Today, every business and individual is striving to become an influencer. It’s a necessity. Researchers and Surveys are already proving the power of Influencers.
Becoming a social media influencer doesn’t only mean having a million followers on a Social Network but to have a connection with every one of them. You absolutely have to network with EVERYONE. Because when you connect with everyone, they will talk to others about you.
Influencers are what they are because they are unique.
It’s not easy to achieve this until and unless you become organized, committed and responsible. Many individuals and businesses have tried but not all of them have achieved their goal of becoming an influencer.
There are some things that they did right and somethings that they did not. After considerable research, I’ve compiled this set of 8 steps that you should follow to set you on the right path to achieve your goal of becoming an influencer.
How to become an influencer in 8 steps
- Define your niche
- Know your audiences' interest
- Show yourself as an influencer on social media
- Have real engagement online and start your journey as an influencer
- Understand that influencers are approachable
- Influence the influencers to become an influencer
- Use trusted social media management tools
- Never Ever Give Up
1. Define your niche
To psychologically understand your niche, you need to study their presence and prepare answers for these 10 questions.
Identify your interests and look for the ones who are interested and are looking into the same things.
Hunt for your target audience on social networks, start building quality followers/followings list.
See what other social media influencers are providing their audience and study the needs of your niche.
You cannot be so broad in the battlefield called Market. It sounds too harsh but the competition in the mass market is bigger than a unique and specific niche.
By working for a specific group of people you tend to focus, engage and respond better.
It certainly makes you understand the deep psychology of your target group. This practice develops a bond between you and your niche, resulting in ascending performance quality.
At the end, you gain trust and achieve hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter like Sam Hurley.
After you have defined your niche, the next thing that you need to do is to give them what they want.
Focus Point: Focus on the niche. Be specific.
2. Know your audiences' interest
Make your eyes and ears sharp, start exploring social networks to find what your Target Audience are whispering about.
Once you understand their interests and problems, you can create a content strategy that caters to their requirements.
If we are to define content strategy, it would be something like this:
"Content strategy is a professional practice on enveloping each part of the content, including its outline, improvement, examination, introduction, estimation, assessment, creation, management and governance."
For better understanding, start reading Blogs published by other influencers of your Niche. They will give you better ideas for the type of content that your niche likes to consume.
Create your own Website or Blog and start providing quality content and do some Guest Posting.
Create different types of content entities like blogs, infographics, podcasts, videos and so on. This helps you in repurposing all your content and provide value with the information that you are sharing.
Add visual content to attract more followers from your community. According to Venngage’s December 2016 research, 300 online marketers figured out in 2015, 41% of marketers said that more than 90% of their content had visual components. In 2016, it boomed up to 53%. That 12% elevation in just one year states the fact that more marketers are concentrating on the importance of including visuals in their posts.
Note: Making video content is one of the TRENDING engagement strategies among Influencers and Marketers
Now that you have your content ready, the next step is to know how to reach them.
Focus Point: Create content for your niche. Not for yourself.
3. Show yourself as an Influencer on Social Media
A total of 2.46 billion people are on Social Media. There is no better place to reach your target audience.
Show yourself on the Social Networks that your audience is using. Keep a better track of your profiles especially on Twitter and LinkedIn.
It is not necessary to be present and active on all Social Networks but to engage only on those that have your target audience in it.
See some original research here:
- All demographics use Facebook
- Twitter has a younger and educated audience
- Instagram has users are probably teenagers and adults
- LinkedIn users have higher income and more education
Make your social posts presentable by including videos, images, infographics, podcasts etc.
There’s always a way to use social media a step ahead than just posting ideas and content. An influencer’s idea behind using Social Media is to build a community.
Social Networks present everyone with a great opportunity to network with your audience. Communicating on Social Media is super convenient and you need to take advantage of this to reach out to your audience, passively or actively.
For example: According to a survey by Adweek, Instagram has already started to emerge as a prominent platform for influencer marketing because of the convenience it provides in terms of creating, sharing and engaging with the visual content.
Related: A Complete Guide To Become An Instagram Influencer.
After you have put yourself out on Social Media, it’s time to talk.
Focus Point: Show your availability as an influencer and share your 'Fresh' Content.
4. Influencers have real engagement online
We all make the same mistake of not deeply engaging with our community on Social Media.
Influencers engage on Social Media wholeheartedly. You need to start conversations and make connections.
Gary Vaynerchuk, an American entrepreneur and influencer, manages a couple of fixed hours on social media every day to sit and reply his audience, engages with most of them. That’s why we see him where he is right now.
Giving thumbs up is not the only kind of engagement that would likely to make you an Influencer. Think of something a step ahead.
Go ahead and create a Facebook group or join Facebook groups where you can have a 1 on 1 conversation with your audience. Create a Twitter list and add meaningful profiles to it. For example: Create Influencers list, which would eventually allow you to track the profiles inside the list and understand about them.
Join LinkedIn groups and share your content with them.
Create a survey and share with your niche, see what you can to do to excite them.
Join Q&A Forums like Quora, look for the relevant topics and start answering the questions. Add links to your social profiles, blogs, and websites in your answers and simultaneously, track the responses you get.
This will create awareness of your presence because you’re constantly engaging with your community.
To influence bloggers, designers, marketers or any of your niche, you need to share engaging content to get more engagement and you can start your conversation right away.
Content interacts passively but nevertheless, it always works. It lets your audience know that you’re listening to their needs and this is what helps in creating a friendly relation with your niche.
In an interview, one of the most successful marketing influencer Sam Hurley was mentioned as the world’s friendliest digital marketing influencer, you might follow him after reading this interview because you feel connected already.
The next box to tick would be approachability.
Focus Point: Let your audience help you become an influencer. Just talk with them.
5. Influencers are approachable
Being approachable literally means promoting yourself as an influencer.
Why do you think Influencers like Sam Hurley have such a huge audience base?
Even though his followers are rapidly increasing every day, he keeps his door open to let his followers approach him. This creates a goodwill among your target audience.
You have to devote time for your followers and reply to their queries. Support their interests and accept their suggestions.
Reply to the comments, DMs and mentions, everywhere.
When someone comments on Neil patel’s Blog, he stays there and replies to ALL of them. This gives a positive click on your audience’s mind that you are reading their comments and replies.
Focus Point: In order to become an Influencer. you need to respect your audience.
6. Influence the Influencers to become an Influencer
This is not an easy step but the most important one to become an influencer. In order to market yourself as an influencer, you need to focus on influencers that are targeting your niche already.
Because people listen to people they trust, Influencers!
Don’t just think about using other influencers for your backlinks, you need to be friends with them. Interrogating them would likely generate their interest in you.
Let’s jump into the techniques that would help.
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Find Influencers who use snapchat. Follow them and watch their posts, share your point of view. Do it on regular basis. Keep a check on how they react. This will help you enhance the value of your name among them.
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Start following other Micro Influencers and engage with them on regular basis. For example: Start a conversation on Twitter, shoot them your Blog you think they might like it, comment on their contents, etc. It is difficult to gain the attention of influencers who are highly established but targeting Micro Influencers is what you should do in order to also establish yourself as a micro influencer first.
Try to add their name to your blog and link to their social profiles.
Following these techniques will give converting outputs which is what you need.
You cannot build an empire by yourself. You have to work with people who will help you build one.
Now, it’s time to manage your audience. Let’s see how you can professionally handle your audience.
Focus Point: To become an Influencer, you need Influencers.
7. Use trusted social media management tools
In order to implement all these strategies, you have to make sure that your audience doesn’t leave you and you stay unaware about it.
How can you stay aware of it?
Lately, social media management tools like Statusbrew are widely used among various Influencers and Marketers to engage their target audience on Twitter and also help many individuals to become an Influencer.
Twitter is continuously evolving as a sophisticated network, engaging audience on twitter is an important activity.
Statusbrew not only allows you to engage your audience but using it's listening feature you can also find the brand or industry related conversations and find profiles of Influencers and marketers in a single click.
You can publish your content on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Google+ in real time or you can schedule it for future.
Thanks to Statusbrew I received a tremendous boost in exposure world wide during the last two years. It's a growth of exposure that is still developing at a satisfactory pace. - @BrainvoyagerMsc
Focus Point: Log In to Statusbrew and become an Influencer.
8. Never Give Up! You have to BECOME AN INFLUENCER!
You have the potential to do anything. You can achieve your goal if you stay passionate, determined and confident.
Every successful person had to start from nothing and achieved their dreams. You are capable of doing that too, the only thing that you have to do is stick around and NEVER GIVE UP!
Today's dose of motivation: "Don't Give Up"
— Statusbrew (@Statusbrew) 18 September 2017
Say it out loud. Go for your dreams ✈️#MondayMotivation #NeverGiveUp #BrewCrew pic.twitter.com/dg7xKTUOwH
Conclusion
Once you become an influencer, you can easily gain attention in their community and this is why Influencer Marketing has emerged to be one of the key factors in Social media marketing strategy.
You will feel good, seeing that your followers trust you.
Well, I have seen many achieving success with the above steps and your views are the most important ones.
If you think that I have missed something important then please do write down in the comments and I will add it in.
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” — Viktor Frankl
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