- [Instructor] An influencer is anyone
with a relatively large online following.
This can include people
like mainstream celebrities Kendall Jenner,
niche celebrities like dog trainer Cesar Milan,
leading industry authorities like Marie Forleo,
and bloggers with highly engaged communities
in their niche like Jillian Harris.
Influencer marketing is a process of partnering
with key influencers in a niche.
The aim is to get your business in front of their audience.
And did you know the number of influencer posts
on Instagram doubled in 2017,
reaching more than 1.5 million in total?
Influencer marketing is growing.
There's a couple ways you can work
with influencers to grow your community.
First, you can attract them into your community,
or you can partner with them to promote your community.
An example is after Super Bowl 51,
Lady Gaga posted an Instagram of herself
in the doorway of a lavish house with a caption,
"Thank you Airbnb for the gorgeous home
"in Houston for #SB51."
Looks like they had a partnership.
Airbnb put up Lady Gaga, and she gave them a shout out.
That was a pretty powerful endorsement.
Now, how do you find these influencers?
If they're already in your community,
they may have a badge if they're using Facebook.
You'll also be able to identify them
because they post, comment, and engage a lot,
and their posts will receive high engagement itself.
If they're not in your community,
find them using hashtags in Instagram and Twitter.
Let's go over how this looks in Instagram.
Here we are on the Tree Trees Olive Oil Instagram account.
This is the web version,
it's a lot easier to show you what I'm talking about here.
Now you're going to be able to seek out popular hashtags,
and you're going to use the search button at the top.
You'll also find it at the bottom of your Instagram account,
and you'll see an icon of a magnifying glass.
Once you click into there,
I'm going to go ahead and type in foodie.
Two Trees Olive Oil is all about food and recipes,
so I'm going to select foodiegram.
It's here right at the top, I can see the top posts.
This is what people are posting on Instagram.
There's also recent posts of hashtags,
looks like it's hidden,
but you'll also be able to see that as well.
If I scroll up and I go ahead
and select one of these posts,
it's here that I can see who's posted it.
What I'm going to determine is
does this person have a big following,
would they bring value to my community,
and would they find my community valuable?
Then what I'm going to do is
I am going to add this person to a list.
I'm going to keep track of all the influencers
that I might want to work with
or partner with in the future.
And I recommend a simple Google spreadsheet to keep track.
You can follow the same process in Twitter.
Facebook is a bit more difficult to identify
without the individual already in your group,
but you might find someone who is
on your Facebook page a lot
and not yet in your Facebook group,
and you might want to migrate them that way.
Your next step once you've identified your influencers
are to reach out to them.
I always stress authenticity, be authentic in reaching out.
We all have received that unsolicited email to boost our SEO
or design our website,
and that cold call or cold email
doesn't translate really well.
So the first thing to do is be clear
in how they want to be contacted.
A lot of influencers will say,
"Don't direct message me, here's my email."
So just make sure you're using the proper channels.
You can also start engaging with their account,
liking posts, sharing their content, commenting on posts.
Be sure you're offering value to some extent.
It's not just an emoji, it's actually a valuable content
you're contributing to the conversation.
Connecting with your brand influencers will help you
grow and add credibility to your community,
but you want to be sure you find the right fit
when targeting influencers.
There are two things you want as the outcome,
the influencer to find value in your community,
and the influencer to add value to your community.
Always keep this as your guide post.
Follow this and you'll find
some amazing potential partnerships.
Remember, influencers don't have to have
hundreds of thousands of followers.
They could just have a hundred,
but have a really powerful voice within your niche.