Introduction
Influencers are the game-changers and trust us when we say it's a path-breaking career move. Brands are always looking for the right social media influencer who can drive perceptions. It is no surprise that the Influencer Marketing Industry is set to grow to approximately $13.8 Billion.
This is the reason why everyone aims to become an influencer nowadays. With over 4.55 billion social media users worldwide in October 2021, becoming a social media influencer is worth your time and efforts; however, you should consider multiple factors to be a social media influencer like:
- Why would someone listen to you?
- Which platform will give you the best mileage?
- What kind of content will work the best?
- Whom should you take inspiration from?
If you are puzzled by such questions, this post will help you find the most effective and easy steps to begin your journey to be one of the best social media influencers.
Let’s get started and find out what is a social media influencer!
What Are Social Media Influencers Who Have Taken Over The Internet?
In the simplest form, social media influencers are the ones who can influence others. They collaborate with brands and develop engaging campaigns, engaging content, and captivating videos to ensure the audience considers the product or service they are promoting.
Many times social media influencers are confused with celebrities. However, in today’s digital world, any social content creator with substantial followers or audience base in a specific niche offers much more value to brands. And when brands hire social media influencers for product endorsement, it is termed as influencer marketing.
Do you know that more than two-thirds (67.9%) of U.S marketers will use some form of influencer marketing over the years? That’s expected to increase to 72.5% in 2022. That's the power of being social media influencers. Also, Civic Science found that 14% of 18-to-24-year-olds and 11% of millennials had bought something within the last six months because a blogger or influencer recommended it.
Sounds Great, doesn't it!
Stay tuned to learn about some social media influencers from whom you can take inspiration, how to become an influencer and the type of social media influencer you can choose to be, what are social media influencers focus areas, top social media influencers.
Looking to Promote Your Brand On Social Media?
- Achieve Your Brand Vision
- Drive Customer Engagement
- Create goal-driven Social-Media messaging
3 Types Of Social Media Influencers That The Audience Loves!
While Kylie Jenner is a well-known social media influencer, not every influencer must be a celebrity. Instead, brands look to tie up with influencers with limited followers but someone doesn’t necessarily dominate that niche. We have shared what is social media influencers types based on the audience size; however, there is no thumb rule here:
- Nano-influencers - Influencers who cater to an audience size of 10,000 followers or fewer, like Chantelle Coustol @Thechann16 (10.5 K Followers), Kalan Laws @Senorguapo713 (9744), Jill Smokler @Jillsmokler (9,587), etc.
- Micro-influencers - They are the ones with 10,000 to 100,000 followers, like Sperry Leverages Fashion Influencers, Jesse Driftwood, Miette Dierckx, etc.
- Mega-influencers - Dominating with 1 million-plus follower, like Colleen Ballinger. They are the famous and most influential ones.
Guess now you know that decent audience size and expertise in your niche is good enough to begin your journey of being a social media influencer. However, these are not the only criteria to influence someone to like a product or service, get their loyalty, make them listen to you.
Check out our next section that unfolds the easiest yet effective ways to become a social media influencer.
How To Become A Social Media Influencers That Brands Admire
We know you have it in you, and nothing can stop you from positioning yourself as a brand in the digital space. We are here to guide you the best to begin your journey of becoming “Influential”.
#1. Choose Your Niche Wisely To Become A Much Followed Social Media Influencer
Is it food, lifestyle, fashion, music, health, technology? What is your “Niche”? Your niche will decide your future course of action. Every influencer on social media has a specific expertise and they promote services accordingly, create content, and reach out to the audience.
Here are some profound ways to figure out your niche to become a social media influencer.
- Decide upon what is your passion or what do you love?
- What is that one thing you are good at?
- What problem do you want to solve as a social media influencer, and do you know to help the audience?
- Determine the profitability of your interest area before finalizing it as your niche.
- Check your competitors, their performance, content quality and how you will make a difference.
- Figure out the market potential for your niche. Then, do basic keyword research with the best keyword research tools and consider using Google Keyword Planner.
- Narrow down your niche. Let’s say you have figured out a food category, so what is that particular niche you want to go ahead with.
- Finally, believe in yourself and go ahead.
#2. Mark Your Podium To Position Yourself As Social Media Influencers
Now that you know your niche, it's time to go ahead with the right platform that will enable you to create your success story. As a social media influencer, there are tons of different social media channels that you can use, including:
You may choose a variety of platforms to connect to your audience. Still, you must choose one primary platform on which you will focus the most. You should consider multiple factors while selecting the right social media platform for you. Here’s our piece of advice:
- The above-stated data shows the most important social media channel for influencers to help make the right decision.
- Identify your competitors and see which platform they are using extensively.
- Your primary platform has to be in coherence with your niche. For instance, you are a fashion enthusiast, in that case, Instagram is the best choice.
- Identify who is your target audience and accordingly select the right platform. For example, if you are B2B, Linkedin is the one, and if it's B2C, you may go ahead with Facebook or Instagram.
- Type of content you’ll create. For example, if you have decided on vlogs, Youtube makes more sense to go ahead with.
- Consider your target audience demographics and which platform works best and is most prevalent in that geography.
#3. Study Your Target Audience To Be Social Media Influencers
To be a social media influencer, you need to reach out to the right audience. No matter your niche or the platform, if you don't have an audience, your content and efforts will go in vain. Your fans, subscribers, followers will define your success.
Here’s how to define your audience to become a successful social media influencer:
- The type of market/industry you want to address defines your target audience. For instance, your goal is to educate others about web development and the best practices, you are aiming at B2B, and the right audience will be on platforms like Linkedin, Reddit, Twitter, and so on.
- Figure out your content format. For example, if you will be coming up with more videos, your audience is on YouTube or other similar online video sharing platforms.
- What demographics you are looking at. The age, gender, occupation, lifestyle, income. Once you come up with the right persona, you will figure out the target audience.
- Check users, subscribers, readers, admirers of your competitor's products. This will help you understand who they are focusing upon, their motivators, age group, interests, and much more. Of course, the best way to study the competitors is through social media, wherein you may check your competitor’s social media pages, blogs, videos, and how the audience is responding.
- Also, define who is not your target audience. This is also a great way to come to the right conclusion.
- Set up and use Google analytics to study the target audience.
#4. Come Up With the Best Content Ideas To Become One Of The Finest Social Media Influencers
You know your niche, the right platform, and the best target audience, but all this to function needs quality content. “Content is king,” and there is no second doubt about it. If you fail to come up with bang-on content, you will lose your audience in no time. Creating great content marks a strong first impression; if you have killer content to launch yourself, trust us, there will be no looking back ever.
Here’s how to come up with captivating, valuable, and path-breaking content:
- Make analytics your buddy! Study competitors' top-performing posts, check on social media analytics using tools like Buffer, keyhole, Hootsuite to figure what’s working and what is not worth trying.
- On Facebook, you could use Pages to Watch that let you compare the performance of your Page with similar Pages.
- You could create a Twitter list of the companies that you would like to learn from and regularly check out what they share while aiming to be social media influencers.
- Use content research tools like Buzzsumo to search any keyword and see the most shared content.
- What are social media influencers’ focus points? Create an audience persona. to understand what kind of content your users will consume more
- Define your content goal. Generally, for brands, the KPIs are:
- Brand awareness
- Reach new audience
- Improve brand advocacy
- Drive leads
- Maximize revenues
- Last but not least, follow trends, keep an eye on what kind of content is trending on social media, and if it matches your niche and audience, you may consider going for it.
#5. Get Going With A Robust Content Calendar In Your Journey To Be Social Media Influencers
Influencers are creative minds who sweep off their audience with some unique, captivating bit of content. And the key here is “Consistency” in creating valuable content loved by the audience and the search engine. Being consistent keeps you at the top of your audience’s mind, and to ensure this, you must create a content calendar.
Here is how you may develop an effective content calendar to be social media influencers, and what are social media influencers content calendar:
- Decide how frequently you want to post the content. For example, your content strategy will be on holidays or weekends when content consumption may be quite high.
- Choose the best times to post your content when your audience is the most active.
- Choose the right social media management tools to help you create the content calendar. Some tools to consider are Loomly, Trello, Sprout social. However, you may also create a smart content calendar on Google Drive and in excel spreadsheets. Download some cool templates and use the format to create the one.
- The calendar should have various formats of content.
- Finally, you can schedule your posts.
- Keep updating and reviewing your plan.
- Monitor how the audience receives your content and if any changes are required.
#6. Develop Engagement With Your Audience To Be A Well-Heard Social Media Influencers
The key to keeping your audience hooked and not letting them lose interest in you is by engaging with them. You don't have to teach, inform, advise, lead, just engage, and the task is done. Even social media platforms love social media influencers and content that engages with the audience. The higher the engagement rate, the more the traffic will be.
Also, brands looking for social media influencers to help them carry out their marketing campaigns want influencers who can push their followers to make purchases and follow the brand instead of silently observing the promoted content.
Here's how to enhance engagement as a social media influencer and the definite answer to how to become a social media influencers:
- Learn the art of storytelling, the audience loves it!
- Use visuals to grab attention. Use various formats of presenting your content visually.
- Ask questions that relate to your audience's pain points, and set the tone of your content accordingly.
- Conduct polls and carry out quizzes.
- Create short videos, a 1-3 min of videos can do a lot of wonders.
- Use humor, punch lines, and make life fun for your audience.
- What are social media influencers best at? Give followers new ideas to make life easier. For instance, DIY videos are a hit because they can relate to them.
- At times, share your life story, struggle, funny moments, as the audience loves to watch, read personal experiences.
- Talk about recent events.
- Use “Previews” to tell listeners what's coming next or how you're going to develop a point.
#7. Never Lose Focus On Developing Traffic As Social Media Influencers
Brands look for collaboration with influencers with a decent number of followers, a high engagement rate, and increasing audience size to maximize their footprints. The more traffic you generate on social media, the bigger a social media influencer you will become.
Here is how you may generate more social media traffic, and how to become a social media influencers:
- Make your content easy to share. For example, if your content is in video format, reiterate to subscribe and share. Never complicate things by asking the audience to fill in the contact details first.
- Use hashtags the right way. Check trending hashtags on every social media channel and use them wisely. Check on competitors' content along with tools like Hashtagify.me to search for the most used hashtags.
- Tag others to maximize the reach of your content as social media influencers.
- Post your content when the audience is the most active. You can get these insights from various social media listening tools.
- What are social media influencers tasks? Consistently interact with your audience and provide tons of value to like and share your content.
- If your budget allows, invest in social media advertising to expand your reach as a social media influencer.
- Mention social media accounts in emails: newsletters, welcome messages, outreach templates, etc.
- Add various appealing videos, visuals, infographics to your content.
- Keep innovating your content and try working on short videos.
- Change your business page profile photos and cover photos.
- Customize your content as per the channel.
- Never, ever buy followers and fans as social media influencers.
# 8. Collaborate With Other Influencers To Increase Your Footprints When Aiming To Be A Known Social Media Influencer
Collaborating with other social media influencers in your niche allows you to gain fans from their communities. Working with influencers on social media may help expose your content to a massive new audience while driving more traffic to your profiles.
What is social media influencers' focus area? You may focus on collaboration, working with social media influencers in your field that can be done in various ways.
- You may opt for paid promotion.
- Request them to promote your content if they find it worthwhile. In this case, to boost your chances, you may interview the influencer, tag them in your post, admire them in your content, and do many more such things.
- Guest post on each other’s blogs as social media influencers.
- Create a vlog together.
- Interview each other.
- It's possible to get mentioned in someone's Instagram or blog by appearing in photos together or teaming up to do each other's pics.
#9. Let Brands Find Your Easily And Quickly To Grow As A Social Media Influencers
Another important piece of advice for growing as a social media influencer is to make it as simple as possible for marketers to locate and contact you. Know what brands are looking for and tailor your content to meet their needs. This will make it easier for them to find you.
Here’s how to enhance your visibility for brands to connect with you:
- Decide on your goal as brands look for influencers who can get them brand awareness, education, SEO authority, social following, damage control, user-generated content (UGC), and sales increase.
- They will see your audience size, content publishing frequency, engagement rate.
- You may use these sites to see how you rank. Sites like moz.com/followerwonk, buzzsumo.com, keyhole.co, ninjaoutreach.com
- Develop a portfolio that brands find value in. It should reflect how you can work with them in multiple ways; for example, you can write blog posts, promote products through pictures and affiliate links, review and rate products/services, send emails to your audience.
- Be visible as brands do Google search to find influencers on YouTube; they may use tools like Iconosquare for Instagram, may use hashtags to find the trending influencers, use keywords, location, and much more.
- Connect with PR forms, send them your media kit, and follow up with them for collaboration with brands. Your social media kit should have your audience size, platforms you are visible on, campaign done by you, clients testimonials, audience demographics (age, gender, location), type of content you’ve produced, and an Instagram analytics report.
#10. Optimize Your Social Media Influencers Bio And Profile
One of the most prevalent concerns among new Instagram influencers is that companies aren't approaching them, usually due to their page's lack of optimization.
Here are some things you can do to let potential brand partners know you're available to work with:
- Create a profile for your company or as a creator. This is crucial for brands to see you as a possible collaborator.
- Your niche and target audience should be highlighted.
- A powerful Instagram bio defines what you do and who you are in a few brief phrases or bullet points.
Simple isn’t it!
Trust us, it's not rocket science being a social media influencer, but yes, there is a lot of research, knowledge, passion, and commitment required to become a successful social media influencer. So, to make your journey more exciting and easy, we have curated a list of influential social media influencers you can take inspiration from.
Top Social Media Influencers To Take Inspiration From
We have a ready reckoner for you to follow, take inspiration from, check out content style, and deliverance of some influencers making social media rounds, and brands love working with them.
Do you think we have missed any of your favorites in this list? Tell us in the comment box below.
Final Thoughts
Influencer marketing is a big trend, and it will see exponential growth. Brands looking to maximize their digital presence, develop strong bonds with the customers, enhance customer loyalties, and popularize their products and service will keep looking for the right social media influencers; instead, there is the growing popularity of nano and micro-influencers.
By following the 10 steps we have mentioned above to become social media influencers like:
- choosing your niche
- exemplary content
- smart content calendar
- building your audience base
- come up with your website
- collaborating with other influencers
- being approachable to brands
These quick ways will ensure you turn out to be a social media influencer who brands, search engine, audience, peers will love.
So, what’s your niche? What thought has motivated you to become an influencer? Tell us your story, and we’ll be all there to support you the best way possible.
Give us a boost! We have put together the best elements to help you be a social media influencer; please do like and share.
Looking to Promote Your Brand On Social Media?
- Achieve Your Brand Vision
- Drive Customer Engagement
- Create goal-driven Social-Media messaging
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