With social media becoming a huge factor in society, learning how to reach out to individuals with high social media presence to promote your business is a necessity. The following article will help you understand what influencers are, where you can find them, and how they can impact your business’s ROI and exposure.
What are Influencers?
Social media influencers, commonly known as “influencers” are individual users on a social media platform that have accumulated authority through a large number of followers based on their expertise in a specific field. Numerically, there isn’t a cut-off to how many followers a page requires to earn the title of “influencer”, it is inherently dependent on the influencer and their field of expertise.
However, there are four commonly recognized types of influencers: local influencers, who have 1,000 followers or less; micro influencers, who have anywhere from 1,000 – 10,000 followers; macro influencers, who have 10,000 – 1 million followers; and mega influencers, who have over 1 million followers.
More often than not, influencers are seen on Instagram and are more common in self-care fields, such as fashion, beauty/make-up blogging, fitness and exercise, nutrition and diet, and positive mental health, to name a few examples.
To put it simply, individuals become influencers when they have earned a large and dedicated fanbase that considers them as experts in their niche and field. Followers of the influencer will often shape their buying habits, thoughts, opinions, and beliefs, around what the influencer believes, the products they promote, and what they use in their daily life.
Influencer marketing, on the other hand, occurs when a business reaches out to an influencer for endorsements or shout-outs on their social media platform, giving the business exposure to the influencer’s fanbase.
Where can you Find Them?
You can find social media influencers on most media platforms, including (but not limited to) YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and Snapchat. In fact, experts have found that there are at least 50,000 influencers present on Instagram alone, without taking the thousands of influencers present on Facebook, Snapchat, and Twitter into account.
Most influencer niches, such as fashion and beauty, are present on all social media platforms with differing levels of popularity. For example, if you are wanting influencers who are focused on fashion and beauty, Instagram and YouTube will be your best bet because they have the highest volume of fashion and beauty influencers. On the other hand, if your business lies within the videogame industry and tech-related fields, Twitch and YouTube would be your desired platform of choice.
Thankfully, there are a large variety of tools and services across the web that can make your search for the right influencers less time-consuming and mentally taxing. Services such as BuzzSumo, Alexa’s Audience Overlap, and Keyhole, are great tools to utilize during any influencer marketing campaign; with each service providing its own unique features and capabilities.
- BuzzSumo’s Influencers, for example, identifying all of the social media influencers on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram and filtering out the influencers with little authority in their niche fields. You can also view users who are categorized as “power sharers” — users who have extremely high engagement in their campaigns.
- Alexa’s Audience Overlap tool allows you to view pages and sites that have audiences similar to your own and can analyze your competitors SEO ranking and popularity, amongst other features. Additionally, the Audience Overlap tool will highlight your less popular competitor sites, providing ample partnership opportunities or collaborations.
- Keyhole’s Influencer Tracking is unique in its ability to track listed keywords, phrases, and hashtags to give you alerts in real time, allowing you to always keep a pulse on your campaign. Keyhole also allows you to track multiple influencers at once while analyzing their audience engagement and follower counts.
Related: 8 Top Tips for Getting 250K+ Followers on Instagram
How Influencers can Impact your Business
Influencer marketing allows a business or brand to extend beyond their normal target audience and reach into the dedicated fanbase of an influencer to advertise their products or services. Influencer campaigns can have multiple outcomes, including having the influencer become a brand ambassador, setting up discount codes with the influencers, creating limited-edition products and even collaborations.
Additionally, there are multiple ways for an influencer to bring attention to your brand, such as wearing or using the product or service on their page, writing detailed reviews about your services, and giving shout-outs in their everyday posting sessions.
Going further, influencer marketing produces a much higher ROI (return on investment) than other marketing strategies. In fact, businesses generate $6.50 in revenue for every $1 dollar they invest into influencer marketing. The top 13% of businesses that use influencer marketing make a whopping $20 for every $1 dollar they invest in social media marketing.
Your Budget
As with any other marketing strategy, you will need to have a budget in mind when looking to start a social media campaign. On average, the cost to advertise a product in a social media post for each platform are as follows: Instagram influencers — $1,000 per 100,000 followers; a 24 hour Snapchat Campaign starts at $500; and YouTube influencers charge a rate of $2,000 per 100,000 followers.
With that being said, each influencer will set their own rates based on their expectations and prior experiences. If you have a smaller budget, then you will want to reach out to local and micro influencers, as they have a smaller follower count. On the other hand, if you have a large budget you can afford to go with mega influencers who can generate higher traffic and ROI rates.
Related: 8 Tips to Build the Perfect Social Media Marketing Strategies
In conclusion, influencer marketing strategies have started taking the business world by storm because of their potential to reach a large number of followers with a single post or advertisement. Remember that influencers should be chosen based on your budget and your needs, and can generate a massive ROI for your business.
