Imagine a world where your social media posts generate so much engagement that you can barely keep up with them. This is possible when you partner with influencers for your online marketing efforts. You’ve probably seen scenarios like this with other brands, so it’s no secret that influencer partnerships work. The hardest part, however, is knowing where and how to find these influencers. Well, rejoice, because that’s what we’re going to talk about in a moment. By the time we’re done, you’ll know more about:
- The types of influencers you can work with.
- How to find and choose them
- Tools available to help you find influencers
Here we go!
What is a social media influencer?
An influencer is a popular personality on social media who has a large following and influence.
But beyond that, influencers:
- are seen as industry experts or sometimes even role models by their followers.
- have credibility and reputation in a specific niche or industry.
- create and share authentic, inspiring, entertaining and informative content.
- help increase brand awareness and engagement rates.
- have a loyal, receptive and trusted audience of engaged people who pay close attention to their social media activities and what they do.
Therefore, these influencers can help drive engagement, shape audience attitudes, set trends and influence people’s purchases.
Considering that around 4.6 billion people worldwide (that’s half the world’s population!) are now on social media, there’s a wide range of influencers and creators to choose from.
Anyone can be an influencer today: a mother of three, a fitness blogger, a techie, etc. Even animals!
As such, it is important to divide them into different categories so you know who is ideal to work with.
Types of Social Media Influencers
There are four types of influencers. They are classified based on the number of people who follow them.
Let’s take a look at each of them: Mega-influencers: These influencers are also known as celebrities with a follower count of around 1 million and above. Mega influencers are usually singers, actors, athletes, and TV stars.
You know, the traditional celebrities that people have loved and known for a long time, as well as online personalities that have gained popularity in recent years. Macro-influencers: These are creators who have more than 100,000 followers. Micro-influencers: The number of followers is less than 100,000, but it is a group of highly engaged followers who share a specific interest with the influencer. Nano-influencers: They have an audience of less than 10,000 people. Their audience is the most targeted, engaged, and trusts them like a friend. Nano-influencers foster communication with their followers and, unlike macro or mega-influencers, nano-influencers always have time to respond to comments.
This means that followers will not only see your product post but will read it, discuss it, and may even share it in their feed.
3 Easy Ways to Find Social Media Influencers
For influencer marketing to work, you need to find the right influencers to work with. But for many marketers, this is a real challenge.
In fact, over 70% of them consider finding creators to be a huge challenge in influencer marketing.
Luckily, here we offer you three ways to do just that.
1. Manually find social media influencers in your niche
Review your existing follower base: You might be surprised to find that the person you’re looking for may be just around the corner. Influencers are real people, and as such, they will follow brands or other people that interest them.
Your brand is one of them, so don’t hesitate to click on the “Follow” button to see if one or more of your followers are the influencers you need.
You can identify them by the number of followers they have, their name, their high-quality profile pictures, or the type of topics they cover.
If you’ve found someone like this, you want to take it a step further and see if they’ve engaged with your content, as this is a sign that they’re already familiar with your brand and would be open to partnering with you.
Conduct relevant hashtag research: Oh yeah, the famous hashtags are also a great way to find work when it comes to identifying influencers on social media. But first, you need to familiarize yourself with the popular hashtags in your niche.
Once you are, type them into the search bar of your favorite social networks and they will highlight the content where the hashtag has been used. What you want to do next is identify the people who are producing the content, as influencers are usually one of them.
Specifically, look for posts that have a very high engagement rate and have a large following from the creator.
Check your competitors’ follower base: You know how we said you should look for influencers among your followers? Well, you can repeat the same process, but in this case, with your competitor’s following.
The first thing to do is to conduct market research to identify your competitors. Then you can start sifting through their follower base.
While manually searching for influencers is fun and all, there’s no guarantee that you’ll like the ones you find. So, keep an open mind if you decide to go this route.
2. Call with an agency
If you are a fan of the quiet life or prefer to dedicate more time to your business, you can opt to collaborate with an agency that will help you find influencers.
Agencies typically represent a wide range of creators, allowing you to choose potential influencers based on your audience, style, and content type.
They are like an intermediary between brands and relevant influencers.
Working with an influencer agency can help you:
- Creating a content strategy for your campaign
- Searching for influencers
- Content execution and campaign optimization
- Detailed reporting
- Price negotiation.
Basically, they save you the stress of searching for influencers on your own. But working with them costs time (in terms of negotiating prices) and money.
If you are a fan of the quiet life or prefer to dedicate more time to your business, you can opt to collaborate with an agency that will help you find influencers.
Agencies typically represent a wide range of creators, allowing you to choose potential influencers based on your audience, style, and content type.
They are like an intermediary between brands and relevant influencers.
Working with an influencer agency can help you:
- Creating a content strategy for your campaign
- Searching for influencers
- Content execution and campaign optimization
- Detailed reporting
- Price negotiation.
Basically, they save you the stress of searching for influencers on your own. But working with them costs time (in terms of negotiating prices) and money.
3. Use an influencer marketing tool
There are also influencer marketing tools like Findly who can help you find influencers. This platform allows brands to specifically search for the ideal influencers they would like to work with.
Findly’s tool helps you identify and narrow down the number of influencers in your industry who might be willing to work with you.
Users can find influencers on Findly in two ways:
Generate a creative brief where they can define the profile of the creator they would like to work with. The influencers will apply to the campaign and all they have to do is accept or reject their application.
Or use the influencer search feature using filters like location, age, engagement rates, niche, number of followers, etc.
All you have to do is fill out a form indicating the type of creator you are looking for and the result will match influencers who fit your description.
Using an influencer marketing tool is the most practical approach of the three ways we mentioned above.
By Nathan Elmaleh
