Being a social media influencer isn’t all hashtagging and posing in front of murals for Instagram. There is a lot of hard work that goes on behind the scenes to get to the point of being labeled an influencer, an individual defined as having an effect or influence on purchase decisions. Thankfully, there are a variety of tools to help manage the process and help influencers step up their game and start getting booked by brands. We’ve cultivated a list of some of the most important tools for influencers.
- FollowerWonk – FollowerWonk is a Twitter tool by Moz and is helpful in identifying your audience and connecting with other influencers in your network. It enables you to dig deeper into your Twitter analytics and provides actionable visualizations. You can compare your social graph to see how you are doing in relation to others.
- Tweetdeck –Tweetdeck is a highly popular application for managing Twitter. Not only does it allow you to schedule your tweets, but it’s a simple way to manage different streams of content in what can be a very noisy platform. Say you are an influencer in the travel industry and you want to track trends around a specific city or region. You can create a stream for a topic, such as #ExploreCanada, monitoring and engaging with all the content that is coming through.
- AddThis Website Plugins – In the modern world of social channels, often times websites get forgotten. But it is important for influencers to have a presence beyond their profiles. A website is a great online portfolio and is the best way to aggregate all your work. To make sure that you are properly promoting your website, we recommend installing some free website plugins by AddThis:
- Follow: The Follow tool is the easiest way to link your social channels to your website so that your visitors can follow you, if they are not already.
- Related Posts: If you are churning out original content and would like to re-engage visitors that land on a specific post, you can use the Related Posts tool to show them similar articles.
- Link Promotion: Have a special promotion or partnership happening and want to give it a boost? Use the Link Promotion tool.
- Share: Every page should have buttons for sharing content. This allows your visitors to easily share your content with their own social channels. The AddThis sharing buttons are also “smart” and know which services to display to each visitor that lands on your pages.
- Slack – Often times Slack is thought of as only being a private social network tool for internal teams to collaborate. But Slack also has extremely valuable public “workspaces” that are wonderful for connecting with other influencers and industry thought-leaders. A great strategy for an influencer would be to create your own Slack channel for whatever industry you are in and leveraging it as a place to share ideas, trends, and other appropriate themes. But as with any channel, be mindful of too much self-promotion. Keep the conversation balanced and make sure there is plenty of value for the people you invite to contribute.
- SocialDrift – SocialDrift is a tool that uses artificial intelligence and automation to help you grow your Instagram followers. It targets your ideal audiences by hashtags, usernames, locations, and more. Users can automate their activity and take out a lot of the manual legwork behind some of the more menial Instagram tasks.
- VSCO – VSCO is a popular photo editing app used by many Instagram influencers to create beautiful images. Many successful influencers have a cohesive aesthetic that people who follow them expect to see, with familiar colors, filters, and scenes. When looking at your Instagram feed, it’s a good practice to think of it as being a magazine cover. Are people going to want to “open” (click) to read and see more? VSCO can help cultivate that desire to engage.
- Buffer – Buffer is a must-have for any influencer or social media professional. Buffer allows you to schedule posts across various social platforms. It also acts as a content discovery platform, helping you to easily find articles in your industry that you can share with your followers.
Top image is from Eudibirdie.
