Make sure it is relevant
The number one concern of influencers looking at a request is – is this wasting my time? If your post would seem a weird stretch for the content that they are normally posting, why would they take the risk? Also, if sharing or promoting your post doesn’t have any benefit to their personal brand or to their personal interests, they won’t. So you don’t just have to demonstrate your relevance to their expertise, but the relevance to their personal career. How do you do this? Tell them your goals, and say how they relate to the influencer’s goals. It’s important to really define what you expect to get out of the relationship, as this will change what kind of social media users you would be targeting. Sometimes, you don’t need a huge multi-million Twitter follower sensation, the large majority of the time in fact. A lot of the times the real value of social media influencers is the way they can reach a very specific niche that is relevant to your brand. So if that person only has a couple dozen thousand Twitter followers, if they get to an audience that is your desired community, and if they furthermore create trust and connection to that audience, then you are rolling in gold.Get them excited about your goal or project
This definitely requires a bit of rapport, since no one is going to get pumped about a random direct message about a stranger’s healing yoga workshop, no matter how much of a yoga fan they are. Instead, add elements of your new launch while discussing topics that they enjoy, including their own work. Anytime you can reference their own work (without going over the top) is going to be great, and tie together the relevance of your two pieces of work.Who is already advocating for you?
A great place to start is to check in with social media users who are already fans. These are your “brand ambassadors. Adweek did a great article recently on how these ambassadors are very different from influencers. These are the guys that are already on board. When you contact them, it is immediately relevant, because they’ve already posted about you. These guys are also more likely to be trusted about their brand enthusiasm. Though influencers sometimes require compensation, brand ambassadors are more likely to not need it.Don’t be weird
I feel like I need to emphasize this. Don’t ask for favors if you don’t know the influencer, unless you’re committed to asking very directly and being prepared for dealing with the consequences. If you’re going to reach out to them up front, don’t ask for anything. Instead, frame it as “making them aware”. An easy way to do this is to feature them in a “best of” style list or in a feature article. Show them some good PR, and they’ll return (hopefully). However, this is still going to work better if you have already had a certain rapport going with them. And, it’s always best if you have a certain amount of blogging or industry credibility yourself. Who cares if a blogger features you in a best of article when it is one of two posts on a blog?Use tools for Outreach
Traackr acts more as a sort of CRM platform that allows you to target influencers, keep track of your relationship, and then features metrics to get the return on interest of the relationship. The profile search allows you to separate by industry relevance, by a specific topic they have written about, and by what type of influencer you are looking for. Then, there’s a great, visual breakdown of each influencer in a profile.
BuzzSumo, instead, finds the most shared content on a specific topic. This might be more relevant for linkbuilding and looking for linkbuilding opportunities, but also a great spot to look for relevant experts to follow by looking at the writers of the posts. Also, checking out what sites are doing well on which social media platform can be helpful to see in constructing social media goals. For example, if your goal is more Twitter attention, try going for a site or writer that is killing it on Twitter. Mostly common sense, but this really adds the visual that is sometimes necessary.
Pitchbox is a good tool if you’re looking to do some very large scale outreach, or perhaps you are interested in influencers based upon keywords rather than communities. Pitchbox scrapes the SERPs for contact information, and then tracks your outreach. You can upload customizable email templates to get at as many relevant contacts as quick as you can, and it tracks who you need to follow up with.
Klear (formerly Twtrland) is great for seeing how you are doing relatively to your competitors, taking in mentions, likes, retweets, replies, and links to create an overall “brand awareness metric to track activity within your industry. You can even see the average engagements per day of your competitors, a super helpful metric that may be even more important than awareness, because it is showing the density of that awareness. Klear also has an influencer search database with over 60,000 individual niches you can select from.
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