Influencer marketing has gained momentum and if you are aware of the benefits, you would definitely want to hire an influencer for your business promotion on social media channels. Influencers are basically people who promote and share your content and with some right strategies you can get a chance to collaborate with the influencers in terms of the content created by you or the influencer.
When you start finding influencers, you also get opportunities to get to know new people who share the same interests.
Finding the perfect influencers for your product and industry is certainly not an easy task but the trick is to get more creative. You need to think outside the box while finding new influencers!
Here are some unimagined and underestimated strategies for finding the right influencers:
Browse The Speaker Lists For Conferences
Use the terms ‘your industry name + conference’ and search in Google. This will display a list of speakers. Analyze the list and look at the speakers for every conference. While doing this, it is important for you to keep in mind that it does not matter if the conference is coming up or already gone. All you have to do is find the right people who can also be influencers for you, they might have spoken earlier or they might be speaking in an upcoming conference but they can be potential influencers for you.
When you perform this search, you might be familiar with a few names and some would be new to you with whom you would like to collaborate. With this method, you can check the social profiles of the speakers and add some in your list of potential influencers that you can approach.
Analyze Twitter Lists For Other People
Twitter lists are created for organizing the list of people we follow in understandable and manageable categories. You can subscribe to other people’s twitter lists as well. If you start analyzing the lists created by other Twitter users, there are chances that you will discover the new influencers related to your industry.
You can go to the profile of someone from your industry that you know and can trust. The lists that they follow or they have created can be viewed in the space highlighted above.
It is ideal to go through smaller lists because a smaller list indicates that the person who made the list has been extremely selective about whom he/she would like to add in the list; and a smaller list also means that there will be genuine influencers in the list.
You can follow the people you like as influencers, add them to your Twitter list and subscribe to their list as well to get to know more people.
Take A Look At Well Known Blogs Of Your Niche
Analyze the well known blogs that cover topics related to your industry. Check the authors who are publishing the posts and then look for them on the social media websites. If they are publishing informative posts with good reader engagement, then they are surely experienced and have a lot of knowledge about the respective topic. You can get some new potential influencers with this method and you can start approaching them.
Search LinkedIn
LinkedIn is a great resource for many professionals; it can be used for networking, for recruiting, for finding partners and vendors, for showcasing your skills and experience etc. There is no denial of the fact that LinkedIn is a great resource when it comes to finding people.
You can find influencers through LinkedIn as well, here’s how – Type the name of your niche or industry in the search bar with quote marks. Use of quote marks is important (“keyword”) because if you don’t use them, the search results will also display people profiles that are not relevant to your search.
So enter the name of your industry and when the results are displayed, filter the results to show people only. In this process, the users who are linked to your current connections will be given priority in the results. In a way this is good as it will help you to finalize influencers from your own network. You can filter the results with various attributes and if you want a more refined search with more filters, you can opt for a premium membership.
Search For Authors In Amazon
This is a very simple strategy that can be effective as well. Go to Amazon and enter the name of your niche in the search bar and click on the ‘Books’ option from the menu present on the left side. Now browse the results displayed for authors and see the ones that you don’t know about, these authors can be potential influencers for you.
Become A Part Of Twitter Chats
Twitter chats are basically groups of people who meet on Twitter to chat at a time that is pre-determined. A unique hashtag is used in order to group all the messages together. This is a great way to find influencers and to connect with them. It goes without saying that in order to participate in a Twitter chat; you need to know when this chat is going to take place and where it’s happening (the hashtag used by the participants).
In order to find the Twitter chats relevant to your industry, you need to search Google for ‘your industry + Twitter chat’. You can also find a list of the upcoming Twitter chats on websites like Tweet Reports.
You can also plan to host your first Twitter chat where you can invite the influencers that you wish to connect with and you can ask them to further invite more influencers as well.
Ask Influencers For Recommendations
Although this might not be an easy thing to do, but who knows it can work for you!
In case you have created a good collaboration with one or more influencers, you can ask them to introduce you to more influencers related to your industry. This is a useful strategy because it has the capacity to introduce you to more influencers which you might not have known about otherwise. Also the fact that you will have a shared connection with the influencers makes it easier for you to build new influencer relations.
Look For Local Influencers And Make A Human Connection
Yes you can meet and talk to an influencer in person! You might be shrugging and thinking that influencers are online people and we need to find them online! Not necessary! You can find some local influencers as well who are active on social media. If you get to know a social influencer, what you can do is keep an eye on the social feeds and event mentions posted by the influencer. Register for these events and try to make a personal connection with the influencer. Make sure to keep the initial interaction light, it is a good idea to exchange business cards so that you can reach out at a later point of time. When you get familiar with the influencer you can start discussing about endorsing your products.
Leverage Your Network
You must treat the task of finding a social media influencer in the same way as finding a new job. You can use your existing network to get in touch with potential influencers. If you have shortlisted some influencers, go through their social media profiles and try to see if you have common friends. If you are working in the same industry there might be chances of having mutual connections with the influencer.
Maintain A List Of Your Outreach Attempts
It is important to track your attempts of reaching out to influencers. Maintain a list about your outreach, time, date, details, success/failure of those attempts etc. and the follow up that happened after that. This will help you to make better and timely decisions.
Over to you
Finding influencers can be a time consuming task if not implemented with the right strategies. The strategies mentioned in this article will help you to get in touch with your influencers and then you can quickly start your influencer marketing campaign. Move ahead and follow the influencer collaborations with gratitude, feedback and guidance in order to get the best results through the social media channels.
