The What, Why And How Of Finding Key Influencers

Hi guys. I’m Cat, and I’m a Content Marketing Executive here at Koozai and I’m here to talk to you about key influencers, specifically the what, why, and how, as well as some tips and tools to take away.

So first of all, what is a key influencer? They are essentially someone who taps into your target audience, and they’ve got a strong social following. They’re going to be really valuable to your brand.

So why do you need them? Once you’ve built a relationship with these individuals, you can start to get them to share your content and promote your business. By getting someone outside of the organisation to do this, you’re essentially adding a lot of value and trust to your brand.

So how do you find them? You’re looking for people that are relevant. You’re looking for people sharing relevant content and insights about your industry. You’re also looking for that strong social following, but you’re looking at where they’re most active. That’s how you’re going to know how to approach them. So if they’ve got loads of Twitter followers and they’re really engaged on Twitter, but less so on Google+, then you want to be focusing in on Twitter because if they’re going to share your content, it’s unlikely they’re going to share it onto another channel.

So you’re also looking for engagement. You need to be looking for them replying to different content, sharing content that isn’t their own, because if they’re sharing just their own content, it’s unlikely that they’re going to share yours. So they’re just basically really getting involved in the community.

So a couple of tips. Building these relationships takes some time. You can’t expect results on this overnight. You’ve got to really get to know their interests, get to know them as a person, get to know what they’re really interested in, specifically around your industry, because along the line you can start to create content around their interests that they’re more likely to share.

It’s a two-way street. You can’t expect someone to just share your content. Nothing in life is free. You’ve got to share some of their stuff too. If it’s industry specific, which it should be, then it’s no problem.

So a couple of tools that are particular favourites of mine. We’ll start off with Followerwonk. This lets you search Twitter biographies for keywords. So you can type in an industry specific word, and it will show you a list of people. It will have the ones with the highest social authority at the top, so these are the people with valuable followers, relevant followers, that are going to have a substantial amount of tweets. Basically you want to be finding these people, but it’s not enough to just have a look on there. You’ve got to do a bit more research. So once you’ve got the name, you’ve got their Twitter handle, you can go have a look on Twitter and find out what they’re tweeting about and if it’s really relevant to you.

So Google+ communities. Again, you can just type in a keyword about your industry on the Google+ communities page. That will bring up a list of different communities with various numbers of members. Just have a look at the ones that have got a more substantial amount of members. It’s not much value to you to be looking at joining and engaging in communities that have got a low number of members. Get on there, have a look at content, start commenting on it, look at the people that are most active, not just posting content, but also commenting on other people’s [walls], because chances are that they’re going to be key influencers. Again, delve a little bit deeper, find out a bit more about them.

Facebook and LinkedIn groups, it’s the same principle once again, keyword search and it will bring up a list of groups that are relevant. LinkedIn is particularly good for this because you’ve got a lot of business people on LinkedIn, and they’re getting very engaged in groups by asking questions as opposed to just posting content. If you can start to answer these questions, post some of your own questions, and really gauge who’s mostly involved in this group, then you’re going to find some key influencers there.

So that’s it. That’s the what, why, how, and a couple of tips and tools to help you out. If you’ve got any questions, just leave a comment below and find out more information at Koozai.com, or just check out the social profiles after this video. Thanks very much.