Do you know which members of your audience are the most influential? Are you engaging with them on a regular basis?
Influencer marketing is part of the new wave of digital marketing, and it’s a key ingredient in the secret sauce of so many successful brands using Twitter. In fact, a full 75 percent of marketers say they use some form of influencer marketing – so if you haven’t added it to your bag of tricks, now’s the time.
Here are five tips that you can use to kickstart, or improve, your influencer marketing on Twitter.
1. Be great at identifying them.
If you are spending time and energy engaging with the wrong influencers, you won’t see much success from your campaign.
Use Twitter search to identify those who regularly tweet about your industry, product or even competitors. Create a spreadsheet or private Twitter list of their usernames, and continue to monitor them regularly.
There are also third-party tools available that can give you more a nuanced understanding of who the best influencers to engage with are, using data points like their demographics, buying intent and behavior online.
2. Engage with them on their turf.
So you’ve found a handful of Twitter influencers. Great! Now it’s time to figure out how to reach out to them.
It’s a good idea to start the conversation on Twitter, and show that you are listening to them by retweeting, commenting and otherwise engaging. Often, after a few days weeks of effort, you’ll find that you’re on their radar and now they are doing the same to you.
Don’t reach out via email, Facebook or another channel until you’ve developed that relationship on Twitter – it can be a bit creepy. However, after a few back-and-forth exchanges, it’s fine to ask if you can email them to discuss an opportunity to work together.
3. Incentivize them.
There is some debate about whether it’s right to pay influencers to endorse your brand, but realistically, people rarely do anything for free. If you are hoping that they will tweet about your brand on Twitter, you’ve got to offer them something in return.
This “something” doesn’t have to be monetary. You can give them the opportunity to write for your blog, which will earn them exposure; give them a free sample of your product to try; or connect them to other influential people in their industry. Just be sure that the relationship goes both ways.
4. Make it easy for them.
If you’re asking an influencer to tweet about your product, you want to make things as easy as possible for them. Instead of requesting a tweet (with no instructions, CTA, or goals), consider writing a few sample tweets and emailing them over, with a note that they can use these tweets and edit them however they like. This way, the influencer won’t have to put in a ton of extra effort, and you will get the exact messaging you want.
5. Get buy-in from your team.
Unless you’re a one-man-shop, you are not an island. Make sure that everyone on your team – at least everyone who contributes to your marketing efforts – understands why you are focusing on building relationships with influencers. Here’s some fodder you can share to convince them it’s worthwhile: 5 Benefits of Building Relationships With Twitter Influencers
What kind of results are you seeing from your influencer marketing efforts on Twitter? Let us know in the comments below.
(Image via stevendepolo/Flickr)
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