Numerous studies have revealed that social media has a huge impact on consumer purchase behaviour. A Forbes article stated that 78% of consumers admitted that a post on social media influenced their purchasing decision in the past.
But this doesn’t mean if you jump on social media and start posting you’ll make lots of sales. If it were that simple, everyone would be running a business. Certain social media users have huge followers in their respective industries, an endorsement from them about your brand or product can sometimes be more powerful than running an advert or campaign.
What are social media influencers?
A social media influencer is typically a single person who is respected within a specific industry.
For example, Lewis Hilsenteger of Unbox Therapy is one of the biggest social media influencers in the tech niche, he manages his own YouTube channel where he provides honest reviews of consumer gadgets. His page has more than 3.2 million subscribers and a single review can instantly social proof the product he’s reviewing.
JD Andrews is considered the number 1 social media influencer in travel according to Klout, a blog review or tweet of a travel product from his account can do wonders for tour agencies and hotels.
There’s social media influencers in every industry, in this article I’ll show you where you can find them and how to create solid relationships.
Finding appropriate social media influencers
If you operate in a popular industry such as fashion, food, travel, electronics or hospitality, you’ll have a lot of options. When connecting with social media influencers, reach out to people who align best with your brand, have a similar fan base and are genuinely interested in your business.
There’s 3 questions you should ask yourself when locating influencers, they are:
Are they relevant to my business? If your business sells tour packages around the United States, there’s little benefit you can gain from reaching out to travel bloggers who focus solely on Europe or Asia.
A good way to gauge their relevance is to see if your fans follow them on social media, this reveals there’s an audience overlap and that they may be a good fit. Doing a quick SEO audit on how similar their top ranking keywords are compared to your business also helps a lot.
Do they have a lot of followers? – The amount of followers a social media influencers has will reveal how influential they really are. There is no fixed number of followers one must have to become an influencer, as each industry varies in size. For example, you should expect a typical fashion influencer to have x10 as many followers as a social media influencer who focuses on gardening or carpentry.
Pro-tip: Look into their post engagement, there’s little use in aligning yourself with an influencer with 50,000 fans if they only receive 2-3 likes per post. Large amount of followers can sometimes be a false-positive, you’ll need to dig deeper into their posts to see if fans are actually engaging with them.
How are they perceived? – Whenever you decide to connect with influencers, remember that it can greatly impact your business for better or for worse. If certain influencers have controversial views, use abuse language in their posts or have received bad press before, that may rub off on your business.
Run an audit on each influencer before hand to see how they are perceived online. Read all their previous social media posts and comments lefts by others. If they have a website read their blog comments and Google their name to see if they’ve received any negative press which could harm your business.
Klout and Traackr are two tools you can use to find social media influencers in your industry.
How to connect with influencers
Once you located influencers who can help your business, there’s two ways you can reach out and connect. They are:
Organically – Start by following them on social media, share their posts and get involved in their discussions. The objective here is to provide value and focus on building a great relationship.
With enough time and work, if your products and services are of value, they will start linking out and sharing your content originally. These types of relationships are the best as they cost nothing and are often the strongest. The downside is it takes a lot of time to build such relationships and there’s no guarantee they will promote your business.
Direct contact – If you don’t have the time to build organic relationships, the next best thing is to contact them directly. Introduce yourself, state how you love their work (mention a particular article or post you liked to show you actually follow them) and most of all, don’t pitch to them in the first message.
The opening interaction should just be a friendly introduction about how much you like their work. As you go back and forth then you can start to ask if they offer branding services and what they can do for your business (retweet your content, review your business, etc).
I strongly suggest contacting them via email over a private social media message. Not only is it more professional but it shows sincerer intent.
Summary
Influencers on social media are great for putting your business on the map. If you’re relatively new or lack social proofing they can do a lot of good for getting your business out to the right people. Just don’t rely on them too heavily, as all it takes is one bad post or outburst for their reputation to shattered.
Nick Bridges
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