For quite some time now, influencer marketing has become something of a buzzword in online marketing. This is mostly because of its overall potential value and efficiency in acting as gateways to obtaining a larger audience, a better reputation, and exchange of content that is beneficial. One of the most important applications of influencer marketing is also in the domain of search engine optimization – it is easily among the best and swiftest ways of scaling up your traffic and boosting your strategy. However, before the benefits of harnessing your social media to those who drive trends can be reaped, it is necessary to know how exactly to find them and how to select the ones that are most suited to your brand.
How Do Influencers Affect SEO
Increased content visibility and link building are the most obvious benefits of influencers. If you are able to persuade an influencer to share your content, then you could potentially gain from exposure to an added audience to which you had no access earlier. Each member of the new audience is again a potential distributor of your content if they decide to share it further. Link building is fundamental to the improvement of your domain authority and improved organic search results. You get the chance of boosting your reputation with every mention that an influencer makes of your site in the eyes of both the audience of the influencer and other external audiences. When you are able to improve your reputation, you will be able to post guest posts on publishers with greater authority; this, in turn, is a reflection of your own enhanced status.
If you get the chance of collaborating with an influencer on some shared content, it will be a chance to for both of you to access each other’s followers, increase the reach of the content, and drive mutual growth. With content reach increasing, you will be able to get more inbound links, shares, and social signals to boost your visibility and traffic.
Identifying Potential Influencers
An influencer attains his status due to three very important qualities. Firstly, there should be a large following over which certain amount of power is exerted. Typically, the influencers that you aim for should have followers running into thousands or ideally, into tens of thousands. If this sort of a following is not available, you will not be able to benefit much in return of your own contribution or share.
Another criterion to take into account for selecting an influencer is their activity level on social media. The ideal influencers are those who are active regularly and display a keen interest in engaging their followers. It is simply not sufficient for an influencer to have a massive following but with very low levels of activity and engagement.A top SEO agency in Mumbaisuggests that the influencer you seek should ideally belong to the industry that you operate in for then you are also assured that the followers too will have the same interest and that you will gain the maximum from engaging with them.
Locating Influencers
While influencers can be located in multiple ways, one of the most common methods includes searching on Google or social media platforms using industry-related keywords or keywords associated with similar brands for people who have very strong associations and influence on trends. Another effective method is to employ social listening software tools to flag certain topics that are of interest and relevance to you. By doing this, you can identify the people who feature most in the tracked conversations – you can find out who shares the most content and who has the maximum number of followers, etc. Some of the more sophisticated tools can even suggest the influencers who could be most beneficial to you. Scanning the industry journals and seminar speakers is also a very good way of identifying the industry leaders, and then you can try and locate them on the social media and connect with them.
Conclusion
The most important part of the process is identifying the influencers who can enhance your social media presence the maximum. As long as you are clear about the benefits that can accrue to you, you will be able to follow rational steps in locating and connecting to them. However, it is vital to appreciate that getting influencers to engage with you can take some time as these persons tend to be extremely busy and deal with numerous similar requests on a daily basis. The key can often lie in your ability to offer something of value to them, which will make them sit up and notice you, and thereafter begin engaging with you.
