What is an influencer?
An influencer, as the name suggests, is a person or personality who, due to their fame, persuasiveness, or following size, can directly affect the behaviour and decisions of other people.
If you want a more in-depth understanding of this topic, check out the FAQ section below:
Question #1: How do influencers make money on social media?
There are many ways influencers can make money on social media, including:
- Doing affiliate marketing
- Doing sponsored posts
- Launching their own brand
- Streaming on Twitch or similar platforms
- Opening a patreon account
- Selling their own merchandise
- Partnering with an established brand to create a special collection
Question #2: How do I get started as an influencer?
Below is a step-by-step process to get started as an influencer:
- Choose a subject/topic/field you are an expert in or at least extremely familiar with. Bonus points if you are also passionate about it because you will have to keep producing and posting content on it to keep making money. While you can always just pick a profitable niche that you know absolutely nothing about, doing so may cause you to get burned out later on.
- Decide which platforms you want to utilise. Are you going to post on Tiktok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn or all six? If you have limited time and resources, you can just focus on one platform first and build a following there by posting quality content instead of spreading yourself too thin.
- Find your pack. Target a specific audience and focus on creating content for them.
- Create a lot of content. It is the only way to not only get good at doing so, but also find out what types of content resonate best with your target audience.
- Engage with your followers or subscribers. The best way to engage with them is to speak with them directly. Respond to the comments they leave you. Go live and chat with them in real time.
- Use tools and data to monitor your progress. Which posts or topics do your followers respond to the most? Use what information is available to you to get to know your audience and what makes them tick.
- Communicate with brands that you may want to partner with. They may sponsor your posts, ask you to promote their product, or even collaborate with you on a new product line that reflects your own brand.
Question #3: What are the benefits of influencer marketing?
The main benefits of influencer marketing are:
- It boosts brand awareness by allowing brands to tap a massive audience (i.e., the influencer’s) quickly. Instead of having to spend serious time and money building an audience from scratch, a brand can just tap an influencer who operates in the same niche and with an already sizable following to instantly get in front of people who might be interested in what it has to offer.
- It is cost-efficient because it does not require brands to pay for every click or view or spend massive amounts on traditional ads. They just pay a fixed fee to get in front of the influencer’s audience. It does not matter if that initial engagement and conversions translates to even more engagement and conversions down the line. The brand does not have to worry about any add-ons to the initial cost.
- It can help boost a brand’s bottom line. An Influencer is a pack leader and mood maker. Whatever they say goes. For example, if a brand hires a beauty influencer with 10 million followers and converts just 5% of their audience, that could easily translate to several million dollars of extra revenue, depending on how much that brand’s products and services cost.
For example, if you sell protein shakes at $50 per tub and you end up being able to sell to 5% of the audience of a fitness influencer with 10 million followers, that is an extra $25M in revenue. Even if you paid that influencer a million dollars, you are still making an extra $24M.