Find the Right Social Influencer

The next most important step is to choose the right influencer.  Keep in mind that this influencer would act as an ambassador and advocate for your brand.   So, don’t just pick one of your favourites or your Auntie Susan’s daughter, make sure to pick one that suits your brand!

It’s no doubt that Influencer Marketing has grown massively over the years, the challenge here is taking the right steps to succeed in it.  If you’re here reading this, you must’ve already set your goals - now according to your goals you will choose the perfect Influencer for your brand.  (What are your expectations from this partnership, refer back to the goals you’ve set in your strategy plan.)  

Once you have your heart set on an influencer you’d like to work with, ask yourself the following before you approach the influencer. 

Does the influencer align with your brand? 

This influencer will be representing your brand, so be sure to find someone who is suitable.  Being said you will need to do some research on the influencer.  You’d want to look at things like their audience, previous brands that they’ve worked with before. As well as their values and their audiences’ values.  For instance, it would be silly to have a vegan influencer to endorse meat products.  

You can start with looking at the influencers’ bio, posts, videos and their captions as well.  Through their captions, you’ll be able to get a sense of their values, what they like or dislike  and their content style.  It’s very likely they will be creating a similar kind of content for your products/ services, so it’s also important to see if their content quality suits your brand image. 

Is the influencer reliable? 

We all want our campaign and collaborations to run smoothly and to ensure that, you’ll have to work with an influencer who is reliable.  If the influencer is a bit slower in responding to your messages, it could affect you in completing your collaboration in a timely manner. 

Reliable influencers are very proactive and would respond to messages promptly.  If they take over a week or so to respond to your messages, it’s a hint that communication will be slow and frustrating when you start your partnership with them. 

Is the influencer authentic?

You may have come across many influencers who have fake followers or inauthentic engagement.  A few things you can keep an eye out for influencers who buy their followers are:

• They have poor content quality, but a high number of followers
• They don’t have much engagement with a high number of followers
• The influencer recently created their account, but have a high number of followers
• After publishing a content, the influencer gains a large amount of likes in a short period of time
• Comments left on their photos are spammy and generic  
• No profile photo; Strange username; Copied Bios; Anonymous profile 
  

Although an instagram profile may have one or more of the above red flags, bear in mind that it doesn’t necessarily mean that the profile is a fake creator.  For instance, a profile may suddenly burst in the number of followers because one of their posts was featured on the Instagram Discover Page - not because they bought fake followers.  Being said, always examine the profile as a whole and in the right context before making a final judgement. 

So now that we went through some key points of choosing the right social influencers.  Now, where can we find them?  

Stay Tuned for 5 Common Ways we use to find influencers at Vu Media Lab! 

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