How to Find Legitimate Social Media Influencers
By Kris Marie

How to Find Legitimate Social Media Influencers

As the term has been thrown about more and more, we are sure you’ve heard of “Influencer Marketing.”  If not, here’s a quick 411:

Influencer marketing refers to individuals who have a strong community of followers (social media communities including Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, etc) who are engaged with the influencer by commenting, joining an email list, and following the advice of these individuals.

Ok, now that you’re caught up a bit, let’s jump into the newest stat that came out.

Influencer marketers centralize upon one age range with 75% of influencers being between 18 – 34 years of age.

With this fact intact, this mostly means those in and around that age (although there are exceptions) are listening and consuming the messaging of the influencers in that age category.  (Probably somewhere from 14 – 40 years old)

How to know if an influencer is a good one:

There are many Instagram accounts out there with high numbers of followers.  This may seem like the perfect influencer for your product.  However there are some important steps you should follow to be sure you are connecting with the right influencer.

  1.  Look at the most recent posts.  How long ago were they posted?
    1. An active Instagram should be posting at least every day or every other day.  If the most recent post was more than one week ago, then check the frequency of posts.  If the most recent was 1 week ago but then from there the posts were coming everyday, it could be there is some reason for the lapse but it will go back to normal shortly.
    2. If the Instagram posts are erratic, once every other week or a longer time in between posts, then skip this one.
  2. Start looking at recent posts.  How many likes do they have?
  3. How many comments do the recent posts have?

The likes and comments on posts on an Instagram profile should be pretty consistent and a strong percentage of the number of followers an account has, somewhere between 5 – 10% of the number of followers.

The above three steps will definitely help in deciding on influencers.

You can repeat the above steps on other social platforms for influencers.