Of all of your followers, do you know who your most popular audience-members are? How about industry influencers – do you have any of those in your follower arsenal? Fedica offers you tools to learn more about your followers, but we can only take you so far with analytics. It’s up to you to do the heavy-lifting and connect with them once you know they’re there.
Getting influencers to notice you, though, is something of a science. While sometimes it just happens randomly that an influencer follows you, retweets you or initiates a conversation, most of the time, however, there’s a reason they’ve engaged. Influencer marketing is growing in popularity, and 75% of marketers say they use it in their own campaigns.
In short, you need to get the attention of influencers, and you need to get it now. Here’s how:
1. Learn to identify them
First, it’s imperative you actually know what an influencer is. An industry influencer is someone who is a master in their field. They always have the best information, the most relevant info on best practices and they’re essentially a mentor to others. However, just because you consider someone to be influential to you doesn’t make them an influencer. For instance, you might find your mother to be influential, but does that make her an industry expert?
The point is that you have to find the right people in order to get your influencer marketing on track. Fedica can help you out by showing you who your influential followers are and up to date analytic data on who your most influential and relevant followers might be. If you don’t have any big influencers following you, now’s your chance to snag some. How would you do that? You may leverage another aspect of Fedica, providing deep and interactive insight into ANY influencer account; you may analyze an account you do NOT own and dissect the true influencer’s impact, follower distribution, demographics and geography.
2. Start casually engaging
Armed with the influencer analysis data, you can narrow down the influencers you want to engage to about 3 or 4. You can work your way up, but start small to help develop and test out your methods. The first step is to start talking to them in comfortable terms.
Find an influencer and follow them. Try to engage with something they post at least once a day. This can be as simple as retweeting content they post or responding to a more personal tweet they put out there. This keeps you fresh in their mind.
Also, refrain from outside communications. When you suddenly appear all over their Facebook and email inbox as well as their X radar, you look a little desperate. The idea is to look professional, not like a stalker.
3. Give them a reason to engage back
Your engagement strategies have put you on the map, but getting them to reciprocate the attention is another battle in and of itself.
Engage with them for a couple weeks, up to a month. Now you can reach out via DM or email to ask them about engagement. Influencers are often busy people, so they don’t have time to engage with everyone without prompting. If you really want their attention, you have to ask for it.
The best way is in reciprocal way. Give them an opportunity to write something for you, or offer them a sample of something you’ve done to review. You can also offer them financial reward to endorse you if you want to go the extra mile, but that option doesn’t work for everyone.
4. Make the process simple
A busy influencer won’t put in the extra time for someone they barely even know – and if they do, consider yourself extremely lucky. You want to make things easy for them, so try and write out what you want from them in as clear of means as possible.
For instance, say you want a X endorsement from them. Give them some samples and tell them they can use and edit them at their leisure. This puts the ball in their court.
5. Get your team on board
Lastly, don’t put in all this effort by yourself. If you have a social media team, let them in on the not-so-secret marketing method you’re trying out. Explain why influencer marketing is important for success, and also get their opinions on the best ways to target influencers and who’s on their radar.
In the end, influencers are a very big part of the social media world. On X, influencers have a lot of power and knowledge in terms of relevant information and best practices. When you tap into their knowledge base, you gain access to a lot of power yourself, so put these steps in action ASAP.