Tips for Becoming a Social Media Influencer
When you want to become an influencer, you have to put yourself out there and collaborate with others. You don’t always need a big following in order to find someone who’s interested in partnering with you. However, you do have to be trust-worthy and be passionate about your niche.
Don’t hold back thinking you need ten thousand followers before you can reach out. Collaboration does offer a lot of benefits to you but it also has perks for the other influencer that you’re partnering with, too.
Collaborating boosts your reach and can result in hundreds of new followers. When you connect with another influencer in your niche, you bring more attention to their brand, too.
In addition, gaining another influencer’s support or endorsement, makes you look popular and in-demand to your audience. Since the influencer, working with you trusts you, their audience will believe in you, too, which improves your authenticity.
Don’t let your collaboration become a one-way street. When you connect with an established influencer, they’re most likely going to have a bigger following. If you want them to agree to a collaboration opportunity, then you need to know how they’ll profit from this partnership.
Have a plan in place ahead of time, before you approach the influencer. Show them what you might have to offer to them in exchange for the collaboration. One small influencer approached a bigger influencer who was busy. She offered to give this influencer’s audience a free copy of her new recipe eBook. The influencer loved the special perk because she needed content for a few days.
You might be tempted to think that the best way to collaborate is by finding the influencers with the biggest audiences. You may also believe that the influencers with the smaller followings won’t be worth your time. However, that’s not always true.
Influencers with only a few thousand followers are known as micro-influencers and these influencers build a high level of trust among their followers. They come across as ordinary people who are talking about products that they use themselves.
The regularly interact with their followers to the point that their audience not only trusts them but feels as if they know them. A micro-influencer may have a higher engagement percentage than an influencer with 100,000 followers. This could mean higher conversion rates.
When you do seek to collaborate with someone else, you want to be sure that you check out the other influencer. You want someone who’s authentic and won’t bring harm to your brand. It could hurt your reputation if you accidentally align with someone who has shady practices or is offensive to audiences.
Tips for Becoming a Successful Influencer
Becoming an influencer can feel hard at first. You might wonder what you’re supposed to do, worry about finding followers, and be totally uncertain about what to say in your posts. Don’t worry. These feelings are totally natural. You will learn a lot about how to be an influencer as time goes on. However, if you’re a newbie, here’s what to do:
Start by filling out your profile. Add your real name, a profile image, and your location. Then craft your biography. You only have 150 characters so you must make them count. When you write your bio, try to think about what keywords someone might type in to find you. For example, you might put “Travel blogger” or “Makeup Artist” or “Beauty Vlogger” in your bio.
Next, focus on developing a theme for your content. Think about your brand and what you want it to represent. In many of Cara Jourdan’s (@CaraJourdan) photos, she’s wearing white, has a soft filter, and features her hair in soft waves. It makes her photos stand out in her followers’ busy feeds.
Even though you may not be earning anything from your social media posts quite yet, go ahead and convert your account into a business one. There are two reasons you want to do. The first is that a business account usually means you can schedule content. This might not seem like a big deal right now but as you grow, you don’t want to be chained to your phone, constantly having to post to your account.
Second, a business account gives you access to in-depth statistics. It’s hard to know how well you’re doing if you aren’t tracking your stats. Every two to three weeks, pause and review your most popular posts. Look at what you did differently with them then see how you can re-create that engagement again.
Conclusion
Becoming an influencer isn’t something that will happen overnight. Expect to spend a few weeks or months building your brand before you can begin to profit from it. In the meantime, focus on supporting your followers.
Build a community with them and look for ways to solve their problems. Focus on being authentic in your interactions. When you’re real, your followers can tell and that will attract them. They’ll begin to trust your recommendations and look to you when it’s time to make purchasing decisions.
As your community grows, don’t be surprised if you catch the eye of a company or brand. Be prepared for this by regularly keeping stats about how many followers you have and what’s working with them right now.
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