Young people have amazing opportunities to turn social media channels into successful businesses. The negativity surrounding social media remains, but training youth to use these channels for successful, entrepreneurial endeavors has the power to change their destinies. Over the years, social media has gone from simply connecting friends to a powerful tool that can be utilised to grow your business and help make a positive change. This journey leads to influencer marketing, where creators collaborate with brands to promote products and reach target audiences.. With the rise of influencer marketing, businesses have access to the trust that influencers establish with their audience, making it a powerful tool in digital marketing.
But finding and vetting influencers is not easy, which is why this article offers practical and actionable insights for young entrepreneurs. Through preparing youth for these skills, they can go from being passive consumers to active contributors in the digital economy while enriching the online community. Fostering Entrepreneurship Then, fostering this new to navigate the opportunity with these opportunities then only in paves way for entrepreneurship and helps in encouraging the creativity to be more innovative in engaging the social media for good.
This guide is brought to you by industry experts collaborating with marketing innovators dedicated to helping businesses achieve their goals. Fundacja Zdrowia i Rozwoju Czlowieka is this project’s coordinator, working with L4Y Learning for Youth GmbH and MAT Mevhibe Ates Teknoloji Vakfi.
Learning Objectives
- Learn how for young people, the transition from casual use to platforms can sometimes be more monetarily beneficial than a traditional business could provide.
- Get practical, actionable advice on finding and vetting influencers to boost brand growth.
- Learn on how to identify the right influencers with real-world tools and strategies.
Finding Potential Influencers
Making Use of Available Tools and Platforms for Influencer Marketing
Specialised tools make the process of finding influencers easy. Users can also track metrics using Social Blade and HypeAuditor relating to follower growth, engagement rates, etc., giving an insight into the influencer’s reach and audience demographics (FasterCapital, n.d.). You can access millions of influencers, and advanced filters that allow you to sort by niche, engagement, audience location, etc. (Modash, n.d.) These are extremely useful for filtering down the list of influencers that may align well with your brand. They have transparency and data that help you find out the best decision.
This approach allows young entrepreneurs to concentrate on data-based decisions, making it possible for them to locate influencers who align with their specific brand values and answer their audience requirements. This eliminates the guesswork in the influencer selection process, allowing businesses to ensure they partner with creators who have a history of engaging their audience. Using these tools also implies that young entrepreneurs can save time and money, an important thing to keep in mind when working with limited budgets.
Criteria for Selection Influencers
Three central criteria are important for entrepreneurs to consider when choosing influencers. For example:
Relevance
Does the influencer’s content support your niche or brand ideals? Attempting to form partnerships with health and wellness influencers would be useful for fitness brand (Twipla, n.d.). Lastly, you are focused on the audience you want to engage, and your text should literally target them, which means that your message should resonate with your audience and allow for meaningful interaction.
Engagement Rate
This is because an influencer with more but less motivated audience usually brings worse outcome than one with disengaged followers (Influencity, n.d.). Engagements are a vital metric of an influencer’s ability to bond with their audience. If the audience really connects with you, they will be more inclined to respond to your company promotions.
Authenticity
“Influencers who develop real ties with their audiences build trust, and, as a result, their recommendations become much more powerful” (Bulk. ly, n.d.). Authentic — the influencer’s promotion of your product should come across as organic, not forced. Use of trust: Followers trust their influencers and thus are more likely to convert from their endorsements.
Example of Influencer Marketing
As one example, a fitness startup could use Heepsy, one micro-influencer dedicated platform, to identify people whose audiences are already interested in fitness-related content (Heepsy, n.d.) They can also have a smaller followers which can make it easier for brands to find someone with specific audience. Micro-influencers are typically those individuals that exist within these smaller communities, providing a platform for the startup to reach its audience in an meaningful way, as opposed to using models, much less commercial.
Evaluating Influencer
Measuring Reach and Engagement
When it comes to assessing an influencer, it’s more than just their follower count. Metrics such as engagement rates—an indicator of quality which is calculated by taking the number of likes, comments and shares and dividing it by the total followers (Influencity, n.d.)—indicate the level of interaction that they have with their audience. For example, an influencer with a 10% engagement rate and 20,000 followers generally garners a better response than, say, someone who has 100,000 followers but only 1% engagement. Engagement metrics are crucial for determining if an influencer’s followers are genuine consumers of their content, not just passive viewers.
High engagement oerformance indicates that the influencer’s followers are listening, which can make brand messages more prominent and actionable. Furthermore, metrics like comments reveal whether the influencer’s followers are engaging in discussions, highlighting their influence beyond likes.
Aligning with Brand Values
The influencer’s personal brand should be aligned with the company’s mission. To illustrate, a sustainability-focused brand should partner with influencers promoting eco-friendly routines. So tools like Sprout Social offer sentiment analysis capabilities that allow users to evaluate whether the messaging of influencers meets brand objectives (Sprout Social, n.d.). Sentiment analysis gives brands insight into the tone of influencer’s content so that it can align with the brand’s values.
By partnering with like-minded influencers, brands can present a more seamless message, creating a clearer connection. And with it, brands are able to build more meaningful and authentic partnerships that drive growth for both sides.
Tools for Influencer Marketing
Tools such as Traackr and CreatorIQ provide data about audience sentiment, campaign performance, and ROI (Traackr, n.d.). These are the type of insights that help entrepreneurs assess the ROI impact of influencer partnerships over the long-term. Another example is Traackr, which evaluates follower quality and helps brands avoid partnering with influencers who may have purchased followers. With CreatorIQ, you can track campaign performance in real-time and determine if an influencer partnership is delivering the desired results.
Thoroughly assess each influencer, before entering into partnerships, to mitigate risks and ensure co-creating value for the brand. With these high-tech tools at their disposal, young entrepreneurs can gain a holistic understanding of the effectiveness of an influencer, combining them when creating campaigns for future projects.
Case Studies of Influencer Marketing
Dove’s Partnership With Gabrielle Union
Dove partnered with actress Gabrielle Union on a campaign to challenge toxic beauty standards. Such collaboration echoed brand slogan, created media hype, and positioned brand image as inclusive brand (Sprout Social, n.d.). Through its collaboration with an influencer that matched its values, Dove succeeded in portraying its emphasis on inclusivity and self-acceptance to a wide audience.
Sustainable Fashion Success
A small sustainable fashion brand joined forces with micro-influencers promoting eco-living. Leveraging HypeAuditor to measure influencer performance, the brand saw a 35% rise in website traffic and a two-fold increase in sales over three months (HypeAuditor, n.d.). This demonstrates that smaller influencers can drive influence too, given they align with the brand message and are trusted by their followers. For the brand, this success highlights an important consideration: choosing influencers whose followers are likely interested in the brand’s offering.
Data Preprocessing: The Devil is in the Data
Note: You are taught on information till October 2023. Similar to how recruiters evaluate candidates’ skill set and cultural fit, brands should evaluate whether influencers share the same values, audience and campaign goals. As much as a great hire can be a force multiplier for a company, a good influencer can serve that same purpose, magnifying a brand’s message, moving the needle on a brand’s profile, and providing deep engagement. It is just like hiring an employee you make sure you pick a person who is mutually beneficial with you. So, brands need to take their time and select the right influencer.
Resources for Influencer Marketing
Books for Influencer Marketing:
- Hennessy, B. (2018). Influencer: Imagine Being Your Own Brand in the Social Media Society
- Blanchard, O. (2011). Manage and Measure More Than ROI from Social Media in Your Organisation
Websites for Influencer Marketing:
- Comprehensive guides on influencer tools and strategies (Influencer Marketing Hub, n.d.).
- Hootsuite blog: Articles on Digital Marketing strategy optimisation (Hootsuite, n.d.).
Courses for Influencer Marketing:
- Influencer Marketing Strategy on Coursera
- “The Social Media Marketing Specialisation” by Northwestern University
There is a lot of material for young entrepreneurs to really build their skills. From books on the very basics of personal branding, to websites that provide guided tutorials.
Expert Advice
Insights from Experts
“The best influencer relationships are built from real connections, not just numbers. “Brands need to focus on relationships, not reach.” — Gaurav Arora, Influencer Marketing Strategist Sprout Social (n.d.)
“You don’t necessarily need the most popular influencers. You need the right ones.” — Gabriela Torres, Digital Marketing Consultant (Bulk. ly, n.d.). Far more important than follower count is authenticity and alignment with brand values. This information emphasizes the need to develop authentic connections with influencers that ultimately results in more meaningful partnerships.
Pro Tips
Discovering new influencers In your niche with tools such as BuzzSumo. BuzzSumo can also help establish what topics are trending and identify influencers currently driving engagement in these topics.
Analyze campaign data for continuous improvement Making data-driven decisions soon after that_session will secure that your influencer partnership continues to provide value. Young entrepreneurs can analyze campaign performance, identifying strengths and weaknesses that can be exploited for continual optimization.
Conclusion and Call to Action
Social media can be — when done properly — an incredible business tool for youth. By figuring out how to evaluate influencers in an effective way, they can interact productively with the digital economy. This knowledge helps young business owners to be strategic in their approach to influencer marketing so that they can turn their love for social media into a successful business.
Next Steps
Research influencer tools, hone in on what matters most to your brand, and build genuine partnerships. If the future of social media is for creators, it is time to realize that we are the creators whose power can be restored & used for good. So experiment and learn, as this means you will give yourself the best chance of long-term success in this changeable and often confusing world of digital mastery.
The MAT Foundation created this blog post as part of the SM4B project. You can explore other blog posts here and learn more about our foundation here.
