Let me start off by saying, I am not an expert at this. I have recently become an influencer and have done my own research and have a few tips that helped me to become one. I think that what holds most of us back that want to become influencers is that we don’t know where to start, what to say, and what our worth is. If you’re game, I’d like to share my top tips with you.
First things first, you’ll need to know what type of influencer you currently would be. Take a look at your follower count on your social media page to determine where you would fall.
4 Types of Influencers by Follower Count
- Nano influencers (1K–10K followers)
- Micro influencers (10K–100K followers)
- Macro influencers (100K–1M followers)
- Mega or celebrity influencers (1M+ followers)
KNOW YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE
It is so helpful to know your target audience and the influence that you have on them. To help you figure this out, you should ask yourself these questions:
- What do my followers admire me most for?
- What am I passionate about?
- What am I good at?
- I get the most engagement from my followers when I (fill in the blank).
- I want my ideal audience to come to my page when they need inspiration on (fill in the blank)
This should get you started if you don’t already know your your audience. For example, my followers come to me to see my big natural hair, fashion, entrepreneur lifestyle, travel inspiration, and modeling photos. Knowing what my audience wants to see from me allows me to fine tune my feed better. Getting to the bottom of this step was key for me because it helped me to get rid of all of the randomness on my feed. My engagement went up almost instantly and I began to get more emails about sponsored collaborations. In contrast, when my audience was not defined, I rarely had engagement and my posts were just inspirational and mostly taking a shot in the dark. As a result, my engagement deteriorated and I ultimately wanted to exit stage left. Learn from my mistakes, know your targeted audience. This is a VERY important step.
CUSTOMIZE YOUR FEED TO FIT YOUR AUDIENCE’S TASTES
There is nothing worse than to have confused followers. When your followers go to your page, there should be no reason why they don’t know exactly what you’re about. This was a GAME CHANGER for me!!! I finally sat down and said, “Okay Lisa, what are the top things you are currently known for out here in these streets?” When I discovered the answers to this, my social media became a whole new world. The best part of that experience was that I was able to make less, more targeted posts instead of slaving all day TRYING to figure out what I was going to post that day. I no longer felt like I was trying to keep up, but yet I felt like I was CREATING. There’s a big difference in keeping up and creating your own lane. You want to take a look at your current feed AND the things you have been posting on your story and ask yourself:
- How does this align with my audience?
- Which posts are random?
- Which posts have substance?
- What types of posts can I begin to create that will give my followers the most value?
- Do I have any share-worthy posts? What types of share-worthy posts can I create?
- Is this a high quality post?
Archive the posts on your feed that do not align with the purpose and intent. Another helpful tip is to archive all of your FEED photos that are overly filtered. Save those for your story ONLY. It doesn’t matter what your target audience is, people want to see authenticity on your feed, PERIOD. Trust me on this one, it’ll hurt to rip that bandaid off (especially if all of your posts are overly filtered) but in the end, your feed will level up.
HAVE A CONTACT EMAIL IN YOUR BIO
Make it easier for brands to reach out to you by having your email listed in your bio. Brands look for ease of access. If they have to jump through hoops to reach out to you, they will most likely just move on. This is a simple but important step, don’t miss it.
HAVE A RESPONSE EMAIL TEMPLATE IN YOUR BACK POCKET
In the beginning of your influencer journey, there will be tons of requests for unpaid sponsorships or even brands asking you to be an ambassador (most of the time they send you a code to get their merchandise discounted and will give you another code for your followers who want to purchase using your code). This is perfectly fine if this is the route you’d like to take starting out. My issue with this is, if they see your worth then they will pay for it. Below is a template that I use to respond to unpaid sponsored collaboration. Here is an example of a paid sponsorship collaboration email and possibly an unpaid email that I have received:
You can use this template to turn an unpaid collaboration into a paid collaboration. Just insert your own info and make sure to proofread for errors. Don’t say I never did anything for ya 😉.
Good luck on your influencer journey. I pray these tips help you to get started on the right track.