Win influencer marketing with smart social media

Influencer marketing is one of the top digital buzzwords of 2015. A quick look on Google Trends shows that search frequency for the term has tripled since the beginning of the year.

For those still in the dark, influencer marketing is the practice of targeting well known and influential brands or people, aiming to leverage their audience for your own marketing needs. It’s especially useful for gaining exposure for new blogs when they’re yet to establish a following of their own.

Previous posts on Problogger have explained how influencer marketing can help boost your blog traffic, how to find the best influencers for your needs and how to get them to share your blog posts. In this post, I’d like to share some ways you can use social media to make your influencer marketing strategy more efficient and effective, getting more engagement and driving more traffic to your blog.

Share like you mean it

One of the main goals when targeting influencers is to get them to share your content with their audience. It’s all very well interviewing an influencer for your blog, but these people are busy and often selective with what they broadcast to their audience, so you might find your influencer simply never shares your blog, despite their involvement.

When your blog goes live you must get in touch with the influencer to let them know. Email or call them if you can and make sure you @mention them in all your social posts. To guarantee a response, though, you can go one step further by doing something a little different.

Take this post on punctuation. The whole point of the article was to get some expert opinion on modern grammar use, hoping the influencers involved would share the post themselves — a process known as ‘egobaiting’. Alas, simply tweeting the post was not getting any results.

The solution? Make the tweet interesting by turning it into a quiz (which you can learn how to do here).

Fill the missing word: “The __ hearts were broken.” More on punctuation from @The_YUNiversity: http://t.co/vJkzbwsAOE pic.twitter.com/erixRFXtld

— magazine.co.uk (@magazinecouk) June 11, 2015

As you can see, this went rather well. The biggest influencer took notice of the tweet and re-tweeted it to their 215k followers, resulting in tons of RTs and a nice spike of social referral traffic to the blog post.

You could also consider making a short video to accompany the post. Anything that makes it stand out from the run of the mill will hopefully encourage your influencers to share with their audience.

Run a competition  

One of the issues, especially for lesser-known blogs, is that influencers may simply not notice you, or deem you worthy of their time. To beat this, you need to offer them something worth their while.

Partnering with an influencer for a joint giveaway can be a great way to offer this. Giveaways are great for attracting new readers, driving traffic to your blog and increasing reader participation. You can use tools like Rafflecopter to offer these benefits to your target influencer too.

Rafflecopter is a really simple way to launch a giveaway. All you have to do is enter the prize to be won, then choose the conditions for winning. Once the deal is live, you get an embed code to stick into the the HTML of your blog. Entrants are listed in the Rafflecopter app, and there’s even an option to select a random winner.

The conditions are fully customisable and include: requiring a Twitter follow or mention, subscribing to a mailing list, visiting a Facebook page, and more. You can even create your own requirements if, for example, you want users to answer a question correctly to win.

Here’s where the influencer comes in. If you run a joint contest you can add several requirements, for example, that the user must follow both you AND the influencer. This means you can jointly benefit from the contest.

Be wary that to really interest the influencer you’ll have to assure them that the contest will be popular. Make sure the prize is substantial and consider paid promotion for the contest to increase reach, especially if your following is quite small. Of course, make sure they promote it as well!

Orchestrate a social takeover

A social takeover means giving someone access to one of your social accounts for a short time. A lot of brands use this tactic in-house to give their account a more ‘human’ voice, but it can also be an effective strategy with influencers.

By inviting an influencer to takeover your account you’re not only offering surprise and variation to your current followers, you’re also exposing yourself to the influencer’s whole audience. The beauty is that the influencer gets the same benefit — it’s mutually beneficial and can help both parties gain more followers.

If it’s traffic you’re after, you may consider asking the influencer to share a few of your posts during their takeover. Even better, put some time into collaborating with the influencer on a blog post, which will appear a more natural link for them to share. 

It’s important to choose your influencer carefully. If you go after some random person who has little or nothing to do with your niche then it’s likely that you won’t see much engagement from your followers. It’ll also be a much harder sell to the influencer in the first place.

As for the execution, Twitter has some awesome example of takeovers in the world of sport.

Combo

There’s no reason why you can’t use all the strategies together. Offering all of this to one influencer will show you mean business and surely grab their attention.