So you’ve got your social media accounts going, you’re posting and sharing, but who are you talking to? Have you researched your target audience and searched for your best online influencers who could make the difference to your brand by spreading word of mouth? If not, there are many tools that can help you to find the best influencers for your specific topic, engage with them and their followers and organize your content to appeal directly to your new audience. I am going to explain a few of them in this article.
This software rounds up many of the features of other tools into one influencer search engine. With Finder you can search by any topic that applies to your brand, see a preview of the influencers and eliminate any that aren’t applicable, and download the report of the influencers to be able to keep track and network with them even while offline. Finder allows you to focus on a specific audience; it offers different features for different paid plans and ranks the potential brand ambassadors by different levels of online influence and engagement.
This software helps you to find relevant users and specific blogs to increase your engagement. According to GroupHigh you can search, filter, and sort to find and prioritize your blogger outreach based on which bloggers are active and building communities on popular social networks.
This program focuses on Google+ and on optimizing your reach on the social network. They claim that the number of followers is a metric that measures a person’s influence on Google+. The higher the number, the higher the person’s influence since more followers are likely to view this person’s posts. They include additional metrics to measure the influence of a person, like the average number of +1s, comments or reshares a person gets for each post.
This tool focuses on Twitter bios and its best feature is searching the Twitter bios by key words. The results are sorted by the number of followers and social influence. It also gives some interesting statistics including how long they’ve been on Twitter, how many people they are following and how often they Tweet. It connects you with influencers in your niche.
This is essentially a blog search engine that covers a variety of industries. You can either search for a keyword, or look at trending topics under “Hot Topics”. The search results tend to differ in quality, so you have to take a close look, but it is a good way to start conversations with leading blog authors.
Now that you’ve found your best online influencers it’s time to research, find out who they’re audience is, how engaged they are in social networks, if they’re the kind of users who would be interested in becoming ambassadors of your product/service and finally contact them and create a credible and professional partnership.
According to blogger, Kristi Hines on iAcquire you want to relate to the influencers you are contacting as much as possible. Your goal is to simply watch their updates and jump into conversations. Some great engagement techniques include:
- Replying to influencers, and especially answering questions.
- Retweeting or sharing their status updates.
- Tweeting their blog posts including their @username on Twitter or tagging them on networks like Facebook and Google+.
- Watching to see if they use smaller niche networks and connecting with them on those.
- Monitor their updates for opportunities to write for their blog, contribute to surveys, and other invitations.
Once you’ve done your homework on the social side of things, Content Marketing Executive at Koozai, Cat Fyson, suggests setting up “Google Alerts” for your brand name and relevant key terms. As well as this, keep analyzing the backside of your profile to see who is linking to you. Last, but not least, tracking your Google Analytics data for traffic sources will give you an idea of your impact as well.
Do the tools above satisfy your needs? Which one is the most beneficial for your specific business needs?