5 Tips for Finding the Right Social Influencers for Your Brand

When it comes to consumer spending, online content and social conversations have a huge impact on how and what people choose to buy.

As marketers, we create content in order to persuade and engage with customers. But modern consumers are skeptical and savvy. The moment something hints of “ad,” they lose interest and move on.

Whether you sell fitness and health products, tour packages, or home services, a single positive recommendation from a trusted source can trump even your most beautifully written copy or most engaging video demonstration. And while brand-crafted content is useful and can help build trust with customers, sometimes the most influential content comes from like-minded people that your customers know and trust.
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In this new social paradigm, bloggers and others with loyal followers on social media are the new influencers.

Who Are These New Influencers? These new, socially savvy individuals often know more about social media and engaging with digital content than brands and agencies. What makes these new influencers even more powerful is the niche-based content they produce, which is often in a very specialized area. There are millions of bloggers publishing content in popular areas like parenting, food, fitness, fashion, and entertainment. These influencers can be segmented further to reach specific consumers like parents of teens, pet lovers, marathon runners, tech fanatics, and organic cooks.

The concept of partnering with bloggers and other active social media users is called “influencer marketing”. It is based on the premise of finding influencers in your niche to create and distribute relevant content and share it in an authentic and transparent way.

Finding The Right Influencers.

Despite its apparent advantages, influencer marketing is a wasted investment if you are not working with the right ones. And while it’s tempting to use single-metric definitions like unique visitors or Twitter followers as a measure of influence, it’s important to look deeper.

The answer to the question “how influential is someone online?” is “it depends.” Here are five things to look for when identifying online influencers for your brand.

Relevance.

Before you look at unique visitors and other static metrics, it’s important to look at how aligned a blogger’s content is with your messaging. Read through that blogger’s archived posts to get a sense for what kind of consumer they are.

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ARTICLE CONTINUES. Just because a blogger posts recipes doesn’t necessarily mean they are a match for an organic brand, and a tech-savvy sports fan doesn’t make them a guaranteed match for your gaming app.

Are you looking for budget-travelers, fashionistas, permissive moms, or coffee drinkers? Is profanity or provocativeness part of your brand personality? These are important things to look for in the content and audience of an influencer and are far more important than traffic.

Engagement

Engagement is an indicator of how interactive a blogger’s audience is with the content. Do those readers respond, comment, and share? What percentage of readers are returning vs. new?

How much readers engage with a publisher and how often they return are indications of how meaningful those relationships are.

Reach.

While not the most important metric, reach is certainly a valid consideration. However, marketers should resist the urge to only look at unique visitors as a measure of reach. Traffic and followers are only meaningful to the extent that the influencer is reaching your brand’s target audience.

For instance, if you are a hotel chain or car seat manufacturer, a travel blogger with a small reach is more influential than a food blogger with 100,000 unique monthly visitors.

It is also important to consider what other social platforms your customers visit. If you are a food or fashion brand, someone with a large following on Pinterest or Instagram might be more valuable than someone on Facebook with a large fan base.

Frequency.

For many verticals, there is a direct correlation between how often a blogger posts and their traffic and rate of return visitors. As with marketing any website, it often takes multiple exposures to get a visitor to click and check out your site, and you want to make sure they come back.

When a publisher is consistently posting high quality content on a regular basis, readers are more likely to return, bookmark, and share. Bloggers who don’t post as frequently tend to have a higher rate of turnover, fewer return visitors, and less loyalty.

Authenticity

This may sound counter-intuitive, but bloggers who have a smaller ratio of sponsored content tend to be more trusted and appear more authentic. Personal stories that include genuine use or mention of a product, service, or brand are more trusted than straight product reviews.

Compelling, engaging stories also tend to get more shares and comments than deals and product reviews. While it’s tempting to ask publishers to write a nice long review of your product (which readers don’t really pay much attention to), a health brand could engage influencers to write a post about things on their bucket list and how that list is motivation to stay healthy and live a long, active life. That type of content is highly engaging for readers, authentic for the blogger, and connects that health brand sponsor to a very sincere health-related conversation among a large audience.

Whatever your niche, you can engage with bloggers to create the quality, authentic content their audience expects while associating your brand with that content.

And remember that influencers are more than just bloggers—they include those with loyal audiences on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram, Vine, and other social networks.

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