You may have heard about “influencers”, a term used to describe people who have large social followings online, communities of like-minded people. It’s very easy to get excited about influencer marketing. After all, these people already have an inside track into the people you’re trying to reach. For some time, they have established a community around their content. A community of people who are truly interested in what these influencers have to say.
Make no mistake, this community did not come easy. This definitely did not happen overnight. They had to produce a lot of niche specific content to draw these followers from all over Twitter.
When you reach out to these influencers and develop a working relationship with them, you get to leverage whatever brand they have managed to produce. That’s really what’s going on. This is tremendous because you don’t have to put in the time, effort, energy and patience to build such an audience. These audiences already exist. These different influencers act as gatekeepers for these audiences.
Work Out a Mutually Beneficial Deal
The idea is to a get a deal going with them, so they can share your content, you get a fresh set of eyeballs and you also end up further enhancing their credibility and authority. Done properly, this type of arrangement produces a win-win situation. Sounds good so far? It should. This saves you a significant amount of time and effort.
Determining Who Is the Real Deal
The problem is how do you know who is who? This is the big challenge with Twitter. You probably don’t need to me to remind you that there are a lot of fakes out there. There are a lot of seemingly influential accounts that don’t have any real credibility. This is because they are usually created by software that automatically publishes content. They also manage to automatically follow and unfollow a wide range of random people.
This is going to be a problem because when people get followed, a significant percentage of them will follow back. Perhaps this is done out of courtesy, reciprocity or maybe they do this out of the kindness of their heart. Whatever the case may be, it complicates things for you. It really does. Why? You want to follow and possibly get followed back by people who are actually interested in your niche.
You’re not interested in random people. You couldn’t care less about people who would just essentially follow anything that follows them first. Those people are not going to buy from you. That’s just not likely to happen. Sure, for time to time, you might get a random purchase from some sort of curiosity seeker, but it’s probably also equally likely that they would ask for a refund.
So how do you tell who is who? Here are a few key points to look at when it comes to finding real influencers.
They Have a Good Following-to-Follower Ratio
When you look at an account on Twitter, you can see how many people they’re following and how many people are following them. If you see that there is a very big difference between the number of accounts they follow (fewer) and the people following them (many), there’s a good chance that you are looking at a real account.
On-point Tweets
This is the main proof you should be looking for. As the old saying goes, the proof is in the pudding. When you look at what the particular account is tweeting recurrently, then this should let you know whether they are actually interested in your niche. If they are, then there is a strong chance that people that follow them are interested in your niche as well.
Pay attention to the consistency of the topics they talk about. Look at all their tweets and see if you can pick out a niche pattern. If it turns out that they are basically tweeting about every subject under the sun, you probably would be better off not following them.
Look for Signs of Real Engagement
If it turns out that this account actually takes the time to respond to each and every tweet, you may be on to something. This may be a real account. After all, they’re investing a considerable amount of time and effort and actually engaging with the people who pay attention to their content.
Keep the three key indicators above in mind. If you’re serious about finding real influencers on Twitter, make sure you know what to look for. Otherwise, it’s going to be like trying to find a needle in a haystack.
