How to find right Social Media Influencers for your Digital Marketing Campaign ?

Working with Social Media Influencers is one of Global Trends in Digital Marketing in 2018. It is proven that Social Media Influencer Marketing can increase brand awareness and sales.

If you hang around a social media marketer long enough, you’re bound to hear the term social media influencers tossed around in conversation. Social media influencers are the bread and butter to marketing strategies and help brands build valuable relationships on social media platforms.

Most social media managers prize their social media influencers because they can drive engagement and word-of-mouth communication to your brand at a higher rate than standard organic methods. At the same time, some managers are hesitant to deem someone a social media influencer just because they have thousands of followers.

There has to be a middle ground toward influencer marketing and it starts with you understanding the goals of your brand and what the influencer will accomplish. Creating goals and outlining each party’s responsibilities, possibly including it in a social media proposal, is essential to see results.

In fact, searches for “Instagram influencer” saw a 3x increase between 2016 and 2017. Searches for “influencer marketing” saw a 2x increase during the same period. So it should not come as a surprise that brands are flocking to social media influencers for their marketing and promotions.

However, identifying the right social media influencers is anything but easy. It is the most important aspect of the campaign, and can make it or break it. Collaborating with the wrong ones will simply burn your budget and give you nothing in return. So you need to be very cautious when you are selecting influencers for your campaign.

Here is some tips from us to find right Social Media Influencers for your Digital Marketing Campaign:

1. Know and Define your target market very well. It is the most first important step before you explore the whole world in order to find your right social media influencers for your digital marketing campaign. By knowing and defining your target market very well, you will have some criteria on which Social Media Influencers who are right for your digital marketing campaign or not automatically. Your target market should match with your Social Media Influencers’ followers or audiences.

2. Use BuzzSumo. A tool that continues to help brands find true influencers in their field is BuzzSumo. With this content marketing tool, it’s simple to discover, measure and monitor content to be one step ahead of the game. BuzzSumo also has an influencers and outreach feature that is made specifically for finding the top writers, bloggers and publications in your field using the same keywords you’re trying to reach as well. BuzzSumo gives you the option to sort via influencers, bloggers, companies and regular users who might not have the status of an influencer. But if you ever need to find who is an expert in your industry, this is the tool. Remember that influencers are not just those who have a high number of followers. Instead, it’s more efficient to look at their total number of shares per article, site domain authority, Retweet ratio and page authority. BuzzSumo makes it absolutely painless to search, find and analyze the top influencers in your industry.

3. Use LinkedIn. LinkedIn is built specifically for helping you network with others in and around your industry. So why not use the social media platform to help find influencers? Social Media Examiner recommends you enter specific keywords or phrases within the search box to pull up second-degree connections and those who are directly related to your search. Don’t be shy about reaching out to those who you feel would be great influencers. However, you don’t want to be too forward with what you want from them. Avoid sounding spammy or too needy as well.

4. Use Twitter. Twitter is a great space to find, interact and converse with your social media influencers. Twitter’s advanced search options give you a lot of opportunity to reach specific audiences or find those who are addressing niche crowds in your industry. Twitter is great for pushing content and measuring how much traction you gained from a specific post or article. Once you can determine the subjects revolving around your brand, you can easily search for influencers with these key topics. Use Twitter’s data to help you make better decisions on how you’ll search the network for social media influencers.

5. Know the Engagement Rate of the Social Media Influencers. Followers count is not the only thing you need to consider when selecting influencers. Engagement rate is much more important. Why ? Because it is an indication of how many followers are truly interested in an influencer’s content. So, how do you calculate Engagement Rate ? It is essentially the percentage of followers who like, comment, or share the posts of an influencer. It is generally calculated as an average of the last 20 – 30 posts of an influencer.

Whether you find your influencers via Google searches, hashtags on social medias, or influencer marketing platforms, you need to screen the properly. Those tips above can help you to find the right Social Media Influencers for your digital marketing campaign.

iMarketology can help you to identify the right Social Media Influencers for your digital marketing campaign. iMarketology can also help you to work with Social Media Influencers during the digital marketing campaign.

– iMarketology –