In an era of social media, having knowledge about how to find the right influencers who can help you to introduce your products to your ideal audience is the best way for generating sales. It is very rewarding to put your time in building a bond with high-quality influencers and getting their help in building your community. 

If you can’t keep up with this latest trend in digital marketing, you sure are going to lose some shares in the market against your competitors. Therefore, you should be agile to find the best influencer for your brand before your competitors do. There are multiple tips and tools to find the most relevant influencers. Some of them can be very time consuming and ineffective. So, here are some most useful tips and tools for you which you will need for audience building, increase your social following and getting more shares in the market.

Social media

Be aware that there are already some people who talk about your product or products that are complements or substitutes for your product. Posts or social media mentions about those products can lead you to these people.

Thanks to social media monitoring or listening tools, you can easily find who is a fan of your product or similar products. Mention and Google Alerts can be a great example of these tools, where you can easily track mentions of your brand or product. Once you find those influencers, take your time to get more knowledge about their engagement rate, demographics or reach. If they are suitable in every way, then contact them in the most proper way in order to get their attention.

Hashtags

Hashtags are great because they make the content very obtainable. Almost every social media have hashtags to make the content very achievable for everyone. Also, people, really like to use hashtags in their post which make them even more obtainable. 

You can either search for hashtags that are relevant to your brand or you can search for hashtags like #ad #influencer #sponsored in order to see who is already interested in promoting products. If you are going to search for hashtags that are relevant to your brand, try to be specific, so you can get better results and save your time.

Once you liked someone’s content, do not jump into connecting with them. Review particular metrics that are important to you – check if their audience is ideal for you, assess their engagement level, and see if their other post is also relevant to your brand. When everything is okay, then do not forget to add the influencer to your list in order not to forget about them and keep your bound with them. It is very necessary for turning them into brand advocates.

Advanced search tools

Some social media like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin have advanced search tools. This is very time-saving as you can dive deeper faster. 

Search for the topic that you are interested in. Once the search results come out, you will have the chance to use filters for people. You will have several filters like location, industry, company, business type and so on. Choose the filter that you need and the search will give you the results that are very close to your need. 

The aim is to reduce the number of results and retain only the most relevant and needed ones. The advanced search tools can give you very specific information and also you can easily contact the influencer through used social media.

Influencer Marketing Platforms

If you want to skip all the steps above, you can use influencer marketing platforms that do everything for you. Keepface Influencer Marketing Platform can be an example of such kind of platforms. It introduces you to its database of influencers with their social media profiles, performance data, audience analysis, and special insights. 

You can get to know the location (country, state, city), demographics (gender, age), score and ranking of each influencer. It also provides you with top-performing posts, estimated impressions, posting frequency and followers growth of the influencer. 

With the Audience analysis tool, you can get valuable information like demographics, languages, ethnicity, interests of audiences. You can also benefit from a special insight that tells you about influencer media value, similar influencers by content and audience, as well as, fake followers. It is a very user-friendly and all-in-one platform. 

You can easily register as a brand, create your own projects, find influencers for these projects from a wide range of influencer database and get the creative help of an in-house project team for briefing the influencers. 

It’s the fastest way of finding the most ideal influencers for your brand 

All the tools above can be very helpful and effective if you use them in the right way. You can try them and choose the most appropriate and effective one for yourself. But do not forget that if you want to add influencer marketing to your strategy then you better learn how to use Influencer Marketing Platforms because they are the most time-saving and cost-effective way. 

Also, bear in mind that these influencers are getting various offers from different companies. Therefore, you should come with the best offer in order to get their attention. Once you find the fitting influencers for your project that would be a huge mistake to lose contact with them when the project ends. The more you build closer relations with them, the more they will be willing to promote your product. 

It is a fact that social media platforms like Whatsapp, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram changed our lifestyle. Exceeding 1 billion users, TikTok has changed into one of the most common social networking apps all around the world. So we do not have to miss mentioning this app. And before getting to know TikTok influencers better, we should get an idea of what is TikTok.

TikTok is a social networking app, users utilize to make short musical creative videos and these videos last up to 60 seconds. It was introduced in 2017 by China-based innovator ByteDance but then it was converted into the combined app because of the reason that ByteDance acquired Musical.ly spending 1 billion and merged these two apps into one app named TikTok in 2018. Despite operating just for one year, it got a lot of recognition and actively used by 500 million people (Datareportal, 2019). Nowadays one of the most-used social apps is TikTok and we do not have to be surprised about the tremendous increase of TikTok users day by day.

We have created a list of top 10 TikTok influencers to follow in 2020.

#1 Flighthouse

20-year old Jacob Pace created a community named Flighthouse featuring entertaining content for YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Spotify.

Flighthouse creates short videos about different online trending topics which are discussed by social influencers and also these influencers are playing such kinds of games in where the ones are given trivial, but interesting questions.

If you are rooting for TikTok influencers Charli and Dixie D’Amelio, you can watch the Flighthouse video in which they play “the finish TikTok lyric game”.

#2 Red Bull

If you are into Red Bull products, and, at the same time, extreme sports like snowboarding, you have to watch Red Bull’s TikToks immediately.

The famous motto which we know from commercial videos of Red Bull is “Gives you wings”. I can recommend you groovy gifted snowboarder named Zeb Powell from North Carolina. His moves on snow will give you chills and who knows maybe will encourage you to be the best snowboarder.

#3 BabyAriel

Ariel Rebecca Martin, professionally well-known as Baby Ariel can be an inspirational model for young TikTok creators. She is a winner of the Teen Choice award in the years of 2016 and 2017. Her name was highlighted among the most persuasive and authoritative people’s names by Time and Forbes magazines. If you like her content, we have good news for you. Baby Ariel also has a Youtube channel and in there she releases musical videos for her original songs.

#4 Leticiafgomez

One of the most creative TikTok influencers is Leticia from Brasil. She is not as famous as Baby Ariel, but her content makes us feel very surprised to even more than Baby Ariel. She transforms herself into different great singers like Freddie Mercury, Michael Jackson and so on. Not only the singers but also the other famous figures such as  Albert Einstein and fictional characters like Monalisa are being resuscitated by her makeup.

#5 Jason Coffee

Sometimes you just need to watch cute and fun family moments and get chilled. His 15-years old daughter, Peyton, and 14-years old son, Caleb make Jason’s videos funnier. If Jason’s TikTok videos are not enough for you to know what is happening in his funny family, you can follow his Instagram account as well. The number of his followers is 14.8 million on TikTok and 551k on Instagram.

#6 Salice Rose

Peruvian-American social character Salice Rose’s content is also for getting thrilled. Salice is so passionate about dancing and spends her leisure time dancing and making funny videos. The funny videos she shares put the smile on your face. But if you subscribe to her Youtube channel and watch her videos, you will realize that she is a true inspirational model. She explains to us of her getting through a tough teen life and its affection to her emotional well-being. She is a prosperous businesswoman now. Salice gives you a lesson that if you are in trouble, it is not the end of the world. The only thing that matters is how you react to the difficulties happening in your life.

#7 Our Fire

It is a shared TikTok channel created by the couple, Chris and Sharla. If you want to watch enjoyable TikTok videos with your partner, you have to pick Our Fire without hesitation. Their lifestyle and personality are as colorful as their hair. The interesting fact is that they’ve met with each other via Tinder. This proves the importance of the social networking app that you do not just know new people with new tastes, interests, and cultures, but you can also find your soulmate

#8 Rybkatwinsoffical

Teagan and Sam Rybka are twin acrobats and dancers who took part in Australia’s Got Talent and became semi-finalists. This participation helped them gain success. The twins show their amazing acrobatic movements to the fans who follow them via TikTok.

#9 Cierra Mist

If you love dolphins, I can recommend you this profile. You can even see leaping dolphin sign next to her name on TikTok. She shared the video about the dolphin throwing person to the air without difficulty. It was her first video. Cierra worked with different animals like sea lions, seals, and dolphins. Her passion for dolphins comes from there. The funny and interesting fact about Cierra is that she passionately wants to get Ellen’s attention. Her personal aim is to go live every day to draw her attention.

#10 Zach King

American filmmaker of Austrian, Chinese and Nicaraguan descent gained the most of his fame via magical and illusional vines. He calls his videos “digital sleight of hand”. Besides Youtube and Vine, he’s also famous on TikTok. The content of the videos Zach makes and shares make us call him a magician. He is the winner of the Hewlett-Packard commercial competition in 2010 and YouTube’s NextUp Creators contest in 2013. If you are into videos with magical and illusional effects, Zach’s videos are for you.

As influencer marketing is the direct way of authentically reaching out to possible customers it is still the epicenter of brands’ digital marketing strategies. Influencers have an inevitable impact on consumer purchases. That’s why, brands focus their strategies on influencer marketing. 

The problem here is fraudulent activities by influencers. Conventionally, brands were in search of influencers with a large audience to partner with. However, trust and authenticity issues punched the influencer marketing in the last years. Unsuccessful influencer campaigns made brands understand the importance of engagement rate over the number of unreal followers. Fake social media accounts, bot followers, pods are ways of decisive activity that cause influencers to inflate their fees. Influencer fraud damages the whole market by dead-loss investments and diminishing ROI.

Reason behind influencer fraud is the lack of transparency

There are different types of fraud activities on Instagram such as bots, pods, and fake accounts. Let’s see what all these mean. 

Bots are unreal profiles with no followers. 

Pods are instead like a group of people who agree to like and comment on each other’s posts to artificially raise engagement. Fake social activities take place in almost all social platforms in different forms. 

In May 2018, Facebook alone deleted 583 million fake accounts. YouTube announced the fake video views susceptibility by influencers to blow up their views counts and all these fraudulent views will be removed as new evidence comes to light. As Instagram is the number one platform for sponsored posts, influencer frauds mostly occur on this platform. 

According to the CHEQ report, fake influencer activity cost brands 1.3 billion in 2019 and expected to reach 1.5 billion this year. Plus to monetary costs, influencer fraud has indirect costs causing the loss of trust by consumers. It has a lot more sizeable impact on the industry that can change consumer behavior.

How to spot fake activity?

Engagement rate

Engagement is the first factor to define if the account has fraudulent activities or not. If the engagement rate of influencers highly deviates from the average platform engagement rate it is the most probably because of influencer fraud. However, bot accounts do play with likes and comments to pretend trusty influencer images. Thankfully, bot comments also can be revealed by human involvement. If the influencer gets a huge number of the same positive comments or emojis it is probably by the bot accounts.

Follower growth rate

Influencer growth rates can tell a lot about the soundness of the influencers’ profiles. If influencer gets sudden hikes or falls in the number of followers that is because of buying bots or due to deletion of fake followers by the platforms. Trusty influencers show steady growth over time as they built their followers authentically.

The demonstrative way to find out if the influencer has done any fraud or not is checking out post captions. If an influencer tends to write small captions or emojis all the time it implies that influencer does not care about the aesthetics of their profile. Authentic influencers write long and meaningful captions, usually asking questions at the end. Quality captions also depict how influencers are interested in building relations with followers. 

Influencer fraud can also be defined by going into followers’ accounts. Too much presence of profiles with no image and also, no followers manifests the fraudulent activity by influencers.

Do not forget to check the comments

Scroll down and read the comments. If influencer gets single-word comments like “Great!”, “Awesome!”, only emojis and repetitive lines in most of their posts and if they do not match with the content of the posts that is the sign of influencer fraud. Community building is the key to successful influencer activity. Real influencers engage with the followers by liking and replying to the comments.

How to guard your brand against influencer fraud?

So, influencer marketing fraud is one of the biggest challenges that most marketers and brands are facing today. The best way to protect your brand against influencer fraud is an in-depth investigation of influencers you want to partner with. Find out where their success comes from, their content or simply Google their names to see the campaigns they worked before.

Micro and nano influencers may not have partnerships with big brands to be mentioned; however, you can view their stories or posts and check the comment sections to see the quality of their job. As you can say, it is a long-running process to clearly decide on the right influencers. Influencer marketing platforms can help to reduce time spent on influencer reach and also providing reliable influencers based on their wide experience.

Influencer Analytics Tools

AI-Powered Keepface Influencer Analytics designed to assist brands in finding the right people. The tool helps you to find related influencer by giving insights about influencer profiles including performance metrics, influencer ranking, demographics, audience analysis, and special insights such as influencer media value, analysis of comment, fake influencer detection, similar influencers by content and audience.

Influencer marketing conferences are to meet likeminded people in the industry and to acquire the latest marketing technics and trends in digital marketing. These conferences help to learn by professionals and set new challenges ahead. Check out the list of upcoming Influencer Marketing Conferences not to miss any opportunity!

Pubcon

Where: Austin, Texas

When: 6 February 2020

Bloggers, podcasters, SEOs, content marketers, social media marketers and, etc can attend this event. The conference will cover large scale industry topics such as linking, keyword research, in-house, agency, Adwords, conversion, tracking, demo & psychographic targeting, social media platforms, email, content marketing and, etc. goals of the conference are to educate, network and fun.

Podcast Movement: Evolutions

Where: Loss Angeles, USA

When: 12-15 February 2020

The aim of the Podcast Movement is to reach progressive podcasters and grow the podcast community. Three track events will simultaneously feature the different podcaster groups (creator podcasters, professional podcasters, industry professionals) to maximize the value for each group.  The Evolutions is to deeply analyze the latest trends and change the industry ecosystem.

SMX West

Where: San Jose, California

When: 19-20 February 2020

Available for SEOs, SEMs, marketing analytics. SMS West hopes to support its attendees to leverage their services by learning from experts.on topics site speed, pros and cons of automation, in-house digital commerce, SEO for e-commerce, managing and optimizing B2B, LinkedIn ads, Google analytics, link building and many more.

Influencer Marketing Strategies Summit

Where: Chicago, Illinois

When: 28-30 April 2020

Available for marketers, brands, agencies, creative people, social media users. The conference will be lead by professionals and speakers. The conference is dedicated to social media marketing and ways to help marketers to launch, scale and measure their influencer marketing. The summit aims to teach how the industry performs and the ways to achieve future goals to reach the potential.

Youth Marketing Strategy

Where: London, UK

When: 29-30 April 2020

 Marketing strategies for younger customers differ from your marketing strategies to adults. Traditional marketing channels such as banners, TV commercial is not trust-worthy enough for Gen Z. They trust one another and they trust influencers who promise products or services or brands can and will make their lives easier. This event is best place, full of freshest ideas and invaluable networking opportunities that will drive your Gen Z marketing strategy forward.

Online B2B Conference

Where: Munich, Germany

When: 23-24 June 2020

The conference is aimed to deliver the strategies for successful B2B marketing. Participants will have industry insights such as community building, content marketing, and influencer relations. The conference offers information exchange between participants and speakers. Experts will provide industry performance measures and the ways to implement it to B2B marketing.

Inbound 2020

Where: Boston, USA

When: 18-21 August 2020

Every year Inbound delivers inbound marketing and sales strategies to the dedicated marketing community. The forum teaches the ways to build a personal brand and new partnerships. Apart from actionable education, you will have a chance to meet and connect to industry stars and entertainment.

Content Marketing World Conference and Expo

Where: Cleveland, Ohio USA

When: 13-14 October 2020

The conference will be held by global content education and training company Content Marketing Institute. The conference is available for marketers, social media managers, sales experts. Content Marketing Institute has been providing training, consulting services for more than nine years. You will be able to advance your storytelling as your powerfull digital marketing strategy.l Some of the global brands like Loreal, Nestle Microsoft, Dell, Chevron, Wallmart and, etc. are expected to share their success stories et the event.

Digital Marketing World Forum

Whens & Places: 18-19 February in Singapore; 28-29 May in London; 16-17 September in New York; 25-26 November in the Netherlands.

The conference dedicated to exploring the latest trends in digital marketing, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, e-commerce, content marketing, influencer marketing, and etc. representatives. DMWF will take place on 18-19 February in Singapore, 28-29 May in London, 16-17 September in New York and 25-26 November 2020 in the Netherlands. Speakers from leading tech, finance, beauty, marketing companies will share case studies and examples on the field of digital marketing. DMWF has four tracks including influencer and social media marketing, content and digital brand strategy, digital experience and e-commerce, and data and disruptive tech strategies. The conference topics are social analytics and metrics, personalization and CX, customer loyalty and retention, blockchain and marketing, brand voice strategy, the impact of digital convergence on customers, and etc.

Global Influencer Day 2020

Date & Place will be announced soon

Holding second in its history, Keepface Influencer Marketing Platform organizes Global Influencer Day will bring together brands, marketing specialists and of course influencers. Brand representatives, sparkling influencers, marketing, and PR pros will discuss the insights of influencer marketing and its growing trends. Technology company representatives will talk about the philosophy of influencer marketing from social media perspectives. Further, at the events, brand representatives will share their successful influencer marketing experiences and their achievements. And of course, after-party in the end.

Everyone enjoys being entertained, which is why humor in content marketing is a powerful tool. Brands are increasingly incorporating humor into their marketing strategies. Why? Because humor sells. It can help to boost your brand’s identity and grow your audience, which is ideal for growing your business. So, how can you add humor to your business blog?

Know Your Audience

We all like to laugh, but what each person finds funny is vary variable. In order to make humor work for your blog posts, you need to know who is reading them. 

You can use analytics to help you get a sense of the demographics of your readers. This can then help you to focus your humor more successfully. After all, humor is subjective. You probably won’t please everyone, but you stand a better chance of writing something most people will find genuinely funny if you fully understand who your audience is. 

You want to write humorous content that will be engaging and help increase your audience. What is funny to someone in their 50s might be boring for a teenager and vice-versa. You want to avoid writing content that will be perceived as overly offensive or distasteful. Similarly, you want to write humor which is authentic and in-keeping with the identity of your brand.

So, create content that is specifically designed for your audience to show that you understand them. Humor will also help to make boring or dull topics seem more interesting, as well as help to put your audience in a good mood, making it more likely that they will come back again.

Use Visuals

Images, GIFs, and memes go a long way in expressing a simple idea in a funny and direct way. It’s well known that the use of visuals on blog posts helps to entice and engage readers. Luckily, visuals can also help to bring in some humor.

“Memes add a bit of expression to your humor and are simple to make,” says Andrew Summers, a marketing blogger at Gumessays.com and Researchpapersuk.com “You can either create your own images or use one which is freely available in the public domain. Just make sure they are free from copyright. Then just use Photoshop, or even just Paint, to create your own memes. Or you can meme generators online, such as Meme Generator – Imgflip. GIFs are another great addition. There are millions to explore freely on sites such as Tenor or Giphy. GIFs and memes are more successful than using stock photography because of the way they interact with the text. Or you can use cartoons, illustrations or even comic strips. They work particularly well to add some humor to serious or heavy topics. “

Remember that whilst visuals can add to your blog post, if overused, they can actually distract readers. Use them sparingly to really achieve the desired impact.

Write Fun Blog Posts

The content or copy of your blog post in itself should be fun and engaging to read. Whilst visuals are a simple and effective way to inject some humor into your posts, don’t neglect the power of words. Remember to keep it simple and to the point.

“One of the easiest ways to add some natural humor into your blog post is to get yourself into a fun, light-hearted mood when you start to write,” says Mark King, a business writer at Luckyassignments.com and Writinity.com.  “Don’t get too serious about the topic you’re writing about, even if it is serious. Write fun content. You can joke around and tell some stories. Use metaphors and similes to inject some light-hearted humor into your writing. Readers really enjoy it when you share some of your personality through your posts. 

Don’t be afraid to include funny anecdotes or even embarrassing or awkward encounters you’ve had. What you want to avoid is making jokes or snide remarks about individuals. But there’s no reason not to mock yourself, and to share the wisdom you learned during some of the mistakes you’ve made.”

It’s Over To You

Humor is a potentially very powerful content marketing tool if you take the right approach. Remember to tailor your humor to your audience and to the content you are creating. Not only will humor help you to connect with your audience, but it can also help to boost your brand’s reputation. 

Brands centralize their marketing strategy on influencer marketing to reach the target customers in the fastest way. The success of your campaign heavily depends on the quality of content that generates engaging and genuine results. For an organic partnership with influencers, brands tend to seek long-term relations with their favorite influencers. The obvious benefit of long-term collaborations is that it builds trust for both influencers and brands. It generates more engagement, increased brand awareness, and higher ROI. Let’s dive deeper into how to build long-term relations with influencers, even post-campaign.

Why long-term relations are important?

One-off projects usually do not create strong results as long-living ones. The quality of posts and content also differs significantly. Influencers put a lot of effort for long-term campaigns. Working together for a long time allows influencers to better understand the values, requirements of brands and create more desired content with their creative touch.  When influencers post constantly about a specific brand, it shows their devotion to the brand which then leads to follower loyalty.

From the brand side, brands’ attitude to long-term relations also indicates how they prioritize the audience of influencers. Even in one-off projects influencers that generate higher results are a good source for your next one-off projects. The more you work together better you understand each other. Working with the same influencers reduces the time spent on influencer outreach and briefing.

Ways to run successful long-term influencer campaigns

An in-depth search of the influencer market 

The first step is to find the best influencer for your campaign. Before starting a campaign investigate a good search on the influencer market. While audience size, industry, demographics of followers are initial factors you have to check, there are other crucial things to pay attention to. Follow influencers’ social media activity, read their captions, blogs, watch their videos. Just like a true friendship, building long-term relations with influencers also takes a long time. The social issues that influencers show care and support are other measures that should be appropriate to your values. Third-parties such as agency or influencer marketing platforms are a smart and fast way for reaching out to the best ones.

Relevance of influencers

For successful long-term partnerships and genuine results, pick only relevant influencers. The relevance of influencers implies the relevance of the audience which will buy your products at the end.

Creativity is key

Often in long-term relations brands allow influencers to prove their creativity within the framework of projects. Repeating the content word-by-word sounds like the usual advertising on TV. Yes, it is important to set a campaign agenda, and rules. At the same time, influencers have to feel free to give their ideas and reveal their creativity.

Decent payment

Payment reflects how brands values influencers in real. Payment affects how they are motivated to work as your employees. Companies usually tend to send free and sample size products. The payment should be defined according to the influencer’s number of audience, location, product, the purpose, and project duration. Unequal payments also affect the length of projects.

Do not forget to thank 

Always say your sincere thanks to the influencers at the end of the campaign. You can send a hand-written letter indicating how you are pleased by working with them, some sweet gifts.

Post-campaign relations

Now, the tricky part, how to keep relations even you do not have ongoing projects? Just let them know that you do not forget about them. Send your wishes for special days of influencers, mention them in your posts or stories, invite them to your events, periodically like even comment on their social media posts. Show your support for their success and hard work. Treat them as industry experts. You can discuss what consumers need and expect from, what is missing by the brands and ask their opinion for resolution. 

Keeping all facts in mind, your goal is to gain and sustain your customers around you. Do not forget your customers while focusing too much on the influencer side.

The reasons for people to join social media groups differ from their interests, backgrounds, needs. These groups usually managed by admins who have experience or particular knowledge on the subject of theme. Alongside communicating people around the same interest, improving knowledge, skills, social discussions, social media groups are powerful marketing techniques in terms of customer outreach and increased brand awareness.

Being the hub of engaged customers, social media groups are an easy way of building a customer community where you can directly communicate with your community, make Q&As, take feedbacks. Social media groups are part of social media marketing strategies. A difference between your social media page and group is that your first goal has to give value to people not promoting your brand. Create content that considers the audience’s needs and suggestions. While the number of group members is significant, but for higher engagement, you need to keep eye on the quality of your posts for turning your potential customers to real ones. 

The content you create also depends on the administration of the groups. If people join your group they want to hear from you and about your services without over advertising. When you are a member of an industry group you need to instruct people, give information, discuss the topics rather than pushing your brand. 

Where to find the largest groups in the digital world?

Social media groups are a goldmine allowing start-up founders and entrepreneurs to act as influencers, market their brands, find partners, raise awareness, get professional feedback, etc. But where to find them? 

Facebook Groups

Since Facebook is the largest social platform by user size, it is definitely crucial to take a look at Facebook groups as part of your marketing journey. Despite its reduced engagements and changing algorithm, Facebook supports groups that frequently posted and have active users.  Posting at the best times is another key point for increasing post engagement that needs to keep in mind.

LinkedIn Groups

Here the group ecosystem is different than Facebook. LinkedIn groups are perfect for influencer marketing to professionals, business people. These groups help to build long-term relations, take further steps for partnership. Once you join relative groups the next step is to find popular posts, the most contributors, and contacts. A plus side of LinkedIn is emailing directly to group members reduces the time spent on communication. You can also feature your own and favorite groups.

Tips to Grow your loyal community with social media groups

For a loyal community through social media, we advise you a few things to do:

• Before creating a group, you need to define the goals of the group. You can start by writing an overview of your business and the aim of the group. Pin that post at top of your timeline to let the audience know you. 
• For engaged community and a better understanding of your audience ask qualifying questions for pending membership. 
• Trust-building is a very key step for building a loyal community. Communication is necessary for long-term relations. Constantly posting on your groups, asking questions for your future plans, taking feedbacks helps to keep engagements high and add members.
• Live chats are a more interactive way to talk to your community especially for instructive content and Q&A. Always prepare your content before the videos, be ready for the unpredicted questions.
• Replying to comments and messages show how you care about your community. Reply to both positive and negative comments. Show your appreciation for positive comments, you can use emojis or stickers. Coming to negative comments, ask the reasons behind and always look for resolutions. 

• Write clearly and briefly. We all have skipped long and formal looking posts. It may increase the number of inactive members which will eventually turn down engagements.
• Link your articles, news, and latest updates to your groups, share infographics, instructive videos that manifest your customer policy. Ones you share articles do not just link them instead, give an overview of the topic, ask questions such as “How to estimate the profitability of ROI?”, and mention hashtags. 
• Apart from creating your own group join other groups in your niche and your customer-related niches. Instead of joining these groups with your company page leverage your marketing team. Assign those workers that have a well-set profile with all the necessary information. As long as your team posts quality content, people will be interested in your products and link to your business profile. Let’s say you are an advertising company and your designers share their works with related groups. In addition to employee advocacy, it will rise the interests of potential customers for your services. Usually, these groups do not allow their members to aggressively promote brands. Based on your industry, the scale you can contact the admins for organic reach and engagement. 

You can position your brand in different social media groups depending on your niche, customer base, and marketing objectives. What is important after creating or joining groups is to keep track of your customer relations management, compare the profitability of your business, keep your marketing and administrative management under control.

The increasing number of social media influencers is leading to the emergence of influencers entrepreneurs. Representing different industries, entrepreneurs use social media to boost their business and online presence. Startup founders small business owners use social media to raise brand awareness, grow their customer base, add market value to their brands and personal brands, as well.

Instead of using celebrities, or niche related influencers, young entrepreneurs choose to promote their products via their own social media accounts. They act like influencers in the business world. These influencers do not need to create content as usual influencers. Contents they share are generally about business news, updates of their works, entrepreneurs the future of hot topics of business and many more. These people often participate in main events, take the stage in major forums, sometimes, promote and support the other industry brands. You can come across with success and fail stories of the intrepreneur influencers on their profiles, their public speeches. 

Let’s look at a few of influencer entrepreneurs that are well-known for their promoting their business.

Neil Patel

Global marketing expert and entrepreneur Neil Patel. He is the founder of marketing platforms Crazy Egg, Kissmetrics, Hello Bar, Neil Patel Digital which serve as fast decision making, project management, website analytics, SEO, and social media tools for businesses. He also ranked as a top entrepreneur by the Wall Street Journal, Top 10 Marketer by Forbes, Top 100 Entrepreneur under 35 by Obama, and New York bestselling author. Neil uses his social media accounts to share his experience and knowledge about the essentials of digital marketing and to boost his businesses, as well. 

Saygin Yalchin

German entrepreneur of Turkish descent Saygin Yalchin is the founder of SellAnyCar.com. He is referred to as the online business guru of the Middle East region. His YouTube channel and Instagram account is the balance of entrepreneur and real social media influencer. Saygin uses social media in a smart way which he shares his daily life, entertainments, travels while not avoiding his work life, events he attends, charity works, etc. In one of his interviews, Saygin mentioned that people do not follow brands, they follow people that lead those brands. To him, people shape the face of companies. Business people have to focus on influencer marketing rather than traditional PR campaigns. Social platforms like Instagram is applicable for fast-growing and YouTube is better for real audience and more engagement.

Mari Smith

Also known as “Queen of Facebook” is Forbes #4 Social Media Influencer, deliver social media and thought-leadership consulting, training on using Facebook as a marketing technique.  She usually makes video tutorials about Facebook updates, optimizing Facebook for small business and Messenger for Business. Mari involved with Facebook from its beta test times. She recommends small business organic traction before paid ads, prioritizing audience engagement.  

Mark Zuckerberg

Facebook’s founder and CEO often Mark Zuckerberg is always on stages about informing the latest updates of Facebook, changing algorithms. What makes him cool on social media is that he also points out the moral benefits of Facebook, its role in society. Apart from sharing news about Facebook, Zuckerberg often attends different events about his path to success and gives advises to young entrepreneurs.

Satya Nadella

Satya Nadella has been working for Microsoft for more than twenty years in different positions. He was the first person who saw the acquisition of Nokia, LinkedIn, Web site. His LinkedIn profile allows us to call him the human face of Microsoft on social media. Together with Microsoft news, he discusses different topics including the new application areas of technologies, the impact of Microsoft partnerships such as their recent with a strategic alliance with KPMG on cloud technology, AI, SAP on cloud technology, Humana. Also, Satya pays special attention to empowering women entrepreneurs and creative innovators in parts of the world.

Impact on brands

Influencer marketing starts with brand storytelling. It is important to set values that your brand lays, its goals, and convey them to the relevant audience. Either by business influencers or directly by their founder’s brands need to be spoken online and offline.

Influencer entrepreneurs are the best fit for the B2B environment. Feedback of impressive people in the corporate world means larger-scale sales in comparison to the B2C. A clever way of promoting your brand in influencer marketing is by using your customers as an influencer. Leveraging your existing customers can generate more conversion and sales. A different range of customers also opens doors to a variety of markets.

Born between 1995 and 2010, Generation Z is changing the habits of social media usage. Born up to the digital era, Gen Z also called Digital Natives, Net Gen, GenWii, Tech Gen. Tech generation gets information mainly from social platforms, makes friends without seeing each other in real life, open to sharing their life on social media spend most of their time online. They are characterized by their unique style. Their purchasing decision heavily depends on celebrities or social media influencers which make brands shift their marketing strategies. They do not prefer traditional educational systems, instead, they choose to invest in their skills, take relevant courses. According to IBM statistics, 26% of Gen Z work online, while 16% work for themselves. Making money online is more attractive than nine-to-five jobs. 

Although statistics show Gen Z spends most of their time online, they do not only surf on social networks but make a difference where they go. Instead of blending in society, Gen Z is enthusiastic about standing up for their beliefs. This generation is political activists, entrepreneurs, environmentalists, and peacemakers. Despite their age, they take big steps to fight for human rights, equality, avoid plastics, are in support of the environment, are earth savers. These kids do not clearly identify their categories instead enjoy the diversities of their world.

Want to know an inspirational Gen Z?

Azerbaijani student Reyhan Jamalova invented the “rain energy” which designed to harvest rainwater as a source of energy in her 15. Forbes 30 under 30 was the youngest attendee at the 8th Global Entrepreneurship Summit in 2017 and got an estimable mention in Ivanka Trump’s speech. 

You probably heard about 16 years old Swedish Greta Thunberg. Environmental activist skipped school for her unbroken beliefs. Starting in 2018, she demanded the Swedish government to decrease emissions by 15%. Thunberg was awarded as Time’s Person of the Year 2019.

Former Disney princess Zendeya continues her stage carrier as a singer, dancer, and actress. She also made clothing collaboration with Tommy Hilfiger, is a global ambassador for Lancome. The popularity of the rising star is not only for her talents but also for her activism in different social issues such as gender equality, body positivity, or bullying.

Gen Z reshapes Influencer Marketing

The consumption power of this group changes brands’ marketing and communication channels. They require brands to be creative, credible and authentic. It is difficult to influence Gen Z with chic promotions. As their older generation, Gen Z is also less likely to be influenced by traditional advertising, what they do in turn, they get information by the people they trust. What works for this group is a blend of traditional and modern marketing technics. 

Brands need to set a sophisticated approach. Focus on leveraging influencers for delivering messages instead of selling products. Brand story-telling is via different channels creates more authentic and engaging backlinks rather than stating fancy missions on your website. Cooler way of self-promotion is endorsing Gen Z influencers over your brand story-telling. Tech natives use Instagram for brand discovery, search for product features on YouTube.

Value creation is among the core issues Gen Z pays attention to. With 2.6 million followers on Instagram and  6.9 million YouTube subscribers, Orkun Ishitmak is one of the biggest influencers in Turkey. He creates a different range of creative content such as travel vlogs, testing, reaction, informative videos on his social media accounts. Plus to his successful influencer background, every New Year year Orkun organizes charity projects where he buys gifts to homeless and needy people. It is not surprising that global and local brands keen on collaborating with him for their commerce and charity works.

 

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A post shared by Orkun Işıtmak (@orkunisitmak) on Dec 19, 2019 at 6:50am PST

Partnering with real people creates credible feedback for this group. This is why nano and micro-influencers are an alternative way of marketing. They are the best medium for raising awareness of small brands or campaigns. Micro and nano influencers generate greater engagements thus have a high ROI. Long-term partnerships also create authentic and high-selling projects, making Gen Z loyal to brands. When working with Gen Z influencers allow them to create User Generated Content, to present their style, freedom.

It is better to collaborate with influencers for online and offline partnerships. Creativity is one of the key ways of reaching out to this group. Go beyond social media platforms. Take Levi’s and Google’s partnership. Brands together launched new lines of “smart denim jackets” which warns wearers if they forget to take their mobile phones. 

Although Gen Z has unlike social media habits the rest of the population, however, have different preferences about social media platforms, different interests, say, platforms like TikTok, Twitch, Live.ly are mainly popular among teens, while the older Gen Z favors Instagram and Twitter. 

Whether brands have successful Gen Z experience or not, It is important to keep track of the latest trends, improve the quality of their products and promotions, as well. 

Despite the technological revolution in shopping experiences, purchases still take through human-to-human interaction. Whether your goal is to sell a product, build an audience for your blog, provide service, the first important point is to build trust. To achieve that level of trust you should humanize your brand. To quote founder at Convince & Convert, Jay Baer:

“Consumers are disappointed by brands. Trust in brands is lower than ever and the flipside of that is just as important, that people are trusted more. The reason people are trusted more than advertising is that there is no financial stake in the outcome.“

The key to success here is to spread the company’s message organically and build trust in customers.

Brands should steer away from the robotic marketing tactics, instead focus on being interesting, relatable, and human. Apart from sharing engaging content, a great way to ensure that your brand has an accurate voice is having the right people to speak about your brand. 

In this case, don’t overlook your internal influencers – your own employees. They are the new authentic marketing channel for your company. For those who may have not heard about Employee Advocacy, it is the promotion of the company by their employees. They share the company’s latest statements, news, product launches or services on their social media accounts. Employee advocacy is aimed to inform and engage with employees as the company’s internal influencers or employee advocates.

According to LinkedIn, in total, employees have 10 times the social following than the brands they work for, which leads to generate twice more clicks on the content shared by an employee than content shared by business.

Humanizing brands is the top motivation for starting Employee Advocacy

For those who may have not heard about Employee Advocacy, it is the promotion of the company by their employees. In a nutshell, the company distributes its latest statements, news, product launches or services on their social media accounts while increasing awareness around its business. Employee Advocacy is aimed to inform and engage with employees as the company’s internal influencers or employee advocates.

Advocacy can be anything from sending internal company newsletters, to fully formalized programs with KPI’s, and particular Employee Advocacy software. 

EA programs build a shared sense of purpose in employees as they believe in the company’s mission so they want to promote their jobs. Engaged employees share a genuine representation of the organization, one which customers can relate to.

Let’s get started humanizing your brand with employee advocates

Identify your key employee advocates

First things first, decide who is going to take part in the Employee Advocacy program. You may start with a small group, beta testers of your EA program, then scale to the whole staff. Compile a strategy that resonates with the company culture, organizational structure, and size. Make your company culture a priority, educate your employees to become brand ambassadors. They want their jobs to have a meaningful societal impact and expect the employer to offer interesting and fulfilling work. So, activate your workforce to strengthen the team cohesion in your company and increase awareness around your brand.

Set goals and KPIs

Define what you want to achieve with the EA program, so you’ll be able to identify which tactics to use and how to measure the success. The common goals and results to expect are: 

• Increase brand awareness and engagement on social networks, social reach, clicks, impressions
• Conversion of qualified leads and increase sales
• Recruitment, career search rates, and applicants

Incentivize employee social sharing

When the brand content is shared by employees, it gets twice more clicks. Broadcast your content via employees, and you’ll get more engagement and awareness. Provide your employees with: 

• Great work culture,
• Gamification like leaderboards,
• Incentives – gift cards, gifts, or intangible equivalents like trophies, praise, recognition.

The better would be to run an internal contest or challenge to encourage employees. Make sure that they understand their industry benefits. Set a reward for more engagement and interactions such as likes, comments, etc. within a specific deadline. These interactions will give your brand lots of “human” bonus points!

Curate internal and external content distribution channels

Content curation consists of finding material relevant to your audience from a variety of sources and sharing it strategically through your communication channels. You might have them to share company news, product launches, blogs, promotional offers, behind-the-scene photos, success stories, even memes, it does not necessarily have to be industry related. Obviously, sharing useful content is a key part of your EA program.

Use the Employee Advocacy Platform

Employee Advocacy platforms allow you to oversee the content distribution process flawlessly and measure the results easily. As a result, you can identify the best performers. EA platform can replace mass internal emails and message boards and make it easier for employees to find the content in one place. EA platforms simplify and speed up the content sharing process, also combines features like a list of most engaged employees, analytics and reporting. 

For a brand’s representation, nothing works better than the recommendation of someone who works there. But building a whole process is not something that will happen on its own, it requires lots of planning, time and effort.