Starting the journey with the Basics
We covered the why’s and how’s of Influencer Marketing in our blog Influencer Marketing 101- The World of Influencer Marketing.
But what about building a career as an Influencer yourself?
Undoubtedly, there is heavy weightage around the word ‘Social Media Influencer’. That’s why despite the limitless possibilities of social media, it can be daunting to think about starting your journey towards it.
Let’s start with some fundamentals: What exactly is a Social Media Influencer?
Simply put, a Social Media influencer is someone who has established their credibility within a given field by creating a loyal following on their social media platforms (For example Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and many more).
Through this loyal following, Influencers can run campaigns, product endorsements, and become brand ambassadors, all whilst gaining exceptional profit along the way. Additionally, their personal brand value increases over time, and sometimes they end up becoming the product too (in the case of ‘celebrities’ for instance). Therefore, the possibilities and benefits are endless in this realm of Social media.
Notably, the common aspect to every micro-influencer, macro influencer and celebrity is that they all start out small. A large chunk of them even have humble beginnings and start out using the free tools that are vastly available in the realm of Social Media. With the tips, you can also land social media influencer jobs.
Let’s break down how you can leverage these tools and start your own journey to becoming Social Media Influencers.
Step 1: Putting yourself out there
Before even posting anything, you need to be comfortable with putting yourself out there. Understand that a lot of your content will entail you to have pictures of yourself, documentations of your life and maybe even your loved ones. Therefore, confidence in yourself is highly important in being able to do that.
Step 2: Explore & Understand your tools
What are secrets that the top social media influencers know?
As aforementioned, there are many tools for you to explore even before you start working towards being an Influencer. In order to explore these available tools offered by different social media platforms, you must convert your social media account into a business or professional account. Linked are the websites that can help you do that for your various social media accounts:
On social media accounts like Snapchat where this conversion from personal to business is not possible on a pre-existing account, it is simply advisable that you create a new business account.
Once you have your business accounts on all social media platforms, you can now tap into insights of your audience and how they are engaging with you. In most Insights, you can check the demographic breakdown of your audience (by location, race, gender etc.), the most impactful timings to post, breakdown of how each post has performed and much more.
Step 3: Define your niche
So now you know how to do what you need to do. But as Simon Sinek put it
“people don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it”
It is crucial to define the crux of your content. To simplify this process, here is an article about defining your niche, which breaks down a niche by:
- Your experiences/skills,
- Your interests, and
- Audience needs
Finding an overlap between these three factors will help you find your ideal niche.
Step 4: Brainstorm content to post within your Newfound Niches
Once you have your newfound niche, you must research the content being posted for that niche. Look at the trends, audios used, hashtags used, whether more stories are being produced, infographics, or videos. There are simply many ways you can categorise it all.
From there, you can start to brainstorm your personal touch on this content.
- Define your personal style
- Put together any other interesting ideas you have
- Combine and create content
Remember that consistently posting is key to increasing your engagement overtime.
Step 5: Be open to brand engagement
- Reach out to brands
- Be open to brands reaching out to you
Step 6: Stay consistent with trends
- Capitalise on trends
- Do campaigns
- Reach out to an influencer marketing agency (for example, Eleve Media)
Yes, there are companies that help you become an influencer!
Hope this leveraged the curiosity gap for you. If you take away one learning from this blog, make sure that it’s to just get started!
In Nike’s words, “just do it”!