What You Should be Looking for in a Social Media Influencer

Influencer marketing is big business. On Instagram alone, experts predict that the spend on this type of marketing is set to reach US$2.38 billion in 2019. However, there are many people on who say they are  social media influencers however this cannot be farther from the truth. In this article, we’ll give you some ideas about what you should  be looking for if you decide to use an influencer in your social media marketing strategy.

Choose the right social media influencer

When looking for the right social media influencer(s) for your brand, you must be sure that they are talking to the audience that you want your brand to be speaking to. For example, if you’re trying to promote your footwear brand it’s useless engaging with an influencer who focuses on food and lifestyle – even if they’ve got millions upon millions of followers.

There are a number of ways that you can go about researching the influencers who are significant in your industry. For example, Followerwonk allows you to search for influencers, on Twitter, in a particular area based on a particular interest. The tool gives you the following information about the influencer:

• The number of Tweets that they’ve sent out,
• How many Twitter accounts follow them,
• How many accounts they follow, and
• How long their account has been active.

Using the free version, you can search for social media influencers for one account. However, to search for influencers using more accounts you will have to pay a nominal fee.

Another great tool to use to analyse public Twitter accounts is follower.me. Input the Twitter handle that you want to analyse and you’ll get all the statistical information that you need about that particular user.

There must be an understanding about money!

Once you’ve chosen your influencer – or team of influencers – you need to have the discussion about remuneration up front. Be it a goodie bag, an honorarium or a decent amount of money, you need to let the social media influencer know how much you are able to recompense them when you first make contact. This is so that they can decide whether or not to accept the job that you’re offering.

Track your hashtags

The best way to promote your business, new product or event is to create a bespoke hashtag. This functions to categorise all the social media posts that people make surrounding your particular topic. Thus, by monitoring the hashtag you’ll be able to see how much people are talking about you.

There are a number of tools that you can use to see how many mentions your hashtag gets:

• On your Twitter dashboard, you’ll be able to see the top 20 hashtags that are trending in your particular area as well as the number of Tweets that were sent out using this marker.
• Tweetreach is a fantastic tool that allows you to monitor the number of accounts which were reached with your hashtag, how many people were exposed to your hashtag as well as who was the most prolific retweeter of your hashtag.

Using influencers in your social media marketing can skyrocket your digital marketing efforts. However, this will only happen if you do it the right way. Look at what is being posted by the influencers and you will naturally get a good idea of character, nature and purpose that is being put out by the person.

Get in touch with the Digital School of Marketing

The Digital School of Marketing (DSM) will provide all you’ll ever need to learn everything about social media influencers in our social media course. This digital marketing course will provide you with the certification that will be your gateway to success! All of DSM’s digital marketing certificates are endorsed by the MICT SETA. In actual fact, we are the only provider of accredited digital marketing education. Visit our website and sign up today!