How to find Social Media Influencers

A how-to guide to perform your own Influencer Marketing Campaigns

In 2007 Kate Middleton was celebrating her 25 birthday with a simple printed dress by TopShop. Her relationship with Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, was not yet official. One day after the publication of the photographs, the dress she wore was sold out in the United Kingdom.

Well… Don’t want to try this with your brand?

Where to start?

Ok, first of all. Which is the best Social Media where to performance my campaign? It depends on your business. Some business fits better on Twitter or Facebook, other on Instagram… But as a default, Instagram is the best choice for Social Media marketing with influencers. 72% of Instagram users claim to make purchasing decisions based on recommendations that have been found in this social network. Instagram is the most influential social network about the purchase decision. Furthermore, the growth of this platform much higher than the rest of social networks. Very superior even for Facebook or YouTube.

Summing up, all cool stuff are happening on Instagram.

There are three different starting points to find Instagram Influencers. Let’s take a look:

Influencer platforms

There are plenty of social media Influencer platforms where brand and influencers get in touch. Usually these platforms are generalists, but there are some focused to specific social networks. I leave a list of top influencer platforms so you can choose the most convenient tool for your Social Media campaigns with influencers. In the case of Heepsy.com, you can choose influencers from Instagram, Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat and Bloggers. Is the platform with the highest number of influencers from all over the world.

This is the most efficient way to take out your Influencer marketing campaigns. It’s not time-consuming and is low-cost.

2. Influencer marketing agencies

Some agencies has been specialized on Influencer Marketing. That’s because they thoroughly understand the potential of these strategies. The growth of the number of brands focusing on this type of social media marketing is extraordinary. Some of these agencies have achieved a huge experience on Influencer Marketing, creating a big number of contacts to carry out campaigns with them.

The main problem is about money. If you’re a small business, it’s more than probable you can’t afford agency option. Anyway, is an option, and really good if you have a good budget.

3. DIY

The last option. Literally. I can’t recommend this one unless you have time in the market. Find the right influencer is not easy. Many of them don’t have an identified audience within your target audience, some use fake followers, others are in decline… And this is really hard to figure out without the proper metrics.

It is true that if you have been campaigning for some time, it is likely that you already have a stable relationship with some influencers and even that they will help you discover new influencers within your niche for your social media marketing strategies. But to get to this point it’s necessary to have this marketing strategy very established within your organization.

In the future everybody will be famous for 15 minutes — Andy Warhol

Which types of Influencers are there?

There are many ways to categorize the influencers, but it seems logical to simplify in 3 different categories.

Celebrities

They are people known for their public life. They appear continuously in different media and, of course, many of them are present in social networks. They use to be actor/actress, athletes, singers… Their social media accounts use to have thousands or millions of followers. Performing campaigns with these influencers have two main problems. a) They use to be really expensive to hire and b) they don’t give confidence when they promote a product. Usually not credible. Standard influencers

They are almost celebrities. They are not known by their public life, they use to jump to fame thanks to their digital life. They have started from scratch and have managed to create a retinue of faithful followers who know them for their publications on social networks or blog. They have from 25K followers and use to have a very targeted audience. Until very recently it gave a very high level of confidence, but with time it has been descending. This is because the collaborations made by these influencers with different brands are increasingly known. In any case, the campaigns with these influencers continue to produce good results. Micro influencers

This influencers are much less known. They have from 5K followers and usually have influence especially in their environment. People often identify a lot themselves with them, at the same time they are the people they aspire to be, so their level of influence and engagement is really high. Hiring this type of influencers is usually cheaper, so the budget of the campaign is often distributed among many influencers of this type. In this way you reach a broad audience, in a very segmented way and with a high level of credibility. They tend to be the campaigns with the best results and with a higher ROI, although the management is more time consuming because the number of influencers that you have to pay attention and reward is greater.

How can I select the right influencer?

Trusting just in the number of followers is not a good idea. This is important, but keep in mind, there are lots of services that send hundreds of new fake followers to any Instagram accounts and it’s really cheap to do this. That’s because you need some key metrics to figure out which influencer is really an influencer and whom of them will give you real exposure in your niche.

Some of the most relevant key metrics in social media marketing with influencers are the number of followers, followers growth (some influencers are ceasing to be), engagement (some accounts are old), account reliability level and posts quality. Some platforms like Heepsy can help you with these metrics since it gives you some of them already calculated. Find out more on this post.

What can I get from an influencer?

Actually, every business is a world, but these are some interesting ideas

Sampling campaigns.

Send your product to influencers in exchange of some posts on social media. An inexpensive and effective way to build hype for your clients. Branded content.

Sponsor an influencer and get branded content for your client. Triple their brand exposure by using influencers on your campaigns Invite influencers to your events.

Invite influencers relevant to the industry of your client and build hype. Get exposure on social media. Set the trend

Create a collaboration with influencers to try your restaurant/bar/store and let them talk about it. Create expectation

Contact influencers to try your products or services before they are available in the market.

How much does Influencers cost?

It’s hard to say. It depends in lot of factors (social media, industry, country, etc), but the most important point is the number of followers they have. There is a high difference between standard influencers and micro-influencers. A micro-influencer should be much cheaper than a standard one, and the engagement and confidence they achieve is much higher.

In Heepsy we have create an algorithm that estimates the cost per post of any influencer, performing the calculation based on different data about each influencer.

Of course, the final price will depend on the negotiation, and even in many cases the consideration will not be monetary, as we have said before, but it’s a good starting point. You can find more about Heepsy estimated costs here.

How to measure results

Ok, that’s really important and surprisingly there are many people who skips this step. And again, it depends.

Branding campaigns are the most difficult ones to measure, just because it’s about awareness. The best metric you can use is reach, and unfortunately you can only know this by asking the influencer you hired. They have this data, so ask them and they can send you a report about the reach of the post they did.

Sampling campaigns could be measured by many ways. For example, if you give the influencers a unique discount code, you just have to count how many people have used this code. Same for off-line stores. If you’re an e-commerce you can give your influencers a tagged link with which you can measure the traffic they give you, and measure also how many of these visits converted. Easy ways to measure your ROI. Take a look to this post if you want to find out about measuring influencer marketing campaigns.

Takeaways

If it’s your first time performing influencer campaigns, select an specialized agency (if you have the budget) or select your favorite influencer platform.

Once you know on which Social Network you want to build your campaign, select the right influencers based on key metrics (number of followers, followers growth, engagement, account reliability level, posts quality and other). Also think about which fits best for your brand and strategy; celebrities, standard influencers or micro influencers.

Think about what you want from the influencers (a review of your product/brand, create expectation, come to an event, wear your brand…) and what you can offer them (money, product sampling, whatever influencer gives value).

Follow up and review the results of your campaign. Measure the success or failure based on the ROI you have achieved.