How to identify the perfect social influencer for your business

Social influencer marketing is rapidly on the rise. It’s quickly becoming the preferred marketing strategy and with good reason. A recent study showed that influencer marketing is twice as fast as conventional approaches in finding customers, and up to ten times more effective. With everyone jumping on the ‘Social Influencer Marketing’ bandwagon, how will you use this marketing strategy to your brand’s advantage?

In social media marketing, you have to be smart. If people sense an advertisement, they’ll head in the opposite direction. You have to find ways of promoting your brand in a subtle way. The new influencers are now social media users with loyal followers. These people often know more about influencer marketing than even advertising agencies. The fact that these people concentrate on a specific niche makes them that much more powerful because a more targeted audience is reached.

The key to successful influencer marketing is finding the right social influencer that will promote your brand efficiently. Follow these tips to find the best-suited influencer for you:

1. Influencer’s reach

Although not considered the most important factor, ensuring that your social influencer reaches the target market of your brand is vital, else you’re wasting time and money reaching people who aren’t interested in your brand.

An influencer with a small reach in your brand’s market is more effective than one with a huge reach in a market not related to your brand at all. Rather opt for reaching a small audience who has a good chance of being interested in your brand.

2. Influencer authenticity

A social media influencer with less sponsored content is usually more trusted and seen as more authentic. An influencer with personal, compelling stories will be accepted more than one who writes long product reviews. It’s tempting to ask an influencer to write a nice review about your brand, but it won’t be as striking as the influencer telling a real story and working your brand into it. People want to relate to what they see and hear.

Also, consider using additional tools to evaluate your influencer and make the most of it. There are tools available that look closely at all your influencer’s audience to measure their demography, authenticity, engagement rate, and reachability to mention only a few of their services.

An influencer with a large follower count seems promising, but what if 70 percent of those followers consist of fake and inactive profiles. And what if the followers are real, but they follow thousands of other Instagram accounts so they will most likely not even notice a post about your product. Working with an influencer with poor audience quality is a waste of time and money.

3. Quality engagement is a must

How much the influencer’s audience engage with the content is essential. If they engage, often it means they will return to the influencer’s platform and grow a relationship. Look closely at the quality of the engagement. Is the engagement of the audience and the influencer natural? Does the audience react favorably to the influencer? These factors will affect how the audience will respond to your brand’s promotion by the influencer.

4. Relevancy matters

You have to be sure that the social influencer’s content is relevant to your brand. Using a social influencer that focuses on healthy foods won’t likely be an effective strategy for chocolate or fast food brand.

5. Consider mutual interests

You should compare the influencer’s personality with your brand’s demographic. If they are similar, you have a higher chance of successfully reaching your target market. Your target market is more likely to trust an influencer who has like-minded beliefs and ideas to them.

6. Choosing the right platform

Using the right social influencer also depends on using the right social media platform to create awareness of your brand. The heavyweights like Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube, are some of the best options to choose from.

Facebook is believed to be the most influential of the bunch. It’s not hard to believe, seeing as Facebook has more than 2 billion users and is ever-growing.

YouTube has a significant influence on teenagers, with 70 percent of them being influenced by YouTube celebrities rather than ‘normal’ celebrities. Using information like that to choose your influencer would be a wise decision.

Over the last few years, Instagram’s social influence has exploded. Up to 80 percent of micro-influencers uses Instagram to post and share new content. Instagram has more than 50 percent influence on people’s shopping habits. More than $2 billion is spent annually on Instagram as a marketing platform.

Conclusion

By incorporating these rather simple yet highly effective ideas into your marketing strategies, you are bound to find your brand awareness growing more rapidly and steadily. Using social influencers is a much more transparent and accepted way of reaching your target market than conventional advertising strategies.