What Are Social Influencers?
Let’s first grasp the concept behind social influencers before even trying to contact them. Social influencers are active in almost every niche market on the web. They are experts in a specific domain of interest and have a healthy following of fans on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, and whom the fans trust implicitly and explicitly.
These influencers try various products, services and anything else associated with their domain of interest and give an honest review to their users, based on their experience. This is based purely on merit as the social influencers have a reputation to protect, their name and integrity equivalent to a brand in business.
It is high time you contacted social influencers in your niche as you have already done the hard work of connecting with authority sites for guest posting opportunities
How Do I Contact Social Influencers In My Niche?
Like you, many in your niche could be attempting to contact a social media influencer who is popular. Influencers are in much demand as many aspiring business owners in any domain would be pitching them to get their attention and leverage the power of their fan base to promote their business products/services.
How To Stand Out From The Crowd
You have to think and act smart to differentiate yourself from the rest of the crowd. Social influencers are of different types. There are some who are cool with accepting cash. There are others who are okay with accepting payment in kind, say Amazon products or gift cards.
That said, it is for you to find out how the influencer can benefit from your relationship. If you can amplify this aspect well, you are well ahead of the pack.
Sending Free Sample And Offering Discounts
Assuming you have a great product, it would be a good start to send the influencer a free sample of your product that you envisage selling well among his/her fans. You can also offer the influencer discounts and/or affiliate commissions on each product the fans end up buying due to the influencer’s recommendation.
Ensure You Contact Social Influencers In Your Niche
Many a time, there are instances where, for example, a product owner selling wedding cakes connects with an influencer specializing in pets. It is true pet owners eat cakes and like them too. But there is very little in common between these two disparate niches. It makes it hard to strike a good relationship and sustain it.
Ways To Find Social Influencers
You can do the hard slog and look niche specific influencers manually on different social media channels. If your niche is a narrow one, it is not too hard to do a manual search. If not, you can end up chewing tons of time locating influencers.
The other alternative if you are time poor is to look for tools that can help you identify social influencers. Some of the popular ones are Buzzsumo, Awario, Followerwonk etc. You can find this to be a good read on finding social niche influencers using tools
Beware Of Fake Guru Influencers
With technology exploding at its seams today, it is easy to get carried away by looking at the size of the fan base. This size can be faked easily using automation where fan numbers can be inflated at will using fake social media profiles.
Another popular way of accumulating fake social media profiles is through crowdsourcing marketplaces like Amazon Turk and Fiverr. You can get people all over the world to work virtually for few bucks and build a fan base inexpensively without wasting your time.
How To Escape The Fake Influencer Trap
First ensure these followers are real humans and check to see the channel interaction activity for some time before making a final decision.
If you see a hundred thousand followers and see less than 10 comments in all over a week or find the same profiles posting mechanical similar sounding comments, it is time to flee in the opposite direction.
Quality Matters And Not Quantity
Do not be swayed by the numbers. An influencer with followers numbering thousand or even a few hundreds will be posting regularly, replying to followers queries and engaging with her/his fans and building an active community in the process.
The fans will also be engaging regularly. When you find there is an active bi-directional exchange, it is a healthy sign and it would be worth your time and money pursuing such influencers.
At Traffic Alignment, we do content marketing for small businesses and in the process use a nominal spend to market the content on social media and help build a community. Try us out!
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