How to Build Relationships with Influencers

November 22, 2015 by  
Filed under Featured Articles, Front Page

 

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Building relationships or strategic partnerships with industry influencers or thought leaders in your niche will help generate targeted traffic, and build powerful organic links and social signals to your website. It also allows you to build a reputation as an authority figure yourself in the proces. As you do so however, don’t make the mistake of ignoring everybody else. Everyone in your niche can add value in one form or another to your business.

 

Who Is An Influencer Or Thought Leader?


As Andre
Hospidales, who offers SEO services through his website, SEOSocialGeek.com put it, “a thought leader is someone who is widely recognized and respected as a leading authority or expert in his niche industry”. A great example of a thought leader is Neil Patel of Quicksprout. Neil is one of the most influential people in the digital marketing industry, and any one of his blog posts can generate thousands of readers within hours of release.”

Thought leaders are extremely active on social networks, especially Twitter and Google+, and spend a lot of time blogging and curating high quality content.

By interacting and communicating with a thought leader you are:

  • developing a mutually beneficial relationship with a highly influential entity. By interacting with them you are increasing your credibility and reputation.
  • you are obtaining expert insight into your chosen field.
  • you are able to obtain a professional opinion into your product and will be able to make changes to your product or business for the better.
  • they will have contacts that they will undoubtedly wish to share with you, if you make it worthwhile for them.

Within any social network, influencers and thought leaders hold the key to accessing a large group of people (typically their followers and connections) or as connectors (allowing you to connect to people who matter and whose followers will significantly amplify your message). Social influence is determined by a wide variety of engagement factors, including likes, retweets, number of followers, mentions and quality of followers. Thought leaders can also help your content be discovered by other influential people, who then share it with their followers. Leveraging thought leaders in this way helps to amplify your website’s “social signal,” which will make it easier to index and rank in Google’s search index.

It is critical for you as a business to be able to first of all identify what type of influencers you have in your network and second what their area of interest is. Engaging with thought leaders can make the difference between your content being seen by a few people, and truly going viral.

 

How to Find Influencers


Ultimately, the goal is to find individual influencers and the online sites where they are spending their time. Start off by identifying the most popular pieces of content in your niche that has been shared on the major social networks. One of the quickest ways to do this is by using a free tool by socialcrawlytics.com.

Social Crawlytics is a free tool that allows you to identify top content (based on social shares across the major networks) related to any particular niche. Essentially, you can use this tool to dig through leading industry blogs or competitors to find which content has been shared the most.

Behind the top performing content you are able to gather are the influencers that are getting their curated content seen by others within the industry. They are the people you should be building relationships with.

Topsy:

A quick way of identifying thought leaders is by using another great free tool, Topsy. Topsy is a social search tool that you can use to find exactly who has shared any given URL via Twitter (and Google Plus). You can also take a look at ‘influential users’.

Alltop:

Another great place to start looking for online influencers is by using the Alltop tool. Alltop aggregates the top blogs on a number of different topics. Top bloggers from most niches can be found using this free service.

LinkedIn Groups:

For some industries, LinkedIn groups is a great place to hunt for influencers. You’ll find that the organizers and active members within these groups are often influential.

Here are a few ways to build relationships with influencers:

  • Start the process by listening to the conversations that the influencers you are targeting are creating and contributing to. Your goal should be to become part of those conversations.
  • Look for every opportunity to provide assistance to an influencer. For example, promote their content, cause and products. When you provide assistance, you build credibility, trust and social capital.
  • For every six pieces of content shared through your social media channels, four should be pieces of content from your influencer target that are also relevant to your target audience. This means that 67 percent of the time you are sharing content that is not yours, and calling attention to content from your influencer group. One of the pieces of content you share should be original, informative content that you have created. When you share influencer content, they notice. And since you are sharing this content without asking for anything in return, those influencers may reciprocate by doing the same for you some day.
  • Engage with influencers by making sensible and meaningful comments on their content. Make sure that your comments demonstrate your knowledge and add real value to the post. Contribute to their Facebook pages and LinkedIn Groups
  • Share relevant content directly to the social influencers to increase the likelihood of it being picked up by and featured on major sites.
  • Message them when appropriate.
  • Create content for them.