5 Tips on How You Can Be a Social Media ‘Influencer’
With the rise of social media, you no longer must be a celebrity to gain fame and recognition!
Have you ever dreamt of being a social media ‘influencer’?
An influencer is someone with a significant audience of online followers which gives them credibility within a certain industry. Micro-influencers are accounts with between 1,000 and 1,000,000 followers (Impact Plus, n.d.), and these are considered to be experts in their respective niche. Besides the validation you get for your content, the large online audience is also a useful marketing tool.
However, building an audience is not so easy and requires some strategy and work. Here are five tips on how you can be a social media influencer!
1. Choose Your Niche
Do you have a passion for handicrafts? Or perhaps you are really interested in computers? Having a niche attracts online users with similar interests and they are more likely to follow your content in the long run. Additionally, if you already have a passion for something, content creation is less of a chore, and you might even enjoy it!
Another factor to consider is which platform is suitable for posting your content. Would pictures or videos convey your messages better? What audience are you likely to attract, and which platforms are they more likely to be on? Influencers are typically successful in only 1-2 channels, so it might be good to select and focus your energy on a few channels!
2. Optimise Your Profile
Now that you have chosen what to focus on, it is important to optimise your profile. Adding a profile picture and cover photo can promote brand awareness and increase visual appeal. Some may allow you to include a brief description of your page, and these can be used for search engine optimisation. Including keywords can help to increase your discoverability. Some may even allow you to include hashtags in your profile.
Creating a business account can also give you access to more functions. Social media platforms which offer a business account include Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. Some may offer built-in analytics tools, such as Facebook Page Analytics or Instagram Insights to help you keep track of your page performance and what your audience prefers.
3. Post Content Regularly
Now that you have attracted your followers, you need to retain them. Posting fresh content regularly will keep them engaged with your page. Repeated exposure to your content also helps them to remember your brand. This is known as repetitive learning, where repetition is found to create long term memory (Schmelzer, 2015). As recent posts are prioritised (Hootsuite, 2021), posting regularly helps to ensure that your content is shown to users!
Here are some general guidelines for the frequency of posting (Hootsuite, 2021):
- On Instagram, post between 3-7 times per week.
- On Facebook, post between 1 and 2 times a day.
- On Twitter, post between 1 and 5 tweets a day.
- On LinkedIn, post between 1 and 5 times a day.
4. Interact with Your Audience
Audience interaction is a common metric for social media platforms to show users your content. Some metrics include tagging, leaving comments, saving your posts, and messaging each other (Hootsuite, 2021). You can create interactions by asking questions and getting them to leave a comment on your page.
Some platforms can also create polls where you can ask your audience simple questions and get them to respond. A common sticker could be “Ask me a question.” Viewers are more likely to respond when they can get something out of it (such as financial advice or winning a contest), or when they have a personal story to share. You can even ask your followers what they would like to see more on your page – this can help you to gauge what your viewers like and generate fresh content when you have run out of ideas!
5. Collaborate with Other Brands
While you may post great content, it may not reach the right audience. Collaborating with brands will allow your content to reach the right audience base more quickly. One way is to reach out and message relevant brands with what you have to offer. Designing an outreach template can help to save time.
Alternatively, an indirect way to reach out is to tag or mention them when you talk about their products in your post. To make collaborations convenient, you can also include your contact information in your profile, such as an email address, to make it easier for brands to connect with you.
Conclusion
Nowadays, buying followers is no longer an effective way to build your social media presence as machine learning helps to differentiate inauthentic activity (Hootsuite, 2021). However, these five strategies can help you to boost your social media profile and attract the right audience. With the right strategy and consistent hard work, you might be the next social media influencer!
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