Business Benefits
Identify promotional opportunities and increase reach.
Define your objectives and target audience for your Instagram influencer strategy.
To define objectives and audience, consider:
- Why are you looking for influencers? To promote your products to their Instagram followers, build brand awareness, start an ambassador program, or to reach a new audience.
- Who is your target audience on Instagram? View your Instagram demographics to see who you already reach.
- How many Instagram influencers are you looking for?
- Would you prefer a macro influencer with broad reach, or micro influencers with smaller, more engaged audiences?
- What type of person, like a college student, parent, or athlete, do you want representing your brand?
Create a spreadsheet to keep track of the Instagram accounts that you discover.
Open a spreadsheet on Google Drive, Microsoft Office, or your preferred platform. Create categories such as Account Name, Influencer Name, Follower Count, Engagement Rate, Audience Demographics, Industry, and Niche.
Check to see if any influencers are already engaging with your brand or content by looking through tagged images or followers.
Your existing customers and followers can be valuable brand advocates. Open your Instagram business account and see if any accounts:
- Comment on most of your recent posts.
- Reply or consistently watch your most recent Instagram stories.
- Tag your brand’s account in their own Instagram posts and stories.
- Consistently re-share your Instagram content.
Click their name to view their account page to see their follower count and profile. Look for the blue verified check mark next to names. Not all influencers have this check mark, but it indicates that this is the person’s real account, not a fan page or impersonator. It is usually reserved for brands, public figures, and celebrities.
Look up prominent personal niche blogs that discuss products, brands, or ideas in your industry or marketplace to see if they have an associated Instagram account and following.
Do a web search and use queries like:
- [your topic] blog
- how to [solve a problem that your company solves]
- the best [product category that your brand sells]
Look at the top search results and see if these blogs have an Instagram account. Their social media handle is often listed in their blog’s footer, header, or author bio. Alltop is another useful tool that aggregates user-curated blog posts.
Search Google for top [your industry] Instagram influencers.
Search for Instagram influencers, for example top beauty Instagram influencers or top fitness Instagram influencers. Narrow the results to make sure Google displays Instagram accounts that are still active and relevant.
To narrow results to your region and in the last 30 days on Google, click Settings > Advanced Search > Narrow your results by… > Choose your geographic region > Last Update > Up to a month ago > Advanced Search to update.
Browse an Instagram influencer platform for influencers in your niche or industry.
Example platforms include:
- Influence.co
- Upfluence
- AspireIQ
- HypeAuditor
Search these platforms via industry or keyword to find Instagram accounts that align with your business, product or industry. Most platforms also have the influencer’s bios, metrics, audience demographics, and niche.
Analyze the Instagram accounts for engagement, brand voice, and activity.
Review the list of accounts you’ve put on your spreadsheet and also record:
- Are they active? Ideally, the influencer should be engaging with his or her community daily.
- What type of content do they create? Are they videos, images, infographics?
- How do they interact with their audience? Does it align with your own brand voice?
- Do their followers engage with their content? Someone with 500,000 followers who only gets a few comments on a post is far less ideal than someone who only has 100,000 followers but gets hundreds of comments on a post.
Engage with influencers’ content by following them and leaving positive comments.
You can also share their content and tag them. When you reach out to them, you will have already shown an interest in their content. You will also learn more about their content, personality, and who they interact with on Instagram.
Last edited by @hesh_fekry 2023-11-14T16:10:31Z