How to Become an Influencer in Your Industry
Influencer marketing has skyrocketed since it first made its mark.
That’s very much due to the way purchasing decisions have changed over the years. You might recall, for example, a story about how many women no longer trust celebrity endorsements. That’s because most consumers, research shows, seek product and service recommendations from those who are, above all, knowledgeable and credible.
And today, those qualities often come in the form of social media influencers.
When it comes to getting advice or recommendations on what to do — which product to buy, which movie to see, and where to travel on vacation — there are still areas where we trust our peers more than we do “experts.”
But that’s part of what makes an influencer so powerful: Despite perhaps being an expert in his or her field, by sharing content and insight in a certain way, consumers view that person more as a peer. We have things like constant access to video and other visual content to thank for that — the tools that help us “get to know” people online in ways that weren’t quite as accessible only a few years ago.
So, how can you tap into this area, and become an influencer in your own field?
It’s for this reason why one of theinfluencer marketing trends experts anticipate in 2018 is the increase in demand for social media influencers, specifically micro-influencers (influencers with less than 100K followers). Not surprising, more and more people want to become social media influencers.
The question is: where do you start?
In this blog post, I’ll be laying out ten ways how to become a social media influencer. On their own, they will help you slowly make your mark and establish you as an influencer in your industry. But do all these together, and you have a powerful strategy that will help speed things up exponentially.
If you want to become a social media influencer, the very first thing you need to do is to choose a specific niche where you want to be known.
Although most social media influencers start out posting content, they’re passionate about, what sets them apart is the fact that they tend to focus on a particular niche within the industry they’re passionate about.
To find your little corner of influence, you’ll need first to determine who is your target audience by developing a unique persona—a semi-fictional representation of your ideal reader. Tools likeHubSpot’s Buyer Persona Generation Tool can help you identify the individual wants, needs, challenges, and goals of your ideal reader that you can help solve and address, pointing you to the right niche to establish yourself and grow as an influencer.
In an interview with Kevin Rose, Elon Musk explained that there are two reasoning approaches people use. The first and most common is the analogy approach. People that use this reasoning method decide to do things based on what has happened in the past.
That’s why we often see many people in a particular industry doing nearly the same thing, talking about the same topics, and even using similar formats when it comes to publishing and promoting their content.
The second reasoning approach is what Musk refers to as the First Principles Thinking approach. Instead of basing decisions on past successes or failures, Musk and others that use this reasoning approach study objective fundamentals and make their decisions based solely on that.
What’s good about following Musk’s way of thinking and reasoning is that it opens you up to other possibilities and approaches by “forcing” you to disregard the status quo, and think differently. Doing that can help set yourself apart from other influencers in your niche, and allow you to bring something new and fresh to the table for your target audience.
Instagram is the channel where 93% of social media influencers focus their content — because it gives them the best results.
However, just because those are the current statistics doesn’t mean that Instagram is a perfect choice all the time.
