator’s Network Score was associated with their likelihood of responding.
It was. Response rates climbed from 33.7% among creators with a Network Score of 0 to 47.8% among creators with a Network Score of 11 or higher.
And it makes sense: a creator may have never worked with your brand directly and still know about it through friends, collaborators, and trusted peers. By the time your outreach arrives, it may feel less like a cold introduction and more like an invitation into a conversation already happening around them.
For brands, a creator’s Network Score can be another useful signal when deciding who to contact next. It adds a new dimension to creator discovery: not just, “Is this creator a fit?” but, “How connected are they to the people already talking about us?”
Highly connected creators mentioned the brand 2.6x more frequently
Highly connected creators aren’t just more exposed to the conversation around your brand; they’re also more likely to participate in it themselves.
On average, creators with a Network Score of 0 mentioned a brand 3.2 times over the six months monitored, compared with 8.2 times among creators with a Network Score of 11 or higher.
When a brand is already circulating among people a creator knows, it may feel more familiar, relevant, and worth talking about.
For brands, more frequent creator mentions mean more opportunities to get noticed. A single post can get lost in a crowded feed. Repeated mentions make the brand harder to miss, building familiarity with a creator’s audience and creating more opportunities for the conversation to reach others in their network.
Highly connected creators stayed active across 1.5x more months
This pattern also extended over time: creators with higher Network Scores kept coming back to brands across more months.
Across the six months monitored, creators with a Network Score of 0 posted about a brand across an average of 1.7 months, compared with 2.5 months among creators with a Network Score of 11 or higher.
That staying power matters.
A creator who returns to a brand across multiple months signals a different kind of relationship than someone who mentions it once and moves on. When a creator keeps coming back to a brand, it typically suggests a more enduring affinity for that brand or its products. That kind of sustained advocacy compounds, lending greater credibility to their recommendation and building brand momentum over time.
Zooming out: Network Density
Network Scores tell us how connected individual creators are to a brand’s community. Network Density zooms out to show how interconnected that community is as a whole.
To calculate Network Density at the brand level, we take the median Network Score across all creators in a brand’s community. Network Density represents the midpoint of the community: a higher Network Density means the typical creator in that community is connected to more creators who have also talked about the brand; a lower Network Density means those connections are more dispersed.
That means two brands can have creator communities of the same size and still have very different network structures. Understanding those differences gives brands a clearer picture of how their creator community is connected, and where there may be opportunities to build from.
What Network Density looks like
When we map creator communities around different brands, the contrast becomes visible. The two plots below show representative samples of creators who’ve talked about Laura Mercier and Danessa Myricks, respectively. Each node represents a creator, and each line represents a tag from one creator to another. Rust-colored nodes are creators who mentioned the brand; gray nodes are creators who did not.
Despite containing similar numbers of creators and nearly identical numbers of connections, the communities differ in how those connections are distributed. Laura Mercier’s lower-density network is more dispersed across distinct clusters, while Danessa Myricks’ higher-density network forms a tighter, more interconnected community.
In a denser network, more creators who talk about the brand are connected to others who do, too. Each mention becomes part of a broader conversation that reinforces the brand’s presence within the community.
These maps not only show how a community is structured—they also point to where a brand might build next. Gray creators positioned near rust-colored creators may be especially promising prospects: they haven’t mentioned the brand yet, but they’re already connected to people who have.
For Laura Mercier, that could mean activating creators around its existing clusters and building more connections across the network. For Danessa Myricks, it could mean reaching creators within or adjacent to its established cluster, extending into new relationships from an already interconnected community.
Denser creator communities see higher retention
When we compared Network Density across brand communities, a similar pattern emerged: brands with denser creator networks tended to retain more of their creator community over time.
For brands, retention matters. Creator programs become much more valuable when relationships extend beyond a single post or campaign. Retaining creators means more opportunities to build familiarity, deepen relationships, and turn one-time participation into sustained advocacy over time.
It can also make brand growth more efficient. Rather than continually rebuilding a creator community from scratch, brands can invest in the relationships they’ve already established while expanding outward from them.
The connections within a creator community may be part of what keeps creators engaged with a brand over time. When creators are more embedded in the network around a brand, they have more touchpoints with the broader community and stronger ties to the people within it.
Turn your creator network into a strategy
Your creator relationships become even more valuable when you understand them in the context of your community.
Network Scores add another layer to creator strategy, helping you understand not just who a creator is, but how they’re connected to the community already forming around your brand. That then unlocks new ways to discover creators, prioritize relationships, and build on the momentum already moving through your community.
Find new creators within your network
Creator discovery doesn’t have to start from scratch. Look at the network of your existing advocates to surface creators who are already highly connected to your brand—even if they haven’t posted about it themselves (yet).
Use Network Scores to prioritize outreach
Highly connected creators are more likely to respond to your outreach. Use Network Scores to focus your time and resources on relationships where there’s already a strong foundation for connection.
Understand the shape of your community
Is your network tightly interconnected, or made up of separate clusters? Which creators bridge different parts of the community? Use that structure to identify where relationships are already strong, where to deepen them, and where there may be opportunities to expand.
Create opportunities for connection
Events, collaborations, and other community experiences help strengthen creators’ relationships to your brand—and to each other. Create these opportunities to build a more interconnected creator community and drive brand momentum.
See your network in action with Kin
Want to see what your own creator community looks like? Request your brand’s network map to see the connections shaping your community.