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Since social media marketing is booming and gaining popularity for the past 5 years, it is now the time when people are showcasing their interests, passion and preferences with an increasing number of users by engaging with them continuously. With this evolution of social media platforms such as Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Snapchat and TikTok, many companies feel confident and have access to a larger audience and highly targeted demographics through promotion done by these influencers on social media.
From bloggers to youtubers to instagrammers, there are plenty of niche areas to start posting high-quality pictures, videos, stories or content to ensure a timely and impactful conveyance of the message to the target audience. But do you know how much work goes behind becoming this popular on social media?
Well, in this blog, you will learn 6 Easy Steps to become a Successful Social Media Influencer.
Step 1: Find Your Niche
Before starting your journey, you need to select your niche. It could be anything you are interested and passionate about doing and can consistently create content around. Having expertise in the area of interest is even better for the start.
Influencer’s job is to regularly update the followers about your chosen interest area through content, so it is important that you choose something you are passionate about and will enjoy working in that area.
It could be a cooking channel or a DIY page or a makeup or fashion related page. Your page can also be a combination of 2-3 interests, but not too broad and different from each other.
Step 2: Create Profile on Social Media Platforms
Once you have selected your niche, now it is time to choose where you wish to become an influencer at. It could be more than one social media platforms; all you need to do is create and optimize your profile as best suited for the platform. More than 2 channels are difficult to focus on.
After selecting your channels and platforms, try to create or optimize the existing profile as creatively as you can.
Here are a few things you can do to make your profile engaging:
- Switch to Business Account
Switching to a business account on social media platforms such as Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, opens up a lot of options for the influencer for collaborations and other business-related opportunities to earn money. Just switch on the business account option in the profile settings.
- Creative Bio
It is important to keep the users hooked to your profile after the first impression, so when they visit your profile for the first time, seeing a great, creative and meaningful bio keeps them intrigued to go through more of your profile.
A social media influencer’s profile should have his/her full name, location, contact details and areas of expertise.
- Choose Quality Profile Picture
The last step of optimizing the profile is to choose a great profile picture which is an important component of your personal brand identity. People tend to remember the influencer’s profile by their profile picture so make sure it is clearly visible and is of good quality.
Step 3: Choose Your Target Audience
Before you start creating and posting on social media, you need to understand your target audience. Influencers are focused on their target audience because they do not cater to everyone but only to those of similar interests.
The main focus is to build a loyal follower base by analyzing the current follower base in order to get insights into their demographics and interests. Many social media platforms have built-in analytics tool such as Twitter Analytics which shows insight into your follower’s interests, gender, location and much more information.
Step 4: Develop a Content Strategy
Sending your message across to the followers is the most important step. In order to do this, influencers need to post and create relevant content in order to engage with the target audience and influence them by your opinions and recommendations.
For this, you need to develop a content strategy, it could be keeping your feed limited to their chosen field of interest or either mixing a combination of niches to widen the target base. For example, a food blogger can post pictures of the recipes, dishes, famous restaurants and even brand promotions.
To make the content more authentic and personal, influencers tend to add a little content from their personal lives. Such vast content helps them get good business collaborations, sponsorships and paid review opportunities so think of your content strategy for a long-term perspective and start preparing to be an influencer.
Step 5: Engage Consistently with the Target Audience
After deciding what kind of content, you want to post, it is now time to finalize the frequency of posting and creating a schedule. Social media platform algorithms give preference to accounts who post regularly, especially Instagram for increased visibility and biggest influencer marketing program.
The frequency of posts can be daily or even weekly. Twitter requires a higher posting frequency, whereas Instagram, YouTube and Facebook are okay with one or two posts a week.
Once you start posting regularly, you will be flooded with likes and comments. It is not always necessary to comment back to each comment, but just liking your follower’s comment could be a show of appreciation. Another way to engage with them is by starting a conversation about a topic of mutual interest in order to build a personal connection and solidify your position as an influencer.
Step 6: Network Regularly & Be Open to Collaborations
The last step is to announce to the world that you are an influencer and you are interested in brand collaborations. You can portray this through your bio or by putting your contact details for collaborations.
Another way to do it, is by messaging relevant brands and to pitch to them. There are also several influencer platforms to connect brands with influencers of the same niche. Also, by tagging the target brands on your post regularly.
Conclusion
By following these tried and tested steps will make you become a successful social media influencer in your domain but remember, it takes time and efforts to yield results so it is important to be patient.
However, following the above steps will make you earn money online in no time.
