What are Social Media Influencers? How can they make an impact for your business? Social Media Influencers are people on social network platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat to name a few that have a tribe of fans that they can influence buying decisions, voting, and many other things with their fan base. Social media influencers can give a brand the quantum leap from zero to its apex because of the power they can carry. How? Well, Social Media Influencers can relate better with their audience because they’re a trusted source with a fan base.
Over the years, there’s become many “niche social media influencers” and So naturally whatever they introduce to their tribe ultimately sells. By placing your brand in the hands of the right social media influencer it can make the world of a difference for the bottom line. Although there’s many social media influencers out there, it’s not impossible to connect with one. We’ve rounded up some effective ways you can use to find the right social media influencer for your brand.
Before Engaging – Study Your Target Audience Before engaging someone to represent your brand, studying your target audience and their likes can help you get the right social media influencer. In the course of studying your target audience, you can find out the kind of influencers they are following and what type of posts they engage in. By partnering your brand with a social media influencer they are already following, it’s easier to relate with the audience through the influencer as they already the trust of the tribe has already been established and they will most likely have a higher engagement from their fans.
Study and Screen Your Potential Influencers To find the right fit of social media influencers for your brand, it’s best to properly screen them to ensure they’re the proper fit for representing your brand. Here are some general screening questions to consider when selecting the right influencer such as:
- Niche Focused – First things first, you need to be certain that the influencer is within your business niche or related to it. This will make things easier for the brand and the influencer. Your brand and niche need to align or be related to that of your potential influencer.
- Number of Followers / Following – This is easily the first thing you can see when researching for brand influencers and a factor to consider. If you want your brand to reach a wider audience, then the influencer must have a substantial number of followers. It’s that simple.
- Online Persona / Personality – Taking the time to vet the posts of your potential influencers helps understand the values that they stand for and promote. If they align with your brand’s core mission and values, then you’ve found a perfect match. This type of synergy in core mission and values makes it easier working with the influencers and also easier for the influencer to communicate the offerings of your brand to numerous audiences.
- Engagement Interaction Rates: We’d say the most important metric in determining if the niche social media influencer matches all the other criteria, then it’s time to find out how much the audiences are responding to an influencer’s posts. Beyond having a huge following in the same niche with similar core values, if the audience is not engaging the influencer, your brand won’t get the true value out of what a brand ambassador can do for you. One thing to consider is not to look past influencers that don’t have the largest fan base, but a serious engagement rate. Engagement rates show that followers are truly interest in the ambassador and whatever he/she is selling to them. Ways to gauge the metrics of engagement are likes, shares and comments. Engagement rate is a good yardstick to measure the success of any social media influencer. Take the numbers of followers divided by the post engagement and you’ve got a good idea of how many of their fans actually interact with the ambassador.
Where to Find the Right Brand Ambassador on Social Media
Combing through all the users on Social Media sites to find the right brand ambassador can be cumbersome and time consuming. Below, you can find some tactics to find the right social media influencer, so let us have a look!
- Setup and use Google Alerts – Google Alerts are just like what they sound like. It’s a notification from Google that you can set parameters and filters to narrow down newly indexed pages. With Google alerts, you can set alerts for keywords related to your brand so whenever your brand is mentioned somewhere on the internet and it’s crawled by Google, you’ll be alerted. It could be in blog posts, social media posts, comments, or websites, but you’ll be alerted and then you can discover people talking about your filtered results. Some of them could be influencers already and you’ve got a hit-list!
- Use popular niche hashtags – Hashtags make refining searches easier. Typically, brands and influencers will tag their posts with multiple hashtags to increase visibility and reach. You could just add them to your brand name and click on the search button across all your social media platforms to find people mentioning your brand. You can start with #influencers, #sponsoredads, #marketing, or #affiliates and see the results that will be generated.
- Social Media Monitoring Tools – You can track your brand’s mentions on social media and monitor how people are engaging with it with the help of social media monitoring tools. More importantly, you’ll find out who is interacting with your brand and engage them to become an ambassador.
Getting the Influencers to Become Ambassadors and Work with Your Brand
Now that you are armed with some of the tactics used to find the right social media influencers for your brand, it’s now time to approach and engage them to become ambassadors. The following tips can help you approach them and strike a deal.
- Follow them on all their social media platforms and like, share, and comment on their posts to make them know you are truly interested in what they’re doing on their social media pages.
- Send them a direct message with a winning proposal and some enticing words to wow them and let them know what’s in it for them to be your brand’s influencer.
- Follow up with them at different intervals while still interacting with the content they post to finally get their attention.
Mash Up
Finding the right social media influencer for your brand gives you the compatibility needed to grow your following and increase the bottom line. It’s not that difficult, the right social media ambassador is in your niche already, understands your goals and values, and will ultimately place your brand in the spotlight of a tribe. Follow these tactics and you’ll land yourself the right social media influencer, or reach out to us to find out how we can connect you with the perfect niche ambassador to represent your brand.