How to Identify Influencers and Work with Them?

Digital influencers are people like you and me, just with one crucial difference. These people managed to gather a broad audience in social networks around them and to win the followers' trust with the help of high-quality content they share.

YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter – any social media platform that allows posting content regularly is good for reaching and attracting audience.

Yet there is one thing to take into account – not everyone who has accumulated an audience can be considered an influencer. First of all, digital influencers are content creators who produce relevant and engaging textual or visual content and share it freely online.

What is more important is the possibility to change someone's views, opinions, and even behavior — that's what they actually do with their posts. People don't just read them, they follow.

The general process of identifying influencers looks approximately like this:

1. You choose the niche — for example, fashion, psychology, or technology.
2. You search for social media profiles with the required quantity of followers using Google or hashtags.
3. Among the found profiles, you analyze reach and engagement to make sure you may get the desired results from the cooperation. The higher are these parameters' values, the better.
4. Also, you analyze the quality of the content that is a matter of reputation for your brand.
5. You contact the influencers to discuss the possible terms of the cooperation.

The described process requires time. Lots of time.

You need to find the influencers, analyze their profiles, contact each of them personally, bargain for prices, and also coordinate with the desired dates.

That's why most of the companies choose whether to hire a specialist who knows how to identify influencers and cooperate with them or to use an influencer marketing platform that will do all that instantly.

Searching for influencers on the platform gives you wide possibilities for searching, cooperating, analyzing the results, and protects you again fraud. And after all, it saves you a lot of time and effort.

Here are several things to take into account before choosing a social media influencer platform.

Companies that provide social media influencer services should give their clients a wide choice which means a big number of influencers. But the quality, in this case, is much more important than quantity.

It means that the best influencer marketing platforms should check their influencers and guarantee that each of them is both accessible and reliable, that the content they post is high-quality, and their statistics looks good.

The second important feature of an effective influencer marketing platforms is its search possibilities. Practically, a quick and comfortable search is one of the most important reasons to use a platform.

There should be filters to choose the influencer by niche, the number of followers, and keywords. And, all in all, you should feel that using the search really saves your time.

Another thing that is crucial for an effective marketing platform is well-thought profiles. Brands must be able to see the historical layout of their posts and the results these posts generated (likes, shares, engagement rates).

Also, contacting influencers must be easy and comfortable.

After launching a campaign, you should be able to analyze its results and engagement: how many people interacted, how many clicks did you receive, etc. if doing this manually, again, you will waste time that should ideally be saved by the platform.

Fixed prices may be profitable for influencers and the platform, but not for the brand. It's much better when you can pay depending on the received result in terms of reach and engagement.

Is this possible? Well, that's how we do it in Publicfast.