Social Media Influencers are people like Huda Kattan (from Huda Beauty), Lele Pons (from CoverGirl), Zach King (from the magical YouTube videos) with millions of followers on their social media platforms. And all the glamorous stuff that comes along, like invites to exclusive events, hefty sponsorship deals, travel opportunities etc. But the road to this career is not as fun and glamour as it looks on the face of it. The entire process demands for a lot of patience, unwavering determination, and a plausible amount of time investment.
These people work their asses off to get to a point where they are able to demand thousands of dollars to make a single sponsorship post. Statistics show how significantly influencer marketing impacts the consumer purchase behavior. Influencer marketing instills the element of trust, mainstream marketing lacks and hence drives positive consumer behavior. Studies show 90% of consumers trust peer recommendations more while making a purchase decision.
With all those glitters, people’s interest in influencer marketing has risen more than 90 folds based on the statistics from Google Trends. If you consider yourself fitting in the same lot, gear up your internet with
frontier packages and follow the following tips and steps to land in this world of opportunity where it is predicted to grow into a $5 to $10 billion market in 5 years’ time.
Find your forte & Stick to that
Being the Jack-of-all-trades isn’t something preferable in the world of social media influencing. Lack of focus or niche will definitely lead to a dispersed audience and hence a “Brand” can’t be created that way. A niche or forte helps you give that humanistic touch to your content, in this day and age of raging mechanicals. Humanistic marketing is the need of time, since marketing these days’ lacks the human touch, the emotional connect to it.
You can post, write or blog about anything, from your favorite food category to undiscovered artworks but the key is to stick to the niche you chose. Since, unless you had a huge following already then you can risk bringing a range of posts but a diluted niche wouldn’t encourage advertising companies into leveraging capital in your bids for sponsorships.
Getting into a certain category, just because it's selling like hot cakes, won’t be a smart choice since as long as you are not interested in the subject matter, the content you develop is not going to connect with the audience and you’ll get bored too (well, eventually!). An already famous person or celebrity, with whom the audience can relate to, on a personal level can get away with posting anything, but it’s crucial for a beginner to stick to a niche.
You can always be passionate about multiple niches and can work on them too, but it would be recommended to keep the channels separate.
Maintain your presence on two or three Social media channels (ideally)
Next step after defining your niche is to decide on the type of social media you’re going to focus on, depending upon your target audience and the kind of niche you have chosen. For example, if you are into, witty commentary upon the things happening in the world or jokes etc, Twitter is a good choice. YouTube, as challenging as it is to maintain but if you’re good with videos and developing visual content then it is a good platform for you. Instagram is also for all visual content, and you better not fake things since it might earn momentary results but won’t last long. So keep it real. If you get the option, then go for the Business account, as it has better metrics to keep track of the traffic to your account and ways to grow it.
The key to the entire process is to consistently invest time in it. Consistency is crucial, after the initial boost, a single dip is inevitable, and to keep one motivated at that time is the most challenging and important part. Most people give up during that time and if one manages to keep the efforts steady, success is certain.
Build your Influencer network
Having a real network of people is essential when it comes to social media influencing. And it can’t be done by sitting at home, sipping coffee and communicating on Social media, it needs more human more in-person interactions. Operating in a certain environment, you might be the master of your field but the competitors can’t be ignored. As they, in addition to posing challenges, help you build, improve and grow in potential. Go to forums, meetups, any public gatherings, talks, exchange ideas and make your presence known in the community. Learn from successful names and their experiences. It is practically impossible to engage with millions of followers individually so, what can be done is, to communicate with them in symposiums, conferences, and community meetups. The crux? Make yourself known!
Coming with a Game Changer Mindset
Everyone has to come up with a niche they are going to explore, continuous and sufficient research is the key to it but when it comes to looking for the precedent and choosing to build upon that only won’t bring in traffic for long. Think innovatively, when choosing a niche before developing a content strategy. Had everyone followed the suit, we might as well not have social media at all. An innovative approach supported by research and facts and figures is crucial to make you stand out in a crowd, hence eliminating or reducing competition and giving you the first-mover-advantage, for a fairly long period of time. Make your content crisper by researching new topics and avenues religiously.
Consistent Postings
The initial hype is overwhelming, but in order to maintain that stature posting consistently on your platform becomes crucial. So, if you want your audience to stay glued to their screens, keep giving them more content to spend their time on, preferably fresh stuff every time or revive an old one sometimes. You can choose to fuel your social media content by your blog entries and get the traffic directed to it.
Handle the criticism, positively
Once you are in the limelight, criticism becomes inevitable. Yet there’s a very small proportion of people who successfully manage to handle critic, out of the ones who receive it.
If you learn to handle criticism constructively, it only helps you polish your work and yourself at large.
Since it is not a day and age when you dictate people to do certain things, it is a two-way channel. They speak up, as much as you do and you both learn from one another and your weaknesses along the way.
Collaborate
If you want to go fast, go alone. But if you want to make your mark for long, keep yourself company. After creating some good content initially, you’ll always need to grow your community, build contacts and collaborate with others.
Hence, in order to be a good influencer, you need to support other influencers. Give them shout-outs and build each other together. Since inside this competitive environment, there’s a big role of collaborative activities. It is always a great idea to collaborate with like-minded people and hence have an opportunity to engage their audience with yours too. But all of this only gets meaningful if you have the right metrics and data to quantify the work and its progress in both the long and short run. Owning a business account helps in keeping track of the right metrics.
Hence, Influencer marketing, not really new but is the latest and most happening trend in marketing. So what started off as a hobby or time-pass for many people, turned out to be a bread earner for most of them. So, if you’re serious enough with your commitment to this, you can definitely end up making good money. And who doesn’t like a little more pocket money?
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