How to Become a Social Media Influencer?
Becoming a social media influencer in today’s society is no longer just a fad or a “job”. It’s a career path and is projected to grow to a 16.4 billion dollar industry in 2022 according to Influencer Marketing Hub’s benchmark report. Whether you are looking for ways to begin your journey or simply just considering the career path post graduation, here are a few key points to help you better understand what an influencer is and how to begin your journey.
What is a Social Media Influencer?
A social media influencer is a person who has a unique position in the digital landscape because they have a large and engaging following and can use their presence to provide companies with targeted niche audiences within the influencer's audience. This gives businesses a great opportunity to communicate with the niche markets through individuals who already view the influencer as a reliable source of information and authority.
Influencer Marketing vs Digital Marketing
While influencer marketing and digital marketing are both similar in what they do, they do carry a few differences. Digital marketing is the umbrella term that holds many different areas of expertise including web design, social media, paid ads (PPC), search engine optimization (SEO), influencer marketing, and many other branches. You may have noticed that influencer marketing was also mentioned as a term that falls under the digital marketing term. That’s because influencer marketing has become an actual factor that businesses may want to consider when developing their digital marketing strategy.
How Is Digital Marketing Different Than Influencer Marketing?
Influencer marketing is a subsection or a branch in the digital marketing landscape. While there are plenty of other digital marketing areas that can be considered for a business, an influencer marketing strategy can potentially open the door to a more direct approach to an influencers market.
How Much Money do Social Media Influencers Make?
Social media influencers don’t have a set amount they can make each month or each year. The amount they make will ultimately be determined by the number of followers, the number of platforms they use, the type of influencing market they are working in, and various other areas that could affect the overall pay. Some social media influencers may get products or services in exchange for the influencers posting across their platforms.
Where Should You Start?
Thousands of individuals are making the move to the influencer marketing spectrum because of the opportunities it opens and the potential income it can bring in. Let’s go over a few ways to begin your social media influencer journey.
Select a Niche Market
Identify and Optimize Your Social Media Profiles
Look at Your Present Audience Analytics
Generate Your Content
Form Your Posting Schedule
Begin Engaging With Your Audience
Reach out to Brands
1. Select a Niche
The best opportunities to convert come from choosing the right market or niche to target. Before doing anything, it is important to do some research into the niche that best fits your independent style.
The most well-known influencers succeed in their field because they are capable of creating content around a niche that attracts a certain type of viewer. For instance, Peter McKinnon is a social media influencer/photographer who has been producing content for years around the photography niche. Starting his influencer on Youtube, he has grown his brand to well over 5.65 million subscribers on that platform alone.
Take your time when choosing your niche so you find the one that fits your style, likes, and passions. That way, creating the content will be easier and you can grow. It is okay to have multiple areas, so long as they are somewhat related. For instance, if you decided to provide financial advice, entrepreneurship, and sales tips, they are related enough to where there is an audience overlap.
2. Identify and Optimize Your Social Media Profiles
Once the niche you want to target has been identified, take some time to think about the social media profiles you want to use to interact with the people in that market. Whether you decide to use one platform or five, the next step would be to position these platforms to reach that audience.
For some of the channels being used, it may be best to create a new profile. Additionally, you should focus on one to two social media channels and slowly increase them over time once you feel comfortable managing the initial one or two. It’s better to provide content consistently than to have a random schedule. We’ll cover that in a little bit so keep reading to learn more.
3. Look at Your Present Audience Analytics
If you choose to use your present social platforms instead of creating new one’s this section can help you gain valuable insight into who may already be in your audience.
Each social platform comes with tools for creators and businesses to use to better help them understand their audience a little better. This information can help you create content, guide new content ideas, and provide demographic information like age ranges, genders, and time of day the audience is active. This is also information that companies will also be interested in when looking to work with your brand. The quicker you dive in and learn about your audience and how they view you, the easier it will be to adjust your content or find new ways to interact with them.
4. Generate Your Content
After all the previous steps are complete, you can take a step into the content creation stage. When you generate your content it is important to see how your audience reacts to new forms of the content and also how the platform's algorithms are favoring your content. Each social platform is different and the algorithms will use different metrics to promote content on their site. Remember, the goal of social media companies is to keep users on their site so if they see your content performing or underperforming they will adjust accordingly.
There will more than likely be periods where the content may see large spikes or falls in traffic so don’t be alarmed. If you see movement in either direction it could be beneficial to try and understand why it happened by using your analytics tools on the platform used.
5. Form Your Posting Schedule
Forming your posting schedule is an important step to creating a successful influencer career. Most social media platforms tend to reward those who post engaging and consistent posting schedules. Whether you post on Instagram stories five times a week and twice in your feed or two times a week on Youtube, their algorithms will be quick to notice consistency or the lack of it.
This is also why focusing on a few platforms, in the beginning, is important. Once you feel comfortable with your posting schedule, you can move on to other social realms. Just be sure that you create your content strategy and adjust it appropriately based on the real-time data.
The posting schedule you choose is up to you, but be sure to keep an eye on your analytics because your audience, the platform used, and the overall experience will depend on many factors. It is best to start small to medium and slowly increase your posting schedule once you feel comfortable with the first schedules.
Quick tip: Try to use the batch shooting method to generate content that can be used for multiple posts.
6. Begin Engaging With Your Audience
Once you have begun posting your content, it's time to interact with your audience. The more connections you make with the people who are in your audience, the higher the chance of them coming back to your content is increased. This can also lead to the social platforms noticing that your content is engaging and that they should show it to more potential visitors like the ones interacting with you.
Each social media influencer has a different way of going about this, but being genuine and answering any questions or comments can help create relationships that will make them more inclined to come back in the future.
7. Reach out to Brands
As a social media influencer, there are plenty of brands out there that may see your audience as an appealing source for them to potentially reach. When you are starting, they may not know whether or not you are accepting brand deals. Since you are still getting established, it wouldn’t hurt to reach out to potential brands through email or their social platforms to see if they would be interested in working with you. The worst they can say is no while the best may be worthwhile.
Over time, you can reach out to an influencer agency to help you manage and get brand deals, but in the beginning, it may be best to do the initial outreach. Brand deals can be anything from individual products or services to monetary compensation or a combination of both.
While reaching out to brands may be intimidating, as long as you know your worth and keep growing your reach, you’ll be on the right path to growing your influencing lifestyle.
