Influencer marketing is when you create relationships with people that are important in your niche. Influencers often have such a large following that a simple mention of your products, services or content can lead to increased traffic, social shares, back links and sales.

Many social media experts rave about influencer marketing and yet it is quite confusing for a lot of people. The barrier to get into it seems too high but using some of the simple steps below, you can cover a lot of ground with very little effort and get into the deeper aspects of it later.

Influencer marketing is not just about reaching bloggers to review physical products. It is also great for professional services firms and any company looking to raise their own thought leadership status.

1. Create an influencer marketing strategy document

It’s important to think about your goals in relation to influencer marketing before you get started. Are you looking for direct sales, to spread your content, or get more traffic to your website? Knowing your objective and documenting it is an important first step.

As Joe Paluzzi of the Content Marketing Institute says:

“Have an influencer strategy. I would say 99% of businesses that say they want to partner with influencers actually have no strategy. Start with why you are engaging with influencers (what is it going to do for the business).”  @JoePulizzi

If you want to keep it really simple, create a one page strategy document outlining the following:

1. What is engaging with influencers going to do for our business?
2. What type of influencers do we want to reach the most?
3. How will we track your results? (E.g. more backlinks, shares and social engagement and or will you focus on sales etc.)

You can certainly create a much deeper strategy than this, but in my experience it is better to start small and have a completed document than to get way into the weeds and never finish.

2. Select influencers

Choosing influencers that are too large can result in no response, if you are just starting out. Picking people that aren’t quite at the top of the heap yet can result in faster progress. With that said, you might be pleasantly surprised at how many top-level people get back to you. Picking five of each tier is not a bad place to start.

Social influencer marketing tools to get you started

Generally speaking, top influencers have a large social following. Twitter is one of the easiest ways to find people of influence and these two tools can help you narrow down your search.

• Followerwonk by MOZ is a great tool to look for people with large Twitter followings in your niche.
  
  Rand Fishkin, the founder of Moz and who purchased Followerwonk to be part of his software in 2012 says:

  “I use Followerwonk for Twitter analytics, connecting to new people, and improving my use of Twitter (which is my primary social network)” @randfish

• Topsy is an amazing tool and according to the New York Times, it searches Twitter better than Twitter.
  

findyourinfluence.com is an interesting paid service and that helps you find and manage influencers or you can hire an influencer marketing agency to help.

There are lots of great influencer marketing tools but I suggest you start with one and get good at it for finding influencers before using another.

3. Share the content of your influencers using Buffer

Using the social media management tool called buffer, can help you to regularly share the content of your targeted influencers.

If you are going to build a social following, you are going to need to be sharing content that you discover. You might as well share the content of your influencers on a regular basis.

Buffer has a section called feeds. You can select 10 different blogs or websites with which you want to receive their latest updates.

By making the feeds your influencers, your regular content sharing activities will automatically be focused on them.

10 is a good place to start so you don’t get overwhelmed.

Joel Gascoigne, the founder of buffer says:

“The best things we know and love started as tiny things.”  @joelgascoigne

Check out my recent post on how to use Buffer for more details and a workflow.

4. Comment frequently on the blog posts of your influencers

By regularly sharing the content of your influencers and by making thoughtful comments on their blog posts, you gain trust and credibility with them.

Blog commenting is often considered spam but it is definitely not, if you’re doing it in a helpful way. Please do not make a mindless comment and slap in a backlink to your site…

The other great thing about blog commenting is that it forces you to read your influencers content more regularly. You can’t really make a helpful comment unless you get a vibe on the post and the community of people having a conversation.

Neil Patel of quicksprout.com and who is the co-founder of Crazy Egg, Hello Bar and KISSmetrics says:

“When you comment on other people’s blogs, you won’t see a ranking increase. Or at least it’s been my experience with all of my blogs. So when commenting, don’t do it for higher rankings. Instead, do it for traffic, branding, and conversions.”  @neilpatel

5. Quote your influencers in your content

Use quotes from influencers frequently in your blog posts like I am doing here. While it is fantastic if you can email them and get an original quote, it is perfectly fine to start with quotes that you take off of their website or even from other people that have quoted them.

You can link back to their website where the quote is from. When you share the content you have created on Twitter, make sure to use their Twitter handle.

PR services like helpareporter.com and PRLeads.com are largely driven by journalists looking for quotes from experts because good reporting isn’t just the voice of the media. If you ignore this long-standing tradition, your content will be mostly your own perspective without any other expert’s opinion or stats to back it up.

Aaron Agius, founder of Louder Online, when discussing using BuzzStream for influencer outreach says:

“If your piece of content is a blog post, put the quote in the post and add a link to the influencer’s website and social media accounts, such as Twitter. Once the article is published, email the influencer and tell them the content is published and ask them to share it on social media and possibly include it in their email newsletter.

This accomplishes two things: 1) you gain exposure to a new audience, and 2) your content becomes more reputable because you’re associating yourself with an influencer in your industry.

Reach out to multiple influencers. You probably won’t hear back from all of them, but you should hear back from at least one or two.”  @IAmAaronAgius

6. Use LinkedIn groups for influence marketing

Neil Patel says he pays about $5,000 a month to LinkedIn for advertisements to get people to join his LinkedIn group. If you don’t have a LinkedIn group, you can join someone else’s. Neil explains why this is so important below:

“An even better way to connect with an influencer on LinkedIn is to look at their profile to find the groups they belong to. Join one of those groups. As a member of a shared group, you’ll be able to send a connection request.

Once you have connections with influencers, you can direct message them. Your connections will get a notice in their email inbox (depending on their settings).” @neilpatel

Using this technique you can create more connections and get into the inboxes of more influential people, where you might not normally be able to get their email address.

7. Ask for a favor

Now that you have done your influencers a favor by sharing their content and engaging on their site, it’s time to ask them for a small favor.

The influence principle of reciprocity, as stated by Dr. Cialdini, says that if you do a small favor for someone, they are likely to return it. So while you might not get everyone to respond, you are now set up for success. So much more so than just emailing people out of the blue.

Here are a few things that you can ask influences to do for you:

1. Ask them to share your content. Send them an email or LinkedIn email and say something along the lines of:
   
2. Ask for an interview. Interviewing an influencer puts you side-by-side with them, which increases your trust and credibility with the general public. The influencer might benefit a little bit from your interview, but it is mostly for you.
3. Ask them if they will accept a guest blog post from you.
4. Give them story ideas or helpful, short, original quotes if they are a media site, that they can use in their next story.

Start small and win big

The days of simple search engine optimization strategies are long gone and if you really want to succeed with search and social media marketing, you need to be seen as an authority. Google will pick up on your thought leadership status from the backlinks, media mentions and social shares of your content and influencers are at the heart of the processes that make those things happen.

Hoping that that content that you create will do extremely well solely because of the long tail keywords in your website pages or simply because you threw it out there on social media despite a limited amount of followers, is short sighted. Trust me, I have personally made these mistakes in the past and hope you’ll join me on this more modern digital marketing journey.

Influencer marketing may seem complicated but a lot of the steps to do it are things you should be doing anyway, if you care about growing your business. Great things start small and if you keep it simple, you just might start to really enjoy it.

You are not alone if you have asked yourself whether or not using Twitter for business is worth it. When twitter first came out, some people thought it was just for letting people know what you had for breakfast. It got a bad rap and is still one of the more misunderstood social networks.

Over time, Twitter has become part of major political upheavals, is used by every major media outlet and is one of the top tools for serious digital marketers.

To be honest, it took me a really long time to get fully on board. Now that organic search engine optimization is so difficult and everyone is doing content marketing, you need all the help you can get to promote your content.

Why use Twitter for business on a daily basis and give it more than casual attention? These experts reveal how they really feel about using Twitter for business and personal use. There is not 1% of hesitation in these words.

1. Michael Hyatt who has 500k a month unique visitors to his blog and over 530,000 email subscribers isn’t just a fan of Twitter, it is clearly a social media tool that he cannot live without.
   
   “Twitter is one of key tools in my platform toolbox. It represents about 21 percent of my blog referral traffic. In terms of the return, I don’t know of a better investment.
   
   Currently, I have more than 110,000 followers on Twitter. According to TwitterCounter and RetweetRank:
   
   I am adding 73 new followers per day.I am re-tweeted 260 times per day.My total daily reach is 418,908.Yet, I spend less than thirty minutes a day on Twitter. I don’t know where else I could impact that many people with so little effort.” Michael Hyatt | @ michaelhyatt
2. Neil Patel has a habit of growing blogs like the ones for his companies Crazy Egg and Kiss Metrics to over 100k visitors a month. He puts Twitter before even making a blog…
   
   “Why do you think my companies have done so well from a traffic generation perspective? It’s because I’ve created a popular blog for each of my companies, right?
   
   Although that is correct, it’s not where we started our traffic acquisition. The very first piece of social media real estate that I create for any business I start isn’t a blog. It’s actually a Twitter profile.”
3. Rand Fishkin of Moz – a true SEO guru – is onboard 100% and has Twitter tools like Followerwonk in his software packages.
   
   “Twitter is really a platform for influencing, growing influence, gaining that thought leadership and authority” @randfish moz.com 
4. Dan Zarrella from HubSpot and writing for CopyBlogger says:
   
   “Twitter is a force that any serious web publisher needs to reckon with in order to gain maximum exposure for content.” Dan Zarrella @danzarrella
5. Brian Clark of Copyblogger says without Twitter you may be a tree falling in a forest that no one hears.
   
   “Twitter has become the place for sharing content links. If your content catches attention on Twitter and spreads, suddenly you’re getting significant traffic from people who may have never visited your site before.
   
   But don’t forget to share other people’s quality content on Twitter. This helps you build up a Twitter audience that values your editorial judgment, which in turns helps you when you have something of your own to share.
   
   In both cases, what you share on Twitter is not just about the actual value of the content. It’s also about whether the content gets viewed and appreciated in the first place.”
6. Guy Kawasaki, formerly the chief evangelist of Apple as well as author of
   
   The Art of Social Media, The Art of the Start, APE and nine other books, doesn’t hold back what he really thinks:“With some effort, you may come to view Twitter as I do: the best new marketing twool of this century. Tweet long and prosper.”
7. Mark Schaefer, author of The Tao of Twitter, likens Twitter to old school networking:“And the best approach to using Twitter is personal networking”.
   
   When he talks to clients, he asks them,
   
   “Are you the type of business that can benefit from going to a Chamber of Commerce meeting or a local networking meeting?” If you are, then yours is the right kind of business to be on Twitter.”
   
   And he goes on to tout it as a must do before spending all your effort blogging:
   
   “If you are a new blogger, you should probably spend more time developing an audience than creating your content.
   
   Here are three easy but overlooked tactics you can use to build an audience on Twitter, which is arguably the best platform for this.”

7 Twitter experts? Haha, more like 7 million…

In looking for people sharing the benefits of Twitter for business, I could have been at it for a years. There is no end to top bloggers and marketers having great things to say about Twitter.

Here are a few extras:

Ishita Ganguly writes for Social Media Examiner, which is the most well know social media blog. They have a huge amount of praise for and how to’s on Twitter marketing and she says:

“Twitter is a great platform for establishing yourself, growing an audience and making important connections.” Ishita Ganguly on Twitter from Social Media Examiner @GangulyIs

Pamela Vaughan from HubSpot, reveals a few nice stats to back up why Twitter is so powerful.

“Twitter can help you promote your content, provide helpful customer service, generate leads and customers, and much more. In fact, companies that use Twitter generate 2x more leads than those that don’t, and 42% of companies that use Twitter for marketing have acquired a customer through it .” Pamela Vaughan | @pamelump

Blog post promotion experts write about it constantly like it’s one of their children:

“Twitter – This is one of the best sites for getting content to go viral. Twitter is my lifeblood.” Hank Klinger | @Hankwklinger

It’s a go to marketing tool:

“Twitter is a hot spot for sharing and spreading great content. It’s one of the first places that we share our latest blog posts.” Kim Roach of buzzblogger.com | @buzzblogger

Looking for more Twitter quotes

I may come back to this and add more later. Mike “I can go a week without Twitter” Arrington, Robert Scoble, Seth Godin and Chris Brogan are just few I would like quotes from about using Twitter for business. Please reach out to me on Twitter or leave quotes in the comments below.

Why use Twitter for business?

If ranking in Google is important to you then you need a blog. That blog needs longtail keywords but it also needs promotion. Without Twitter, you are losing out on a substantial amount of sharing opportunities.

Having a social following makes you an authority to some degree. We all like to see large numbers of followers listed by the top experts. Social proof is a powerful thing that can help customers trust you.

Twitter power is one of the important factors that tools like Klout, Kred and Peer Index use to judge your social influence. Not that these tools are the be-all and end-all of authority but it is certainly relevant that you will be hard-pressed to get a high score with no Twitter account.

Another popular tool that gives you a grade on your marketing is marketing.grader.com from HubSpot. Here is what it looks like when you don’t have a Twitter account – or any other social media set up:

As it says right in the marketing grader tool, companies with even just 51 to 100 Twitter followers generate 106% more traffic than those with 25 or fewer.

Getting started with Twitter

Getting started is very easy and using Buffer is a great way to build up a Twitter following. For businesses and their staff looking to be seen as thought leaders, it all starts with sharing other people’s content and sprinkling in your own.

I am humbled by the knowledge of these Twitter experts and inspired to take it up a notch myself, before Twitter throttles back your organic reach like Facebook did.

If you’re still on the fence, consider the fact that there are almost no famous marketing experts or journalists not on Twitter… Are you willing to be one of those few?

Follow me on Twitter here:

@McDougallJohnD

Spammers have been gaming the system for as long as SEO and Social media have been around. There are plenty of people that would much rather take shortcuts rather than be authentic and put in the hard work it takes to develop content and be a thought leader.

Google got started with its famous PageRank algorithm, has patents on tracking authors and all kinds of things to clean up search results. This recent update adds even deeper social network spam detection and prevention.

According to Google patent expert Bill Slawski of SEO by the Sea:

“The patent proposes an approach to detecting spam across a social network. It does this by including a spam detector that includes modules such as a fingerprint generator, a comparison module, and a response module, so that once spam is found and identified, it can be responded to. The fingerprint module captures the characteristics of spam seen elsewhere. The comparison module can be used to identify that fingerprint in comments left in a social network.

In the patent is says:

“The fingerprint is compared to other fingerprints previously generated and stored. If the fingerprint matches any previously stored fingerprints, it is considered to be spam and processed accordingly. If the fingerprint does not match any previously stored fingerprints, it is posted in the social network.”

The Google patent is as follows:

Detecting spam across a social network
Inventors: Christopher Jones and Stephen Kirkham
Assigned to Google
US Patent 9,043,417
Granted May 26, 2015
Filed: July 10, 2012

Think of Google as a detective tracking down a criminal. They need to be able to keep track of the “bad guys” and have a system of doing so. Much like a fingerprinting system used by police, this system will identify patterns that spammers use when posting things like cheesy blog comments on trending posts.

Bill goes on to say:

“The patent doesn’t give us a road-map as to what spam is exactly, and provide ways for us to trigger the negative implications of spam. But if it did, it probably shouldn’t share information like that – a patent that may make it easier for people to spam the search engine would be highly undesirable.”

What’s the takeaway?

If you want to be tracked down and digitally fingerprinted by Google, then by all means, go make some mindless comments in social networks and in blog comments with a link to your irrelevant products or services. Then you will start to develop a devious reputation as a spammer and will forever be known by “Google’s black box” in that light.

If on the other hand you want to excel online with your content – that is the majority of your digital fingerprint – identify yourself and the things you produce.

Note how Bill summarizes his Authorship info at the end of his post:

Spam is not going away any sooner than petty criminals are. The search engines and social networks are getting more sophisticated all the time, so focus on quality in what you do right down to each and every blog comment or profile update. The more you do that, the more your fingerprint will be registered in the Google hall of fame and the more you will show up prominently in search and social media results.