Useful Tips For Working With A Social Media Influencer

Useful tips for working with a social media influencer to drive awareness and sales

 

Are you looking for a more efficient way of promoting your business online and reaching your target audience in a meaningful way? In our latest blog we look at everything you need to know about working with social media influencer(s), including finding the right influencers for your campaigns.

 

What is a social media influencer?

 

There are all kinds of ways to categorise social influencers such as posting style and online activity, however, there is also a more general way of categorising them and that is based on their audience size.

Social media micro-influencers, as you may have gathered right from their name, are influencers that have smaller audiences – the consensus being that they tend to have under 100k followers on their social profiles. They can have as little as a few thousand or they can have 100k – the number isn’t that important, at least not compared to their influence over their audience. Once you find the right influencers for your campaign you will need to pay them to share your content.

 

So, why reach a smaller audience? Why not go for the ‘big guns’?

 

Well, as it turns out, for many brands micro-influencers have actually proven to be more effective than huge influencers. Studies have shown that working with influencers with under 30k followers can often outperform larger influencers in virtually all categories. Other key stats from recent studies have shown that micro-influencers enjoy:

>60% higher engagement rate.

>Micro-influencers are 6.7% more cost effective.

>And micro-influencers have 22.2 times “more weekly conversations that the average consumer”.

What makes micro-influencers so special and effective is, in many respects, specifically about their audience size; a smaller audience size can usually mean a more targeted audience and it also means more direct engagement. Kendall Jenner, for example, might have nearly 100m followers on Instagram, but it also means that her audience is very fragmented (from people passionate about clothes to people following just because of her popularity) and she clearly won’t have the time to respond to comments consistently / actually engage her audience.

 

Social media influencer marketing isn’t about vanity metrics

 

Don’t judge a social media influencer on vanity metrics – i.e. their follower numbers. In fact, that might just be the least relevant statistic you should concern yourself with when researching influencers. And if it’s reach you’re looking for, then simply work with multiple influencers at the same time.

Instead of focusing on follower numbers, look instead at their audience first, and then at their engagement stats.

The idea when working with a social media micro-influencer is that even though their audience might be smaller than what you’d want to reach, it’s actually so relevant and targeted that the conversion rate will be much higher than if you’d worked with a bigger, but less relevant influencer.

To help with this, you can use tools that allow you to search for influencers and filter your results based on their existing audience. For example, you can use various online tools which lets you not only search for influencers based on keywords, channel used, and their engagement rate, but also based on who forms their audience (age, gender, location):

This is especially important if you operate in certain areas; influencers are very likely to have a global audience so it’s important to make sure that any influencer you target has enough audience from your city or country.

 

Setting up a micro-influencer campaign

 

If your promoting your business through micro-influencer marketing to generate brand awareness, web traffic and/or boost leads and sales, then don’t forget to check the following:

>What content they create themselves and on what topics

>What types of content they share from other sources

>What products, services, and brands they’ve mentioned or worked with in the past

>What discussions they have on their channels with their fans and followers

Point 4 is easy to do by following them on social media and their blog or other digital channels; plus, you can look at this as an opportunity to establish a relationship or a connection with the influencer before actually reaching out.

It’s really important to check an influencers relevancy. Even if you share a similar audience, they might not be creating and sharing content that is directly relevant to your business. And that is a problem as your campaign would seem inauthentic to their audience; for example, if you’re selling cupcakes and targeting food bloggers, you can’t use just any blogger with a good audience – some might focus on specific foods, other might only about savoury meals, and so on.

There is additional help out there! You can use a tool like Buzzsumo to help; for any influencer you find, you can quickly see a list of the links they shared as well as a snapshot analysis of these links (the top domains shared, their favourite topics, etc.). You can also search for influencers based on the content they shared, either by keyword, or by website domain.

 

 

Establish a connection first

 

Once you find a social media influencer that you’d like to work with, it’s a good idea to establish a connection with them first before reaching out to them to discuss a collaboration. This is especially important if you want to build up to a longer lasting campaign with the same influencer, or want to turn them into your brand ambassadors. This connection can be through one of the many infleuncer marketing platforms that now exist, or you can do this yourself.

Start by following them on their social channels and simply engaging with them: follow them on social media, share their updates with your audience, leave comments, and engage in conversations with them.

When you want to reach out to the influencer, try contacting them via their direct email as it will massively improve your chances of success.  Use a tool like Lusha to help you find their correct emails; download the Chrome extension and find the influencers’ profile on Twitter or LinkedIn to look up their contact information.

In your initial email, be friendly and show them that you are familiar with their work – and a fan of their work!

 

Let the social media influencer do their thing

 

When working with influencers, it’s very tempting to tell them exactly what you want them to do. However, it’s important to remember than influencers are popular with their audience because: their audience trusts them and they love the content that they put out.

Inauthentic content simply will not cut it with audiences – they’re more likely to turn on the influencer about promoting something so blatantly, rather than go buy the product they’re promoting.

Whenever working with an influencer, listen to their input over the campaign – and don’t be afraid of their sincerity. For example, one recent micro-influencer worked with Adidas to promote one of their shoes; in her Instagram update promoting the shoes, she admitted she didn’t think she’d like them much – but, she ended up loving them and generating close to 500 likes and 38 comments on her post (and around 15k followers in total), most comments praising the shoes.

So, whenever working with an influencer, brainstorm content ideas with them and let them be authentic and create the kind of content that their audience is expecting from them. Also, don’t forget to discuss how results will be measured and reported for each campaign you run.

 

How can GDR help

 

Have you tried working with social media micro-influencers yet? If not, now is definitely the time – not only are they very cost effective, but they can also lead to better results and more conversions.

At GDR we know that business owners understand how important social media is to your marketing and business, but also understand that not everyone has the time and skills to handle it themselves.

The team at GDR Media Group are here to help you:

• Effectively use micro-influencers
• Engage social media audiences with a creative and compelling brand story and message
• Increase reach, traffic, and engagement
• Track analytics and return on investment  

 

We would love to help!