Interested in becoming a social influencer and building a career from it? Then this will help you understand what you need to do and what to avoid. Social Influencers have helped companies reach brand new audiences, driving traffic and customers over the last decade with the industry worth 10 billion, and set to be 700 billion by 2026.

What is an influencer?

A simple definition is:

“a person or thing that influences another.”

But from a marketing aspect, an influencer is a person with the ability to influence potential buyers of a product or service by promoting or recommending the items on social media.

Sounds easy right! Posting a product or service on social media, but it’s all about the results from your audience. In order to build a career and be paid for your services, you must look at it as a business. You are selling the business to your audience, and they will expect results.

Finding your niche.

Your niche is all about building your audience, and the content you share, which will attract businesses that fit within that niche. Don’t try to cover everything, this will limit your audience and be harder to sell to businesses. Think of your social media as a genre, a clear subject matter where audiences know what to expect.

Example

Clear Niche.

Your niche is dogs, posting about training, puppies, and health problems.

People who like dogs will more likely follow you, likes and engage with your posts.

Businesses that sell dog products are more likely to hire you as an influencer.

Wide Niche.

You post content about animals, food, travel, memes, mental health and music.

People who like some of the topics may follow you, but your content will get fewer likes and engagement.

Businesses may struggle to see where their product fits in, and not get the results they want.

Think about who you follow, most successful influencers focus on one clear topic, and looking at their social media you know what they post about. Make sure to find your niche to build your career. Remember this is about selling a business to your audience.

Your audience

Your audience is key to becoming a successful influencer, and you need to make sure you know your audience if you want to promote paid content. When you have found your niche, building your audience will take time, don’t expect to get thousands of followers overnight, it takes time and work.

Who is your market?

When you have your niche, you need to understand who your market is. This means building an audience that fits in with that niche.

Are you trying to become a local influencer, national influencer or global influencer?

Depending on the influencer type, this will affect the numbers of followers you need to build a career.

Example

A local influencer would usually promote things local to them. This means your audience would need to be local! A small coffee shop will not be interested in paying you if your followers are in a different country – this will not help their business.

Your audience would need to be local, but your audience size can be smaller. (1k-10k followers)

If you have a local audience but have high followers this could attract national businesses who may want to focus in that area. (10k-100k)

A global influencer would want either a national or global audience. (100k – 1m+)

Depending on the type of influencer you want to be, paid services will very and local companies will not match global budgets. While it may be tempting to go after the global companies, growing an audience for the size required will take time, plus you will also need engagement from your audience.

Promoting your services

You have found your niche and built up an audience, and ready to start making an income. Before you start reaching out to companies, create a media deck of your social platforms.

A media deck is an insight into your audience and should include information about you and your audience.

Include in your media deck

Highlight your niche – This will tell the company why you are the right fit for them.

Your social media platforms.

Your audience insights – size, location, age, sex

Social Media insights – engagement, links clicked, shares and impressions.

Businesses will focus on looking if your niche fits with their products or services, your audience size and the engagement. If you only have 1k followers, and your engagement is 1% then businesses most likely won’t pay much as only 10 people would engage with that post. If you have a million followers with 1% engagement they would pay as its 10,000 users.

Try to also promote engagement with your followers, a higher engagement is more likely going to attract more businesses to work with you. Don’t buy followers, while it takes time building your audience, buying followers will decrease your engagement as they are not real.

Having content published can also help promote your own social media, if you are interested click this link and find out about our Everyday Role Model Program.

Take away

Finding your niche is key to building an audience, keeping content linked to your topic and engage with your followers. Focus on the type of influencer you are and build your audience around that. There have been many articles about influencers with little followers asking for free things from businesses which never end well. Businesses want results for what they pay for, treating this as your business, always present in a professional manner and not just to get free stuff from businesses.