Marketers often find themselves confused when considering the best and budget ORM tools available. Online reputation management is of the utmost importance in the wired world. Hence, it makes sense for the service to be demand. The cost of online reputation management would be based on the people you talk to. It’s also about whether you are opting for personal ORM or business.
Unfortunately, companies are benefitting from your confusion. It is nearly impossible to judge if the fees you are paying are justified, given your situation and needs. We’ve tried to put together an honest picture of the situation for you.
The Actual Cost of Online Reputation Management
Before we start looking at finding an honest service, we have to know its actual price point. If you agree to pay a certain amount you should know the service and the cost that goes into it.
If you are interested in online reputation management for the long term, a software tool will prove more cost-effective than hiring a team of specialists.
So ultimately, the explanation of the charge will depend upon:
The complexity of your reputation problem,
The issues you want to get fixed, and your goals
The length of time for which you will be involved with the process.
Different professionals charge different rates based on these factors and their specific expertise.
Online Reputation Management Techniques
When you look for online reputation management, keep in mind that it is not a one-time process. Simply put, in a world where over 1.5 billion people shop online, your online business needs to look good. To make this possible you need to make sure of portraying a positive brand image. 88% of customers research online before making a purchase. This means they will read about any negative or positive reviews that your brand has. One bad review can be disastrous for your company’s sales and future.
Monitoring brand mentions online and paying specialists for online reputation management can become a financial burden. Especially so, if you are a small-sized business. With bigger businesses, the problem is more complex. For some, the cost of hiring a professional can climb up to $10000 per month.
Social listening is an effective tool in this situation. It saves your business from this vicious cycle of seeking professionals and paying big dollars. For instance, Auris brings you real-time updates of all your brand mentions. This makes it easier for marketers to act immediately in case of a crisis before it becomes full-blown. It’s impossible for you to sit hawk-eyed all-day long, trying to track each online mention. Complimentary services from Auris keep a check on the social sentiment for you. Social media analytics is also a featured service within the tool Auris, which provides you with the key ethnographic metrics. When you know what your audience likes (or dislikes), it becomes easier to cater to their taste.
In the long run, a social listening tool adds value to your business. It makes your marketing team get self-sufficient with online marketing and online reputation management. Before investing in the tool, you can test its services, as most of these tools offer a free trial.
Top 6 Influencer Marketing Campaigns of 2018-19
18.5 million posts! That’s the number of posts Instagram turns up if you simply search the keyword “#influencer”! This goes to show how influencer marketing has become more plentiful and successful over time. Over 79% of brands prefer Instagram for influencer marketing campaigns. After all, some influencer marketing campaigns have proved wildly successful. According to Business Insider Intelligence, they plan to spend up to US$15 billion on influencer marketing campaigns by 2022.
We talked about the effectiveness of influencer marketing. Here we will see how some brands effectively implemented their influencer marketing campaigns.
The Best Influencer Marketing Campaigns
67.6% of marketers consider finding the right influencer to be the most difficult job. Agreed. However, when you actually do, results could often be amazing. These brand stories are proof enough.
1. Skittles-Taste the Rainbow
Skittles came up with an innovative idea to advertise via social media. They decided to turn a typical California teen into an ultimate influencer online. Marcos Menendez, a real-life massive skittles fan, was the icon for their “Exclusive the rainbow, Taste the rainbow” campaign. DDB Chicago came up with this idea of making a super bowl commercial which is not about the super bowl.
Skittles announced that they would make a Superbowl ad for only one viewer. This ad would be seen by only one skittles superfan – Marcos Menendez. On February 4th, the Superbowl Sunday, the exclusive ads were shown to Marcos and his reaction to the ads was broadcasted to the world via Facebook Live. The campaign has received over 1.5 billion media impressions, coverage in ABC’s segment and won gold at Cannes 2018 under social and influencer lions.
2. Lyft
Lyft has achieved over 5.9 million engagements per year. How did they do it? One of the ways they guaranteed this success is via influencer marketing campaigns. Their strategy involved different types of influencers. They got a balanced mix of celebrity endorsers and macro-influencers for their campaigns. As a result, Lyft set its position as the most mentioned brand in 2018. This was about sponsored posts, highlighted by the inclusion of hashtags like #paid, #ad, #sponsored. Lyft engaged with over 1.1 thousand influencers over the course of the year. Their list of influencers includes names like Zayn Malik, Snoop Dogg. They also roped in macro-influencers like Peyton Mabry.
3. Fiji Water
Fiji Water collaborated with Instagram influencer Danielle Bernstein for their campaign. Danielle Bernstein runs the fashion blog and brand WeWoreWhat. She boasts a strong follower base of 2.2 million people. Fiji Water joined hands with her for their influencer marketing campaign BodyWoreWhat. This campaign had Danielle Bernstein putting forth 8-minute workout videos. This campaign conveyed Fiji Water’s commitment to hydrate anyone who wishes to be as fit as Danielle Bernstein.
4. Sperry’s Boat Shoes
We all know that social media users often interact with brands online. It could be through comments on brand posts, inquiries via messages or posts that tag them. Most often it is the last. The current generation uses Instagram to post pics of their proud possessions. Sperry has been using this to their advantage. Since the end of 2016, the brand has been working with micro-influencers on Instagram to boost its own following and engagement rates. And the results have been amazing, at no cost at all. Sperry re-posted a photo shared by Slava Daniliuk and it became their most engaged photo in 2016. This process has proved super-successful as it is a win-win for both parties, at no extra cost.
They have been engaging with influencers when reposting photos shared by people, with their permission. Apart from giving a shoutout to the influencer, the brand is also conveying to others in the age group how hip and trendy Sperry Boat shoes are.
5. Daniel Wellington
Daniel Wellington has almost perfected the art of influencer marketing campaigns. They have never focused too much on traditional ways of promotion. Their influencer marketing strategy was to monitor influencers with a high engagement rate. It does not matter what niche they are in. As long as they have an active follower base, Daniel Wellington is willing to work with them. They have collaborated with people with the reputation of celebrities to animals like horses.
6. Nike
Innovative as always, Nike took a creative turn for their influencer marketing campaign. The ‘What’s Inside” Youtube channel has a massive follower base. The current count of their subscriber base is 6.76 million. The channel carries videos of things being cut in half to show us what is inside them. Nike collaborated with them to promote Nike Air VaporMax before it was released in the market. Their video “What’s inside Nike Air VaporMax?” received 6535014 views. It really helped Nike build a buzz around their product.
Give Influencer Marketing a Try
These are just a few examples of how brands have effectively used influencer marketing campaigns to spread their reach and visibility. If you are thinking it would be difficult for you to do the same, you are mistaken. Influencer marketing isn’t rocket science and we are here to guide you step-by-step. Marketers often feel that finding the right influencer is a difficult task which is where AI can help you. Also, social listening tools can help you find the right influencer. Connect with them and get started.
8 Competitor Analysis Tools for your Brand
If you have been following this space you know we have been laying emphasis on how important competitive analysis and benchmarking are. It is not just us, there’s a very similar saying attributed to Petrarch (as well as Sun Tzu) which goes “keep your friends close and your enemies closer”. Competitor analysis is essential for brand survival and the ready availability of digital data makes the process easier.
In this blog post, we try to put forth our top picks for competitor analysis tools and explain why it must be tried.
Qualities to Look for in Competitor Analysis Tools
Competitor analysis tools are available by the dozens. The best pick would be one that serves your defined goals and needs. Here are some important features we considered while picking out our favorites.
Metrics
A superficial comparison of likes, shares, and comments is not enough to truly judge the performance of a brand. An enterprise tool can offer you deeper insights into demographics and psychographics. These insights tell you what consumers are interested in, and highlight the content with which they are actively engaging and so on. Also, sentiment analysis tells you if your focus is in the correct direction.
Sentiment Analysis
Sentiment analysis can guide your way to win your customers’ hearts. Take the data and apply sentiment analysis to it to find the strongest reactions. The extreme points in positive and negative sentiments will give you a wholesome idea of how to solve your customer’s problems.
Content Analysis
Just like you, your competitors are also on social media. What content are they posting? How are they performing online? What channels are they on? Be sure to look at every aspect of your competitors’ online marketing efforts. Benchmarking against the top brands with maximum reach online can help you understand the improvements you could make to your approach.
Top Competitor Analysis Tools
Which tool to finally invest in? What are your needs? Rest assured there is a tool for every purpose and you will find one that caters to your needs. Here are some top picks.
Auris
Auris is a complete package for social listening with specially tailored features to make competitor analysis smoother. Simply feed in the names of competitors, their facebook URLs, Twitter handles and so on. And you are all set. Auris fetches you the data from across the channels all on the same dashboard. The tool features two tabs for deeper analysis. A comparison dashboard and one which displays the activities of your rivals.
The comparison dashboard brings you elaborate charts explaining the reach, engagement rates, and estimated media spends for posts made by your rivals. Auris also allows you to calculate your share of voice and share of mind against your competitors’. This information tool is available free for a test run.
Phlanx
Phlanx is an influencer auditing tool specially designed for Instagram. It is a useful tool for brands that depend most on Instagram. Phlanx helps you audit influencer accounts by tracking the genuineness of the accounts. Checks whether their follower base consists mostly of fake followers and bots. Tracks their active followers and engagement rate to check if they are the right influencers for your brand. The tool also provides a detailed account of engagement rates from across an array of other social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and Twitch.
Rival IQ
In their own words, Rival IQ focuses on making social and SEO data easier to analyze and act upon. Rival IQ lets you compare your brand to competitors with respect to social channels, audience growth, rankings, activities et cetera. Rival IQ allows you to look at key insights like top-performing posts, activities, and engagement metrics.
Social Blade
Social blade ranks you and your competitors based on social media statistics gained from platforms like Youtube, Instagram, Twitch, Dailymotion, Mixer, and Twitter. You can view a summary of metrics like subscriber rank, monetization estimates, and an overall rank based on the number of views and rate of new subscribers. This platform also allows you to search based on specific locations and categories. If you want to know about the top YouTubers in Australia, Social blade can help set up the search.
Owletter
Owletter makes spying on your competitor’s email strategies easier. Most marketers have subscribed to the newsletters from competitor brands. This effort is to catch a glimpse of your competitor’s strategies and yet they miss out on so much data. With Owletter, brands can understand when their competitors are sending out promotional emails, seasonal changes in emailing strategies, the reputation of a brand email for SPAM et cetera. The longer you use Owletter, the more historical data is available and the more robust your reports are going to be.
Competeshark
Competeshark allows brands to monitor their rivals in real-time and play copycats if they choose to. Without needing to physically visit a competitor’s website and comparing changes. With Competeshark, the process has been automated. They visit your competitor’s websites, reports and so on and study the changes. You can stay updated on price changes, layout changes, design changes or any new trends your competitor is following.
Datanyze
Datanyze specializes in “technographics” which is where they analyze data to your advantage and tell you where to seel what and to whom. The analysis they provide includes email marketing, advertising, and eCommerce capabilities. Unlike other tools that use demographic data, Datanyze uses technographic data to capture buying signals.
Wappalyzer
This is one of the tools many marketers are using these days. Wappalyzer goes beyond the realm of social media to analyze competitive data for you. This tool looks into specifics like web frameworks, content management systems, server software and so on. If you wish to know how your rivals are managing their data stream Wappalyzer may be able to help you.
Depending on your requirements and budget you might have gained a fair idea about your ideal tool by now. If you are thinking about whether or not to invest, you have to keep an eye on your competitor. It has to be done either manually or you can choose to opt for an automated tool. Most of these tools can be customized with bespoke filters and options to cater to your needs whether you want to track influencer or monitor brand mentions on the same platform.
How to find Instagram Influencers?
It’s a well-known fact that influencer marketing is one of the hottest marketing trends right now. Influencers are driving sales for brands around a topic, service or even a niche product. With millennials making up most of the audience, they are moving away from traditional media. Hence, businesses are getting more invested in influencer marketing via social media. And turning Instagram into the most preferred platform for influencers. It’s reported that Influencer marketing on Instagram alone will produce over $1.7 billion in revenue by the end of 2017 and will continue to grow. So how do businesses rope in these popular Instagram influencers and how does the process work?
Why Instagram for Influencer Marketing?
To begin with, the engagement rate on Instagram is higher than on any other social media platform. Images on Instagram get 23% more engagement than their Facebook counterparts on average. Moreover, Instagram has been gaining popularity over the years and it is continuing to grow year-on-year. Here are some stats which show why influencer marketing on Instagram is a good idea.
More than 2 million advertisers worldwide are using Instagram to share their stories
60% of people have said they discover new products via Instagram
More than 200 million Instagrammers visit at least one business page daily
One-third of the most viewed stories are from businesses
And the reason behind influencer marketing being popular on Instagram isn’t surprising. People love visual content and influencers seem to be more trustworthy than with traditional marketing methods which have become intrusive. As opposed to traditional promotions, influencer marketing is two-way communication. The influencer and follower relationships are based on the word-of-mouth concept.
Still wondering how to make this work for your brand?
Who are Instagram Influencers?
Before you start your influencer marketing campaign, you should know a little about the influencers. Influencers are of different kinds.
Celebrity Influencers
It can be seen from the title, that these are celebrities who are famous for their work in their respective fields and are adored by hundreds of people. Personalities like Beyonce or Benedict Cumberbatch fall into this category. Since people admire them, they would like to believe that whatever product these celebrities are endorsing is truly worth possessing. But only large enterprises can afford to work with celebrities, whose charges are usually steep.
Macro Influencers
Macro influencers are famous and a household name many a time. These are almost celebrities themselves with followers ranging from thousands to millions. These people have gained fame in niche fields showcasing their passion and hence people have come to trust and admire them. People like Marques Brownlee – a youtube vlogger who talks about technology and has over 9 million followers – fall into this category.
Micro-Influencers
These people are starting to get famous and recognized. They have a couple of thousands of followers and are suitable to collaborate with if you have a small business. They take a small paycheck or would sometimes endorse your brand even for a product discount, free trial or to build a mutually beneficial partnership.
How to Find Instagram Influencers?
According to EConsultancy, one of the trickiest jobs in influencer marketing is to find the right set of influencers. You can approach this systematically and with some help from social listening tools.
1. Know your target audience
Before you reach out to influencers, you need to know your audience. Which age group are you targeting? Are they from a specific geographic location? What are their interests? The quintessential features that define this target audience have to be studied well.
This step is essential because while searching for an influencer you need someone who has followers from the same category.
You can also divide your audience into niche groups while sourcing for influencers. Say your brand makes organic beauty/health products. You can partner with influencers who talk about organic food and influencers who talk about beauty/health products with organic ingredients.
2. Look for the right influencer
Now that you know your target audience and what message your brand wants to put forth, it is going to be easier to find a suitable influencer. Remember, the influencer you chose has to sound relevant to your audience. A millennial YouTuber may not sound convincing enough to your target audience of middle-aged men if you are trying to sell financial investment plans.
Social media listening tools can help you in this ordeal. Type in your keyword or topic related to your brand and start monitoring. Social listening tools display the top influencers talking about the keyword. Apart from this many social listening tools also track the influencer scores of everyone who shows interest in the topic and is discussing it. So you get to filter out influencers based on their influencer scores.
If you want to do this exercise without a tool, you can always find people organically. Go to the search space on Instagram. Type in the keyword and check out the top posts for the keyword. The people who are trending are probably the top influencers in the field. To be sure, search through their profiles more closely. Look at their posts, the frequency of posts, their engagement rate et cetera.
3. Engage and Implement
Finally, to start your influencer marketing journey you need to convince your chosen influencer to collaborate with you. Engaging with them over direct messaging or contacting them via their secretaries (if they are extremely famous) is the first step. Influencers are human beings too, build a relationship with them and try to see how compatible are they to work with. Once the friendship is in place, you are ready to launch your campaign.
In conclusion, we would like to remind you that launching a campaign isn’t the end of your responsibilities. It is essential to measure your results and track the campaigns. You may pay a fortune to an influencer but you need the data to know how well or poorly the campaign went. Keep experimenting with more cost-effective ways to launch your influencer marketing campaign.
Top 6 Social Media Management Tools to watch out for in 2020
As we advance into the future, the Internet gets more sophisticated. Conducting business online on social media gets easier and complicated at the same time. Reaching a vast audience and trying to deliver your brand’s message correctly is the ultimate goal. There are tools aplenty to help you plan, execute and achieve this goal. Social media management tools help enhance your brand’s capability to engage with the audience and boost your profits. Here are some of our top picks of social media management tools.
What to look for in a Social Media Management Tool?
Consumers are evolving. Your customers today wouldn’t buy the first option available to them. They have done their research, read reviews, asked friends, and are well aware of their specific needs. So it gets crucial that a brand connects with its audience at a human level to break through the noise.
Fortunately, there’s a way for brands to know what customers have in mind and use the insights to connect with them. Listening to social data can help them gauge all the details needed for good customer service.
Here are some social analytics insights that can empower your brand:
Online Reputation Management
As the market gets saturated, there is hardly any scope for your brand to make mistakes. Avoiding brand reputation crisis moments becomes an absolute must. It may just be one bad review and once it starts catching views and likes on social media, there’s no going back. So it is essential to handle any crisis well in time. Social monitoring tools alert you to potential problems. While seeking a tool, this feature becomes important.
Check on Competitors
Competitive benchmarking is vital for your growth. Tools that help you keep an eye on the competition and provide you competitive intelligence are going to be worth investing in. You will need to learn from others’ faults and take inspiration from the top players. This requires you to keep monitoring what they’re doing.
Tracking Influencers, Engaging with Leads
Managing your business over social media takes a lot of effort. You may be promoting your product/service on the official page, but is someone vouching for it? If your brand is launching a fitness band and is promoting it on the official page chances are that very few people know about it. If Marques Brownlee or Linus Sebastian are talking about it, your product is definitely getting more attention. But how will you know about these influencers? How will you get them to collaborate and promote your business? Social media management tools help you with that.
Also, social media management tools are meant to make this task easier for you. Posting content, researching your audience, competitive analysis, tracking brand mentions all at the same time can make everything seem too much. Hence, look for a tool that can be your one-stop solution. There are tools available that allow you to research for your content, schedule posts, follow your competitors, set up keywords for insights and track influencers all at the same place and the same time without you having to do much.
The Top Social Media Management Tools
There are a lot of tools available offering a varying range of services and these are available at different price points. There are many options to choose from, ensure you pick the one that meets your brand’s needs.
1 Auris
A media management solution that brings together all your brand mentions across social media, news, et cetera in one place. Why keep shuffling between apps when you have one platform for multiple solutions? Auris helps brands with actionable insights via social listening, competitor analysis, social media monitoring, influencer outreach and more.
A platform that helps you track brand mentions in real-time, alerts you to potential crisis moments, guards your brand’s health, provides graphic reports and helps you zero in on your operational fault lines is a must-have. If you need a comprehensive solution take Auris for a test drive before you finalize your list for 2020.
2. Audiense
Understanding your audience and their interests and then speaking to them personally is a difficult task. Audience Segmentation helps you be prepared according to the specific interest field of that segment. Sending across a message to someone you know is always easier than trying to communicate with a complete stranger. Messaging your audience based on their interests is a crucial part of social media marketing.
Audiense helps you identify these interests and break them down so you can categorize and send out personalized messages.
3. CrowdBooster
Creators and innovators need funding, crowdfunding is a must for them especially for high profile projects. And there’s a solution for this – getting social influencers to champion the cause. CrowdBooster helps you grow your community on Instagram and/or Pinterest. It helps you raise funding for your innovation or campaign. It also takes care of press releases and shipping after the campaign is funded and done with.
4. Oktopost
The tool is geared to help with specific social media management needs but crucial for business, especially B2B brands. Oktopost helps you measure the impact from every post or campaign your brand puts forth. It also provides employee advocacy insights, engagement metrics et cetera and more importantly integrates easily with a lot of other tools. It helps you attain invaluable insights and can be integrated with other tools making your life easier.
5. Sendible
Sendible helps you streamline and manage multiple brands at the same time. It provides unique inboxes for each brand making the workflow easier and also offers collaborative tools. Plan your client’s content, schedule it, present individualized reports, and collaborate with Sendible.
6. Storyheap
If your brand counts Snapchat and Instagram as the go-to places for marketing and promotions, you must be familiar with stories. Snapchat and Instagram stories have become quite popular. Storytelling is unique and important, so it’s essential you do it right. Storyheap tells you about your stories, tracks your follower growth, no. of opens, no. of swipe up or clicks, no. of screenshots and so on. The data is very specific so you can dive really deep into the analysis.
We understand that picking one tool for your business can be daunting. Especially for smaller businesses, this decision has to come after some budgeting and adjustments. Thus you want the tool to be tailormade to your needs. We would like to point out that social media marketing tools are worth investing in. And there is no need to sweat it out. Most platforms provide a free trial period. Try one or more of these tools for testing out, before you make a full investment.
Steps to Analyze your Competition on Social Media
Competitive analysis is the process where you categorize and test your rival brands. It involves using a collection of metrics to understand their strengths and weaknesses. This is also called competitive benchmarking. You look to define the best practices and compare your own brand’s performance.
The benefits are undeniable. The better you know your rivals, the better is your chance to surpass them as market leaders. The concept is simple, the process is a little more complicated. Competitive analysis ranges over many areas, metrics, and orders. The more extensive your research the more effective your competitive analysis.
Here we attempt to discuss the steps to competitive analysis in detail.
How to Perform a Competitive Analysis?
Competitive analysis can be as exhaustive as you wish it to be. It is important to have an organized view of which metrics would be the most useful for you. Competitive analysis will allow you to know when your competitor is doing well or losing. Both these times are a good time for you to check your standing against theirs.
Choosing the Right KPIs
The first step is to know which metrics you should be focusing on. Think about your business and what KPIs could be an indicator of bigger outcomes. Say you notice a drop in your share of voice/engagement rate. Check if you are doing something wrong or your competitor is trying something better. Keep comparingyour performance to your past performance and to your competitor’s results.
Consult all other departments to know what metrics are useful to them. This is how you put together a wholesome list of KPIs. You can track them and share them with most of the departments in the company.
Identify your Primary Competitors
You will already have a list of your competitors but is it comprehensive? Have you considered all the criteria? You have two types of competitors – direct (primary) and indirect (secondary). Your direct competitors are the ones that are selling the same product as you. And to the same audience and even the same geographic location. An indirect competitor may be selling the same or similar products but targeting a different audience. Your relation with your competitors differs hence whom to include depends on what you wish to get out of it.
You can start benchmarking against your closest competitors. These are the companies closest to you in size, success, and structure. Benchmark yourself against them to get a fair sense of the companies you are up against. This qualifies as your near or mid-future planning.
You might have bigger ambitions than winning against your closest competitors. Its time to look at the best players in the industry. Competitive analysis can put forth an analysis of how well they are doing and how you can reach them. It isn’t going to be easy to follow the best in one day. The competitive analysis gives you a foundation on which you can build further.
Metrics To Consider
Before delving into the absolute nitty-gritty of competitive analysis, learn about the basic stats. First, get a general overview that tells you about the competitor, their size, followers, activity, reach et cetera. This helps you establish a preliminary comparison between you and your rival.
With time you can delve deeper and research further data points. The most commonly available data covers their revenue, the number of clients, fields of operations etcetera. If the company publicly listed, you can access their annual reports to track their financial records and performance.
As for their marketing messages, track them across the channels they use and identify the audience they target. Use social media monitoring to measure their brand mentions and to gauge their reach, their share of voice, and their share of mind and engagement rates.
SEO and Keywords
Google offers the most successful way to gain organic traffic. You will need to check your competitor’s SEO. In other words, how well do they rank on Google? Next, check the keywords they are ranking for. Lots of SEO and social listening tools will give you an overview of the domain/top keywords used.
Once you have a general idea of the ranking of all your competitors, you can start chalking out your strategy. SEO is the greatest way to earn organic traffic and revenue. Hence ranking high on google can never go wrong and actually goes on to show you’re doing well.
In conclusion, we would say that competitive analysis does take a lot of hard work but the fruits are worth it. The insights will help you know how to differentiate yourself and compete against your competitors.
Use Social Listening for Influencer Marketing
A brand may claim any number of things. Consumers believe what their friends, family, neighbors, and colleagues have to say about a brand more than all such claims. They would also trust any endorsements by their favorite actors and sportspersons. This is the power of word-of-mouth and how much it is trusted. This concept is the premise on which influencer marketing plans are based. Influencer marketing is on the rise and startups, consumer brands and even B2B businesses are realizing the effectiveness of word-of-mouth. According to Social Media Today, influencer marketing content has eleven times the ROI of traditional marketing.
How does Influencer Marketing work?
The popularity of influencer marketing is primarily derived from the algorithm trusted by social sites that prefer humans over business pages. It’s also due to the innate tendency of human beings who like to socialize with fellow beings, trust them and follow their recommendations. Customers relate more to your product when their favorite celebrity endorses it or an industry expert vouches for it. There are tools aplenty in the market which claim to be good for influencer marketing on social networking sites but it is always wise to hold back and look at the simpler things instead, for a while, before making a hefty investment. Log in and simply browse through, try to find influencers and the people who have influence over you. This is a good place to start. For the next step, investing in tools like social listening platforms can be a smart move. It is a platform that serves the purpose of hunting influencers for you and meets a plethora of other marketing needs.
How to use Social Listening for Influencer Marketing?
Social listening only aids your native search process by organizing the data better. Simply put, you are browsing through relevant social media comments after applying the required filters. So, how do you get started?
Identification
Any social listening tool allows you to set up a search for specific mentions or hashtags. If this hashtag or keyword is related to your area of interest/business/industry, you would find important people from within that community speaking about it. Mapping their influence score and audience reach with the social listening tool tells you about this influencer. Now, based on their influence scores, a social listening tool tracks all the important people talking about the keyword and presents you with the data. Influencer identification becomes easy when using a social listening tool.
Learning more about the Influencers and choosing the Right Fit.
Once you have identified prospective influencers to work with, a social listening tool presents you with a complete analysis of each influencer’s score, community reach, no. of posts, and engagement rate.
Swedish watchmaker, Daniel Wellington, built its social outreach strategy mostly around influencer marketing, since inception. The company approaches micro-influencers to spread brand awareness. The founder believed that several micro-influencers would create more buzz than one mega influencer. Different companies adopt different strategies and social listening tools which are built to serve any purpose. Auris, for example, lets you look for mega or micro-influencers on the same platform. Filters within Auris allows the admin to search for influencers by their influencer scores.
It is always advisable to closely follow an influencer before you choose to go ahead with them. Social listening tools can help you monitor your prospective influencers, they can help you find the right fit, but it is upon you to prove a great collaborator and get the influencer to champion your cause.
