Social media influencers are individuals who create content endorsing brands and have a good reach or following. But knowing whether to work with them or what results they drive can be tricky. Nonetheless they can play a big part in helping you reach your target audience if you identify the right people who are open to supporting you and transparent about results.
You can identify social media influencers in the hashtag conversations relevant to your business or place using the Insight builder feature of Maybe*. When identifying influencers they should be:
Relevant. The right influencers for you should have a keen interest in your sector that is evident through the social media content they post, or locally relevant
Active. They should have a strong voice in the online conversations that are relevant to you and your business, post regularly and earn good engagement
Connected. The larger influencers and the ones you might have heard of will have tens or hundreds of thousands of followers. But for a local influencer 1,000 followers is good, and 5000 fantastic. Anything over that and you might find that their community is not totally relevant to your local business. Crucially though, they must be engaging with their own followers as well as creating content.
Once you have identified some online influencers, start by building a relationship with them. Follow their accounts, engage with their content by liking, commenting and sharing – this will increase the likelihood of them following and engaging with you back. Use their content as inspiration for what you post, see how they do it well and copy their tactics. Tag them into your posts if you think it would be genuinely relevant to them.
As you start to build a relationship with them, direct message them and ask them if and how they collaborate with businesses. Working with influencers should always feel like a collaboration that is fair to both parties. Some influencers will want payment, but the majority will be looking for an event or experience that they can share exclusively with their followers such as an invite to the launch of a new menu or preview shopping evening, or a discount code for them to share exclusively with their followers. Never ask an influencer to do something for free, instead start the conversation by asking them how they could help, and how you could work together.
Pro tip: use Maybe* to identify the influencers in any social media conversation or add your favourite influencers to Maybe* Engage so you can easily build relationships with them. You can also measure the engagement they achieve using the Maybe* Insight Summary to understand the kind of results they get.
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