Updated January 10, 2023
Reading Time: 3 minutes
Increase Your Reach
As the old quote goes; “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know”. Well, in 2018 this is still as accurate as ever. You’ve probably noticed that if your company posts something on any of the social networks it only gets a few likes, and minimal interaction, then you’ll look at the most recent Twitter, or LinkedIn, post from one of your industries’ ‘celebrities’ and see it’s got hundreds of thousands of likes and shares. So what gives? Is your content crap while theirs is great?
Understanding Trust
Influencers are people who have built up a reputation in a certain niche. They might work for a well-respected company, run their own business, or just be ‘internet famous’. Whatever their background, they have a group of followers who consume their content. Whether the content is created by them, or just curated, their followers trust that this person knows what they are talking about, in this area.
Being a trusted voice is very important in the age of fake news so if you are a trusted voice in your industry you need to be careful to guard that trust. Many social media influencers make most, or at least a significant amount, of their money through this influence so they won’t want to risk their cache unnecessarily. This is how the social influencer symbiotic relationship goes. The follower knows that internet fame is fickle and if the influencer backs the wrong product it could hurt their reputation. So they trust the influencer to make the right choice.
As A Business Owner I…
So, why should you care? Well, as with everybody else, Influencers need to create a lot of content. Their whole world exists around content creation and they need things to talk about. So, why don’t you try and make your business one of those things they talk about.
In many ways working with influencers is like guest blog posting. You are either asking if they would like to write about your business, offering to write something for their site, or asking them to share your content. Basically, you are swapping content for reach.
Where Can I Find My Influencers?
Finding your industry influencers should be easy. They’re the people that are at the top of your Facebook and LinkedIn feeds. The people who are speaking at industry events, or hosting webinars. The easier to find the influencer is, in theory, the better they are at their job. The difficult part is finding out if they are really speaking to your target customers or not. Here you will need to do some detective work looking at the content that the influencer shares and the interactions they have to determine if they are speaking to your ideal customer or not.
Under the Influence
That’s the end of part 1 of our blog post on influencers if you want to find out how to get in touch with influencers and what to offer them when you do, you can check out part 2 of our post here.
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