Step By Step Guide To Become A Successful Social Media Influencer
Being a social media influencer is the in-thing these days. Brands want collaboration with them for social media advertising as it helps increase the reach and get those conversions they need. On the other hand, their followers turn to them for advice and solid recommendations.
Are you also planning to become one? The popularity of influencer marketing is booming, and it is only natural that people want to become influencers.
But, building and maintaining a steady community of followers is not as easy as it looks. The influencer has to put in persistent effort. Before we talk about how to become an influencer, learn about the concept of social media influencers.
Decoding The Enigma Of Influencers
If we talk in layman terms, then influencers are just social media personalities that have many loyal followers. The fans maintain a friendly relation with the influencers. They consider the influencers as their idols and follow the recommendations they offer. Let us tell you why these people are considered so influential.
Due to the boom of social media platforms, influencers can form personal relationships with their followers. Their lives are an open book different from the traditional celebrities. On the flip side, an influencer lets his followers into his or her personal life. This, in turn, helps them establish a strong bond with their admirers.
Influencers thus are social media celebrities who have a prominent position in their fan base mindspace. The most significant factor that will separate the influencers from celebrities is that they can add a level of authenticity to the content they post. Their followers do not find it difficult to trust them.
Benefits Of Becoming An Influencer
We will now talk about the benefits of being an influencer.
Digital marketers and brands both know that collaborating with influencers is going to be fruitful. A significant advantage of influencer marketing is that marketers get straightaway access to the influencer’s fan base.
Also, the marketers do not have to identify and target the target audience. This job is already done by the influencer. This is the reason why 86% of the marketers used influencer marketing in 2017.
These days, the most effective source to getting conversions is social media influencers. The benefit of impacting other people’s lives is what makes them so successful. The influencers clearly have the power to convince their followers.
Becoming An Influencer Is A Challenging Task
Many people these days want to become influencers. It is a preferred job choice for many. But, behind all this glamor, there is a lot of patience and hard work that you need to put. It is not easy to build and retain a loyal following. With the number of people trying to become an influencer, this is becoming a challenging task.
It will take a lot of effort to see that your content is valuable and can pull audiences towards it. Plus, as an influencer, you have to take extreme care when you are working with brands. The followers become loyal to you just because you have added a simple touch to your content. If you fill your blog with sponsored content, the equity of your blog will be diluted, and your followers may get disengaged.
If you still want to become an influencer, here is how you can do that.
Your Guide To Become A Successful Social Media Influencer
Being a social influencer needs determination and a lot of patience. It will take you a year or more before you see the exact results.
Now let us tell you the seven steps to becoming a social media influencer.
1. Choose A Niche
The first step, to begin with, is to choose a niche. This step is necessary, and if you don’t do that, you cannot hope to build a loyal following of engaged people. If you notice any marketing influencers, you will see they have a particular niche.
In the absence of a niche, it is not essential what other advantages you get. This is because you will have to compete with many people to get the attention of your audience. Plus, since you are talking to so many people together, you might end up not reaching out to anyone.
To choose the niche, you have to ask yourself these questions:
- What is the one thing that you love?
- What are you particularly good at?
- What is the thing that you are passionate about?
- What interests you?
- Are there any weird quirks that you have?
- Is there something that you enjoy?
For example, if you are a fitness freak, then it is sensible if you become an influencer who motivates others to remain fit. Such things become essential aspects in attracting the attention of your audience. But you have to ensure that your choice conveys your personality type because that will be the only way people will start trusting what you have to say.
When people see the passion with which you are working, you will get the audience as well as engagement. Irrespective of the niche, the topic you choose should also be something that you love doing. This only will ensure your success as you will be inspired to keep going even when things are not working right.
2. Know The Different Social Media Platforms
Being a social media influencer, you can use many different channels. Some of them are:
- YouTube
- Tik-Tok, and more
Before you start your campaign, you must create an account on the platform. You may use multiple social networks, but there should be one platform that you will post most of the content on. You could also be active on the other networks, but most of the efforts should be focused on social media channels.
There are many things that you must keep in mind when choosing the appropriate social media network for yourself. Look at the other influencers and see which social media platforms they are focusing on.
The main channel you choose will depend on the type of niche. Like for the fashion-oriented influencer, Instagram will be a great choice, but a video game influencer should choose YouTube or Twitch.
Apart from this, you can choose platforms like Pinterest, Twitter, Snapchat, and other social media networks based on the following:
- Your target audience
- Channels that other influencers of your niche are saying
- The type of content you wish to create
- How comfortable do you feel in front of the camera?
- Can you write good content that engages your audience?
3. Find Right Audience To Be A Successful Social Media Influencer
Apart from choosing the perfect niche, you will be a successful social media influencer only if you find the right audience. Without these fans, followers, or subscribers, the brand will be useless on social media. Before you start posting on the social media platform, you will have to first figure out the target audience.
The audience you choose depends on the market type. For example, if you are a business influencer and your goal is to educate the readers with course licensing programs, then your target audience will be on platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn. If you need any business-related videos, you could look for them on YouTube. Lifestyle influencers will find the audience on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.
4. Develop A Content Calendar
A social media influencer should churn out content that the audience loves. People expect the social influencers to be committed and consistent. You must post every day, and the message should be consistent. Plus providing helpful content that is relevant to the audience is required too.
Once you have an idea of what content you require, you can create a content calendar. This will help you to make the content consistent.
Here are some tips you can use to create a content calendar:
- You must create and give away content that offers value to the readers.
- Do plan your content marketing strategy by deciding your goals and choosing the content that will help you to achieve these goals.
- Choose a posting frequency for each social media platform separately.
- Pick up the best time to post the content so that you can get maximum engagement.
- Decide the social management tools that you need to develop the calendar. Or you may create an excel based calendar of your own.
- Fill the calendar with multiple content formats, topics, types of posts, etc. You can add information on the sites where you are going to post the content and mention the times and dates too.
- You can now schedule the posts. This will be different from making a content calendar because the process requires setting up a content queue that you can post on social media at decided times using automated tools.
5. You Must Have A Strategy To Generate Targeted Traffic
The more traffic you are able to generate, the bigger an influencer you will be able to become. Once your following grows, more people are going to follow you. Then you can use the lower social proof to reach out to more fans and followers.
But in the beginning, you will have to find out how to generate traffic so that the momentum is maintained.
We will now tell you some easy and effective tactics that you can use to get more social media traffic:
- You should make the content easy to share so even the audience can share it with their networks
- Tag other people and add the appropriate hashtags so as to increase visibility
- You can install proactive customer service tools like a chatbot on your social media profiles
- Share content when you know your audience is most active
- Interact with your audience continuously
- Use social media advertising so that your reach increases
- Compose creative and powerful calls to action
- You can engage with the other industry influencers so you can boost your credibility and authority
- Go on and establish excellent media relations that increase your publicity and help in brand promotion
- Cite your social media accounts in your newsletters, emails, welcome messages, and outreach templates
- Include a variety of attractive visuals, images, videos, infographics, etc., that make your content look different and increase your engagement
- You can think of engaging in the brand in places like hosting webinars, audio podcasts, video interviews, and more.
6. Collaborate With Other Influencers
By collaborating with other influencers in the same niche, you can get more fans from their followers. You can talk to influencers who have a million followers on social media. Working with them will expose the content to a totally new audience and get more traffic coming your way.
You can use them in multiple ways. One is to pay them in order to get them to promote your products and content. But if you are a beginner, this could be a challenging task.
Another way is to engage with them organically. You just have to ask them to share your post when you publish it.
To increase chances of being successful, you could include influencers by doing interviews, creating expert articles, etc. Later tag them when you share the post, and the influencers will mostly share it further.
7. Engage Your Audience
This is very important. If you are not engaging with your audience regularly, they will lose interest in the brand. The content you share is a critical part of the influencer marketing strategy. But if there is no engagement, it is of no use.
Platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube want that people should engage with your content. It gives them an impression that people are liking what you are sharing. Apart from that, their algorithm will show your content to people who are pretty interested in that topic.
This is like a snowball effect where the higher engagement, the more people see it, which means even more engagement. Brands that are looking for influencers to conduct their social influencer marketing campaigns want those who can motivate their followers to make a purchase instead of just seeing the content.
To make this kind of impact, the audience should feel that they know you very well. You have to keep telling them that you appreciate their presence and thank them for the support provided.
