Six Tips To Become A Social Media Influencer

Social media influencers have a lot of sway in the digital marketing space. Influencer marketing is now a popular marketing approach for brands and businesses, with amazing results and a growing financial incentive. 

According to Statista, “the global influencer marketing market value has more than doubled since 2019, standing at around 13.8 billion U.S. dollars as of 2021.” 

Saying, “I want to be a social media influencer one day,” has merit as a pretty lucrative career option these days if you have the drive and skills.

But how do you become a social media influencer? 

Today, we share six tips to get you started as an influencer.

Six Tips For Becoming A Social Media Influencer

1. Find Something That Can Hold Your Interest For A Year or More

To become a social media influencer, you need to choose an area that interests you. This niche will be your signature as an influencer, and you’ll establish yourself as an expert in that field.

When choosing a niche, make sure that you have in-depth knowledge of the topic because you want to be able to create interesting and engaging content on-demand. Or, be willing to apply yourself as a student regularly and stay one-step ahead of your audience.

Expertise in your niche will aid you in creating appropriate content and will assist in convincing others that you are the go-to guide in that sphere.

It is imperative that you research and keep up to date on a continuous basis to ensure that you are in the know about all the happenings of your topic of interest.

The importance of choosing a field that will interest you for at least a year is what will allow you to continue long after the trends and excitement around the topic wear off.

2. Choose One Social Media Platform To Start

It is best to focus your efforts and build a following on one social media platform until you have enough traction. Choose a platform that best supports the kind of content you want to create, and the audience you want to help. 

It is best to focus your efforts and build a following on one social media platform to start because it will enable you to maximize all that platform has to offer and stand out from more casual creators.

For example, Instagram is all about visual content so if your niche has a lot of visual media, that’s one platform to focus on first.

Having chosen your platform, you must create and optimize your profile. Make sure that you have a striking profile photo and captivating bio. Include your best link in your bio, whether it be your most popular blog post, your portfolio link, or your business site.

Most social media platforms now have business account options. A business account provides useful features that will help you build and track your brand’s growth.

If you already have a regular account, you can easily switch to a business account.

3. Know Your Audience 

Before starting to add posts and stories, you need to understand the audience you are targeting. As an influencer, your success is dependent on the trust your audience has in your content and knowledge of the topic. 

If you’ve had your account for a while, you can check your viewership by looking at the analytics and performance of different posts. But if you are starting new, more research will be needed.

This knowledge will guide you on what your audience is interested in seeing. Look also for what type of content performs the best (e.g. long-form, short-form, live streams, etc). Monitoring your audience feedback will be an ongoing practice to inform your new content.

Another way of understanding your target audience is to look at competitors or similar accounts. This will show you what type of content is shared and what gains the best traction.

4. Create and Share Content that Entertains and Educates

Now that you have an optimized profile and know what your audience enjoys, it’s time to create and share engaging content.

What does engaging content mean? It means content that entertains and educates your audience. A highly produced, movie-quality video of you dancing to the latest song on TikTok, while entertaining, doesn’t exactly serve your audience if they are there to learn how to grow flowers.

Find ways to mix both delight and insight.

The best thing to do is to develop a content strategy where you can combine different kinds of content. Your strategy helps you map out content and make sure you have a great variety to keep your audience interested.

When creating your strategy, include personal posts too as these help you develop a connection between you and your audience. Your origin story. Your turning-point story. Your current obsession story.

As you grow as a social media influencer, you can then mix it up with sponsored posts in alignment with your values. With more collaborations, your content sharing becomes more flexible to new angles on old topics.

To support your strategy, you should also find handy content creation tools that make it easier for you to create good content. 

For example, having a Wavve account makes it convenient for you to create snappy social media videos when all you have is audio or talking head video.

5. Stay Consistent

How often social media influencers post has become a huge area of debate. The consensus, however, is that consistency of any sort is key. Start with a cadence that works for your schedule and stick to it. Once per month. Once per week. Several times per day.

As you improve your skills and grow more comfortable, you can increase your posting rate. A strategy that demands posting three times a day from day one when you have never posted consistently ever is probably going to disappoint you and your audience. So start with what is doable.

In order to become a social media influencer, you have to establish trust through a consistent presence on your social media platform of choice by posting and engaging regularly. 

To help you remain consistent in your posting, experiment with scheduling your posts. Try a tool like SocialBee.

6. Make It Easy To Do Business With You

Tips one through five are all about helping you build your power or presence as an influencer. Once you have enough momentum on a particular platform and desire to start earning money as an influencer, you’ll want to find ways to leverage this presence. 

This includes working with brands, selling products, capturing emails on your list, and more. The tip here is to make it easy for your audience and business partners to buy from you. Have contracts written up. A pricing sheet. An influencer media kit. A way to pay you. Product websites. Affiliate websites. Buy links.

To make sure you’re always ready for potential influencer work, know your story. Know the value you provide. Know who your audience you serve is in detail. Potential collaborators will want this quickly and clearly from you, so have it ready.

Use Wavve to create an attractive, short summary video from a voice memo on your phone. Include this in your media kit or upload it to Youtube and put the link in your email signature. This one brief video could be what causes collaborators to decide to work with you. A quick look at your socials to confirm your account and content aligns with theirs is one thing. But it does not tell the whole story. So be sure to share what they cannot quickly pick up from browsing your social profile.

Sending your media kit to brands you’d like to work with is one way of inviting them to collaborate with you. Another way is to engage regularly with their content to bring awareness to your account.

Conclusion

The influencer marketing industry is increasing in popularity every day. It’s a growing industry with a lot of potential for people to make an income from their social media accounts.

Anybody can create a social media account, but not everybody can execute their influencing successfully. 

This is because being an influencer takes more than just posting. You need purpose, self-awareness, consistency, creativity, and a deep understanding of your audience and area of influence.

Use these handy tips and the tools from Wavve to get you started.