Have you considered utilizing influencer marketing as part of your social strategy?
Here are five statistics to consider:
- 70% of teenage YouTube subscribers trust influencer opinion as opposed to traditional celebrities.
- For every $1 spent on influencer marketing, a business makes $6.85. It is no wonder therefore, that influencer marketing content delivers 11 times higher ROI than traditional methods of digital marketing.
- 46% of people rely on recommendations from influencers, when making a purchase.
- Twitter users report a 5.2x increase in purchase intent when exposed to promotional content from influencers.
- 40% of people have purchased an item online after seeing it used by an influencer on social platforms.
In this post, I'll walk you through five tools that will help you research and find these online influencers.
1. Research You and Your Competitors Influencers with FollowerWonk
FollowerWonk enables you to search for keywords within Twitter user bios and sort through individuals, revealing those with the largest reach and most authority.
Followerwonk can also be used to identify influencers who are following your competitors, but are not following you.
To do this, you need to first use the "social authority" tab to sort and filter your followers - this will help identify who your most notable influencer followers are.
Once you define your targets, you can create a report in Followerwonk that compares both you and your top influencers - this will help identify who's not following you on Twitter but is following your top influencers.
Now you have a list of followers to target as prospects.
2. Determine Influencer "Types" With BuzzSumo
Granted, the app's free trial is quite limited, however, BuzzSumo works in three interesting ways.
First, you can search for the most popular content being shared around a certain topic, and even find out who shared it.
Second, the free feature helps marketers find influencers based on keywords and hashtags.
And last, it's easy to filter influencers based on types, such as companies, bloggers and journalists.
What's more interesting is that all these features are found in one simple dashboard. As a result, a quick analysis reveals the most successful type of content in your niche industry, and exactly who can amplify its reach.
The tool isn't limited to just influencer research, however - it can also help inform you about ideal content length, average social shares by content type and share counts by network for a given keyword or industry.
For example, when searching for "digital marketing" content, it looks likes a list format is your best bet:
With a length of 2,000+ words at least:
3. Score Influencers Using Kred
Designed to offer entry-level influencer marketing metrics, Kred measures influence by evaluating mentions, replies, follows, and retweets on Twitter. Their 'outreach score' provides a rating based on how often you tweet, mention other people, and reply.
Both metrics work by revealing how influential a person is, giving preliminary knowledge on influential online users.
Using the Kred leaderboard, you can find top outreachers and influencers based on your particular niche:
4. Find Influencers by Category with Klear
Formally known as Twtrland, Klear is a great, freemium tool which enables you to find influencers who are already engaging with your brand, and those within your networks across Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and even blogs.
Even better, you can filter these influencers into different categories - such as celebrities, casual, power users and novice.
To ensure that you target the right audience, Klear uses demographic features, enabling you to see which types of people are following the influencers you're considering. This information can then be used to understand whether the audience matches your requirements - and if not, you can target a different influencer.
5. Use Tweetdeck Search to Find Influencers
Tweetdeck has not only made it easier to use Twitter, but it's also a great free tool for researching influencers - and particularly, showing whether people listen to them or not.
In addition to seeing how many followers a potential influencer has, it's helpful to also check how many Twitter lists they're on - this can help underline their influential status.
One of the most useful features is the #hashtag and/or keyword search. By adjusting the search volume to tweets that have at least 25 retweets, you can quickly weed out and mute the noise that's often returned for these types of queries.
Depending on the volume of results returned, you can adjust the retweet volume higher or lower.
In doing so, you can better determine who is really getting noticed for these keywords and hashtags. Better yet, here's a full list of advanced searches you can use to find influencers:
search term |
Show all tweets mentioning these terms |
"search term" |
Show tweets that mention this exact query only |
this OR that |
Show tweets containing "this" or "that" (or both) |
this -that |
Show tweets that contain a mention of "this" but not "that" |
filter:links |
Only show tweets with links |
filter:-links |
Only show tweets without links |
from:@username |
Only show tweets from a specific user |
-from:@username |
Filter out tweets from a specific user |
to:@username |
Only show tweets sent to a specific user |
-to:@username |
Filter out tweets sent to a specific user |
@username |
Only show tweets referencing a specific user |
Filter out tweets referencing a specific user |
|
list:@username/my-list |
Only show tweets from accounts included on the list @username/my list |
filter:safe |
Tweets marked as potentially sensitive are removed from the results list |
filter:media |
Only show tweets including an image or video |
filter:native_video |
Only show tweets including an uploaded video, Amplify video, Periscope or Vine |
filter:images |
Only show tweets with photos (will include Instagram content) |
filter:twimg |
Only show tweets with a pic.twitter link (or multiple images) |
:) |
Positive mentions |
:( |
Negative mentions |
? |
Question |
#hashtag |
Only show tweets containing this hashtag |
near:city |
Only show tweets sent near this city |
near:city within:15mi |
Only show tweets sent within 15 miles of this city (you can list any distance and you can use 'mi' or 'km') |
since:2016-6-27 |
Only show tweets sent since a certain date |
until:2016-6-27 |
Only tweets sent up until a certain date |
min_retweets:100 |
Only show tweets with at least 100 retweets (you can enter any number you like) |
A Future of Influence
It's clear that influencer marketing can deliver great results - these tools can help save your business time and money by enabling you to find the best influencers for your specific brand and niche. And the best part is they're free. Worth taking the time to check them out.