How To Make Sure Your Influencers Are Actually Influential
Influencer marketing is becoming one of the new hot tactics for marketers. Though brands have been using influencers for decades (celebrity endorsements for example), with the growth of social media, almost anyone with a passion can become an influencer on their own topic of expertise. While these influencers add credibility to your marketing pieces, they also have a large number of social followers that should be on target with the products you offer. This can even further increase the potential reach of your marketing efforts.
Those looking to find influencers for their marketing programs often believe that those with a high follower count are automatically an influencer. Sadly, this method of identifying potential partners based largely on following aren’t going to garner the greatest results. Here’s how you can pick prime candidates for your programs.
Big Following Are Often Bust
Building a big social following isn’t something only brands can do these days. Anyone can build a great following by actively posting relevant content on social and nurturing their channel. I personally have a large number of personal accounts with over 50,000 followers. While many may assume those with big social followings are influential, this is very often not the case. A bit of research will show if these people are really influential or ineffectual.
You’ve found some folks you think are on-target for the topic of your influencer piece and they’ve got quite the social following. Now it’s time to dig in and see if they’re really the thought leaders you’re looking for.
Are They Faking It?
Start with a quick audit of their following. Tools like twitteraudit or Fake Followers Check can quickly show if someone has a lot of fake followers. While very large accounts and ones run by well known brands see a large number of fake followers (spammers often follow them to make their own account appear more legit), if you’re seeing a high percentage of fake followers for an individual account, you may want to think again about their influence. People can buy followers to appear more influential but these followings are general garbage and won’t help you further your message in any type of meaningful way.
Ensure Engagement
Next you’ll want to make sure people are actually engaging with the influencer. There are plenty of people with large followings that have no one listening. Maybe this is because a large number of their followers are no longer active on Twitter, though more likely they have a following that doesn’t care about their message. This could be because the content they’re sharing isn’t great or they’ve gained followers that aren’t relevant to what they’re sharing. Whatever the reason, if people aren’t engaging with their content, they aren’t really a thought leader and they aren’t likely someone you should be considering.
Quickly browsing through their feed will give you an idea of what kind of engagement they see and if it matches that of their following. If someone has tens of thousands of followers yet sees little to no engagement, there is likely something up with their following and they may not be the best candidate.
While checking their engagement, also see who is engaging. If you find it’s just the same couple accounts over and over, their message isn’t likely resonating much of an audience. While it’s great to have very engaged followers, you’re looking to get to as many relevant people as possible. It’s fine to have the same few retweet everything (this often happens when bots end up following you too) but you want to see engagement outside of just the same people over and over.
Filter Their Following
Now it’s time to look into who is actually following your potential influencers. Just because they have a good sized following and one that engages with their posts, through favorites and retweets, doesn’t mean they have a relevant audience. You’d be surprised at how many people have followings made up of those that have zero interest in what they’re actually talking about. Just because people retweet messages doesn’t mean they care about them.
Taking a deeper dive into someones following can be done in a number of ways. There are many tools that surface information about followers. I personally like to export a list of all followers of an account and then sort it. This allows me to start by looking at those with the most followers of their own, those with verified accounts, those most recently active and more. If you don’t have the ability to export a list like this (it can be done through the Twitter API or other means), you can simply click on “Followers” on their Twitter profile page and start looking at their followers that way.
Seeing who’s following others will often surprise you. You’ll likely find people that have tons of crap accounts following them. Obvious spammers or off-topic tweeters, and those simply looking to follow others in hope they’re followed in return. Sorting through these folks will give you a better picture of who you’ll really be reaching if you engage them as an influencer and if they’re really influencing the people you’re looking to get in front of.
The Right Representatives
For influencer marketing programs to have the best success and really hit the intended audience, we need to ensure our influencers truly are influential. Making sure their Twitter following is made up of the people we really want will mean we’re getting our content in front of those we had hoped for, rather than having it fall on blind eyes (or no eyes at all most commonly). Through a bit of research, we can better qualify all influencers we hope to work with and get the greatest return from our influencer marketing efforts.
