9 Steps to Your Social Strategy: Step 8 - List Your Influencers!

9 Steps to Your Social Strategy: Step 8 - List Your Influencers!

In the strategy process, you need to list the key Influencers or Giants in your community. Influencers or Giants are those who will help you distribute your message to their trusting followers. Influencers are critical in growing your followers. Quality Influencers will help your social trust factor and growth. A quality Influencer or giant is someone who is in a complementary, not competitive, business, and has the same target followers as you do.

Having a quality Giants retweet your tweets, share your Facebook Posts, or RePin your posts on Pinterest is the fastest and most effective way to grow. It is speaking to your target market through someone they already trust. For example, if your goal is to be recognized as a leader in leveraging social media for businesses, an industry giant you might look to would be Hootsuite. As their account strives to be a leader in social media news and tips. 

After the initial strategy exercise, your Social Media Coordinator should search online for your Influencers as part of their routine. Furthermore, individual departments may have their own unique Giants. Some might overlap. One approach to getting your Influencers’ attention is to mention them when appropriate in your posts. As well, an old fashion approach of picking up the phone and calling them is also effective, asking them if they would look for your posts, and share them when appropriate.  

Another creative approach to working with an Influencer is to invite them to your events, and ask them to tweet or do their voodoo while attending! I have heard successful stories of inviting Influencers to events or asking them to share or retweet in exchange for coupons or other VIP treatments.

Who:  Social Media ‘Giants’ have many quality followers.  They can be individuals with large followers, Business Associations, Media, Local Celebrities, Sports Groups, Vacations spots, industry experts. On the side of the giant's twitter page you will see a list of followers you follow already that also follow this giant. This is useful to make sure you are following the right giant.

What are they contributing:  Share or retweet & using consistent keywords if they are commenting on your behalf.

Why are they contributing:  Passion, sense of pride, desires to help drive your mandate, and growing their own business or cause.

Criteria:

Measure the impact of your Influencers/Giants

•       Increasing numbers of retweets & sharing.

•       Increasing use of your selected keywords by these Influencers.

•       Increasing number of quality visitors to your website from the Influencers’ shares or retweets. 

•       Mentions, posts, photos, and videos live from your events.