Those days are gone when you have to leave the comforts of your home or office to interact with other people face to face, or work in a physical office to earn money. Guess what? With the initiation of technology and social media you can now easily make money through the good usage of social media.
With the passage of time along with the advancement of technology and social media, people especially young people and businesses/brands are now considering social media as a necessity and basic requirement rather than just an amusement and pastime, which makes it easier and faster for you to earn money or help you reach to many people from all over the world to grow your business rapidly than ever.
But before we dig into a complete guide on how to become a social media influencer, let us clear you some misconceptions about social media influencers and their role in influencer marketing with their impact on online brands and business by their recommendations and honest reviews.
What is the job of Social Media Influencer?
Social media influencers have become the backbone of technology and information networks. Cleary social media influencer is someone with a noteworthy audience of online followers and usually of high trustworthy and organic profile within a specific industry whether it’s Beauty, Cooking, Video Gaming, or Fitness.
Becoming a social media influencer is an unstoppable, dangerous yet responsible job itself which requires a lot of dedication, persistence and hard work. This one is exactly a job that needs to be handled with a great deal sense of responsibility because whatever you put out on your social media has a real impact which means influencers have rare power to influence people, to change attitudes and mentality, which they can change for the better, and scarily, even for the worse too just by their knowledge, skills, or experience in a particular niche. So a social media influencer should hold himself/herself accountable for the good and the worst.
Social Media Influencer and Influencer marketing
Before the advancement and rise of internet, social media and influencer marketing, it was a limited arena only to celebrities and a few dedicated bloggers and social media influencers. But now, it seems like the world witnessed social media influencers’ rise, saturate the online market with a huge spike in popularity over the years and with good reason.
Influencer marketing refers to the promotion of a product, brand, business or an idea through the use of a person of influence on social media because influencer marketing cannot be run without social media influencers. Why? Because these social media influencers have a good grip on influencing people and the decisions of hundreds and thousands of people all over the world with their rising popularity and good marketing strategies.
Online Brands/Business and Influencer marketing
Influencer marketing is a part of social media marketing and online marketing which comprises endorsements and product placement for brands and companies from social media influencers, people and organizations that have a claimed to be an expert level of knowledge or have a good social influence in their field on social media.
Whereas, influencer marketing is not just important to influencers but more than very important to every kind of businesses and brands because collaborating with social media influencers can bring your brand or business recognition, enhance your reputation and standing on social media, audience engagement and increase conversions. They have the power to drive more people globally towards your brand, products or services and the reason is that the consumers trust the recommendations made by their favorite social media influencers.
Over to you
Hope that we have helped you understand the role of social media influencer not just in the influencer market but also in social media and our society that you might have figured out if becoming a social media influencer is the right thing for you to do because it comes with a lot of responsibilities and risks. It is rightly said that,
With great power comes great responsibility
By now, you should have a good idea of what being a social media influencer contains and must have figured out whether you’re the right kind of person or not. So our next target is to briefly guide you on how to become a social media influencer.
Now, let us take you to a complete guide on how to become social media influencers who know how to earn the trust of the people with their consistency, honesty and dedication.
How do you become a social media influencer in 2021?
Presently every industry has depicted a rise in influencers with influencer marketing phenomenally trending. So no wonder why influencer marketing has become a serious facet of the marketing job industry.
Being an influencer has become so lucrative and rewarding that no wonder why everyone wants to be one in their respective domains but know that it is not a piece of cake. It might look very pleasing and attractive to you but you always have to keep in mind that you are not the only person who wants to earn not just money but also success from this industry.
This year, we have witnessed many evolutions, updates, and changes in the social media industry. In all of this, many changes have been brought about in how brands are leveraging social media influencers today more than ever before which is spiking a huge rise of influencers in the social media industry. So we have gathered a few steps and guidelines you need to follow to give you the best possible chances of success and become a successful social media influencer in the presently competitive world.
Pick your Niche on your interests
Before you do anything else, find and know your niche. You need to choose a niche that you are interested in and can consistently create content about without getting bored because if you don’t have a niche that interests you it can be very difficult for you to do no matter what other advantages you bring to the table.
Choosing a niche is crucial because this can easily make or break your success as a social media influencer because the niche that you chose will depend upon what you are interested in. Most of the successful bloggers and social media influencers have spent most of their lifetimes mastering a specific niche by using their knowledge to educate the online community.
So we advise you to choose a niche in which you have some level of expertise in the field to be able to establish yourself as a social media influencer in this competitive world. Better to choose something you are passionate about, just find your calling or mix some of your interests together not to make it boring.
Boost and Optimize you Profile
Just when you are done with selecting your niche on the basis of your interests, the next thing that you have to do is pick your preferred social media platform and start working on optimizing your profile. Most of the social media influencers are popular one mainly one or two social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat but there’s only one preferred platform which they target the most.
So you should do the same, get ideas from their profile but don’t copy. Then direct all your energy and hard work on the selected channel only. If you don’t have a social media account on that platform then make one, or if your account already exists on that platform then you better optimize it for better audience engagement.
As today’s world is all about Instagram other than any social media platform then we suggest you to choose Instagram as your platform to be a social media influencer.
Understand your targeted audience
When you choose your niche, you must keep that in mind that what kind of audience you are about to target because finding your target audience is primary step towards becoming a successful and well-respected influencer, and in fact it’s the very first thing that you should do once you decide which niche to serve to your audience.
It’s another yet main key to the door of becoming a successful social media influencer, it is important for you to know who you are targeting and then do it well to build a loyal follower base. Understanding your targeted audience will help you increase engagement itself.
Create and Post Relevant yet organic content
Once your engagement starts to increase, create and post content that is relevant to your online audience. The more you are able to engage with your audience through your posts and content, the more people will be influenced by your opinions and recommendations.
Don’t sell so much and work on having more conversations with your virtual family. People are looking for juicy yet organic content that’s how you make your audience listen to you. Because the audience can sense when you are posting inorganic stuff and being inauthentic.
Improve your content strategy
Aside from carefully choosing a niche for your targeted audience, you should also learn how to develop a good content strategy. To formulate a good content strategy, you need to use a mix of different yet attractive content types, preferably the ones that your audience will most like.
It’s hard to exaggerate how important your content strategy actually is in the journey of becoming a successful social media influencer. Creating content doesn’t have to be insanely difficult nor money consuming on the best equipment or the newest and coolest gadget. But it can also be a simple tweet, a picture with a good yet informative and connecting caption, a tutorial, or even a Facebook/Instagram Live.
Consistency is the Key
Consistency is surely an important key to anything you want to achieve, whether it’s passion, dream, or even someone you love. Same as when it comes to becoming a successful social media influencer your content is the fuel that burns the fire at the heart of your influencer marketing strategy, but engagement is the spark that lights it. Yes, you heard it right.
You’ve to regularly engage with your audience, once you have thought about the type of content you will post because when people engage with your content regularly it sends a strong signal to those social media platforms that you are posting stuff that your audiences want to keep coming.
Choose to post daily weekly, or at any frequency that you’re comfortable with or work out on a schedule of yours but be consistent with your content so you can get maximum engagement on your posts.
How much money does a social media influencer make?
No doubt, working as a social media influencer looks very appealing and attractive to one’s eye. But the job isn’t easy as it looks. These influencers can make hundreds of thousands of dollars depending on their follower count and outreach success through advertising brands and products and sponsored posts.
But the amount of money social media influencers make totally depends on the number of their followers. More the count of followers increases the chances of taking a good amount of money to your home. But those social media influencers with huge numbers can easily drive serious traffic and deliver excellent results for big brands. The influencers with the most following also tend to be very expensive.
An average social media influencer makes a good amount of money from $30,000 to $100,000 per year by promoting, sponsoring and collaborating with brands. But any social media influencer with more than 1 million followers can make more than $100,000. So let the brands know that you are always up for collaborating to earn more.
How many followers do you need to be a social media influencer?
Numbers of the followers is the real game for any social media influencer but there is no such metric of followers for influencers as they tend to increase with the betterment of content. But those social media influencers with a great number of following can easily drive good traffic. Initially a person needs 20,000 followers or more to be counted as a social media influencer.
What is the future for Social Media Influencers?
The real question is, is there really any future for social media influencers? Because being a social media influencer isn’t something like any other occupation. But it is safe to say that being a social media influencer and influencer market is here to stay and going nowhere for a long time in future. Just like all other marketing strategies, influencer marketing is bound to change with new technologies and trends which are yet to witness more updates and trends in future.
No, there is a bright future for social media influencer marketing. Influencer marketing will get more into mainstream advertising and sponsoring because companies and brands will approach selective good social media influencers to promote their brand and attract a large audience helping you to drive traffic to your site and upsurge your brand equity.
Wrap up
Wrapping up with the hope that these points we mentioned above must have covered all your queries related to social media influencers and influencer marketing. So if you thing you are the right person to become another social media influencer then what are you waiting for? Not that you know all that you need to follow to become a successful social media influencer, you still need to be willing and able to put the work in. Because all your favorite social media influencers that inspire you didn’t wake up one morning and find themselves with hundreds of thousands of followers on their social media accounts.
Plus point to your journey would be to follow your favorite social media influencer’s footsteps and tips that they share other than these above mentioned steps. On the top of that all you need to do is work hard and fight your luck, so good luck!