Find Social Media Influencers in Minutes

If I listed some top celebrity names like Christiano Ronaldo, Justin Bieber, Taylor Swift, A riana Grande, Selena Gomez, Dwayne Johnson, Kylie Jenner, and Katy Perry, you’d probably think they were involved in some type of upcoming TV or media special. The truth is, they’re all in the top 10 social media influencers, and collectively have over 1 Billion followers on social media platforms. That’s right, it’s “Billion” with a capital “B!”

So, what is a social media influencer? It’s someone who uses various social media platforms to promote different products and services to their followers. They have such notoriety that they’re able to influence a person’s purchasing decisions based on the relationship that they’ve built with their audience. And going back to that collective “1 Billion Followers,” that audience is huge!

Marketers use these influencers to reach their various target audiences to sell their various products. Once they begin promoting a product or service, their audience associates that influencer with the company’s product – and sales begin to soar. Make no mistake, those influencers are paid well for providing companies access to their followers; Kylie Jenner, for example, is paid $1.2 million per post. A Christiano Ronaldo earns $975,000 per post, and Ariana Grande isn’t far behind with $966,000 per post. Why would companies pay so much money for a single post? Because it sells products!

Just to be clear, you don’t have to be a Kylie Jenner or a Christiano Ronaldo to become a social media influencer. And, you don’t need millions of followers either. There are many “micro influencers” who have as few as 1,000 followers that earn good money promoting products on social media. And while the average age of influencers is between 25 and 30, young kids are making money as well. Think about this: the Number 1 YouTube earner last year was only 7 years oil – with a following of more than 21 million subscribers, “RyanToysReview” earns big bucks unboxing and reviewing toys.

Cybersecurity Problems

Companies often are faced with cybersecurity issues when it comes to influencers. Some pretend to be someone they’re not, and use their ruse to hack into followers’ accounts in order to steal their usernames, email addresses, phone numbers and passwords that are unsecured. Unfortunately, it happens far too often.

Fake influencers aren’t easy to detect, and even Instagram has problems with crooked influencers who purchase databases of phony “followers.” Companies considering hiring an influencer should vet them, starting by using Nuwber to verify their true identity by entering their phone number, email address or other pertinent information. It’s a fast and reliable way to see if the person claiming to be a legitimate influencer really is one.

Finding Reliable Influencers

To avoid those cybersecurity problems, companies have a couple of options when it comes to finding a reliable and legitimate influencer. One way is to use an influencer marketing agency who has many celebrity and micro influencers on their roster. Sure, they charge for their efforts, but for companies that have large budgets to work with it’s money that’s well-spent. In addition to helping find the appropriate influencer, they are able to help with managing the influencer, developing content to use on the various social media platforms and provide an analysis of results

Some of the top social media influencer marketing agencies include Obviously, Viral Nation, Kairos Media and Upfluence, among others. Fees vary and some have exclusive access to some of the top influencers on the various platforms. They’re all successful and have helped many companies in many different niche categories. They also can help when it comes to conflicts and problems.

Those problems have to do with an influencer who turns out to be fake, or doesn’t have the followers they claim to have. The agencies also work to avoid any ethical problems, in instances where the influencer is involved in activities or behaviors that damage the brand’’s integrity and image. Scandals happen, after all, and companies have little control over their outcome. But marketing agencies know how to do damage control and how to work with their influencers to avoid them in the first place.

Another option to using an influencer marketing agency is to use software that helps to find influencers for specific types of products and services. These platforms use complex algorithms to scour through databases to find the appropriate influencer. While they are much less expensive than a social media influencer marketing agency, they do have some drawbacks.

First, they’re limited in their choices. They certainly don’t have access to celebrity influencers with millions of followers. Also, they don’t provide help with content creation or analytics. However, they can help to find micro-influencers looking to monetize the followers that they do have. Some of the top software influencer marketing platforms include Grin, CreatorIQ, #Paid, and Influsoft, among others.

The budget will determine which direction to go, but either wayfinding relevant influencers can dramatically boost a brand’s image and sales volume.