I
want to talk to you about how to reach out to Influencers on social media.
What
is an Influencer? Very basically, an Influencer is someone who has a lot of
followers in a particular industry, in a particular business and by talking to
them about your business or about their problems, you will put yourself in a
position where you can get referred to or introduced to a much larger number of
customers in a particular sector.
What
I want to do in the next couple of minutes is talk about how you can use
Twitter to reach out to Influencers. The example I really like using is the
travel Industry, so if for example you are selling holidays in Northern France,
selling holiday villas, you might be looking to sell those villas in places
like Normandy for example but how do you do that? There are thousands and
thousands of people who want to buy holidays in Northern France. You can’t talk
to every single person; that would be a huge amount of work and not very
profitable. What you can do is that you can see on Twitter that there are lots
of people who are in a similar business to you who compliment what you do and
you have a lot of customers and followers who will be very interested in what
you have to offer.
For
example, one of the things you can do on Twitter is you can search in real time
for conversations that people are having.
You can search Northern France, you can search for a hashtag #Normandy,
and you can look up travel ideas Northern France, so there are lots of key
words you can search for. When you search those key words you will see in real
time the conversations that people are having and some of those conversations will
come from tourist authorities in Northern France or there will be people that
have complimentary services, so for example, there will be places of historical
interest, possibly amusement parks and all of those will be interested in
talking about or promoting accommodation in their area. What you need to be
doing is talking to those people because those people are Influencers. Once you
have monitored those conversations you then need to keep a list of people who
are possible Influencers.
One
of the things that Twitter has is a feature called ‘Lists’ and that means you
can keep a separate Twitter feed just of people who are Influencers. What you
do is, each time you see someone on Twitter who might be an Influencer, like a
Tourist Authority Northern France, what you do is click on their profile and
there is an option. You will see a silhouette symbol at the top of that
persons’ profile and there will be an option called ‘Add to List’ so you can
create a list of travel companies in Northern France. Once you have created
that list you can start actually monitoring the conversations those people are
having. If there is a conversation relevant to you, for example they are
talking about coming to Northern France or saying “come to visit this Amusement
or this place of interest”, you can then join in that conversation. You can ask
them about how far they are from where you are based, you can draw their
attention to other places of interest about where you are based, and you can
ask them about where people stay. What you are doing is building relationships
with people who have an audience that is going to be interested in what you
have to offer.
I
think the most important thing is that this is not just an on line
conversation. Twitter is a means to an end, not an end in itself. For example,
once you have met a Tourist Authority in Northern France, connect with them on
Twitter and suggest that you continue the conversation by phone or by email.
Agree on the various ways you can promote each other on Twitter. For example if
you have any offers that are of interest, they will re-tweet what you have of
interest to their followers. You can also draw attention to them by making sure
you re-tweet what they are talking about, or regularly engage with them. Just
by merely doing that you are drawing attention to yourself because each time,
say for example, there is a Tourist Authority in Northern France, if they
re-tweet something you have said or they reply to you, their followers will see
you so that will draw their attention to what you have to offer.
Just
to summarise – to attract more business on Twitter or on social media
altogether, you need to talk to Influencers. By talking to Influencers what I
mean is that you need to monitor conversations that you think will be relevant
to you and what you will do is find quite quickly that people in complimentary
businesses you can talk to and then if you get those people on board they will
promote what you have to say to your followers.
That
is my tip for the day. If you want to grow your business on social media, focus
on Influencers.
