Get Twitter Influencers to Work for You

What is a Twitter influencer and how can they help you grow your business? My name is Rebecca Xiong, I’m the founder of Grow Epic, and I’m here to tell you all about Twitter influencers. They break down into three different types.

Mega-Influencers

There are the mega-influencers, the Kim Kardashians of the world. They might have millions of followers, and have a lot of power. So when they tweet about something, like a fashion accessory or something, you have hundreds of thousands of people liking that tweet and responding to it. It’s a great way for a brand to launch their product or services. For a smaller business, that might not be quite as helpful.

Macro-Influencers

The second kind is macro influencers, these are influences more specific in your industry and typically have tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of followers. For example, if you’re targeting doctors, there could be physician influencers with hundreds of thousands of followers. Some of those influences will expect to be paid to promote the product or services, but sometimes they just like what you do and they might do it for free. So those are obviously the folks you want to engage.

Micro-Influencers

The third kind is micro influencers. These are your everyday folks who have some pull with their friends or coworkers. So if they recommend a product or service, people will listen. And some of those influencers can be right there among your followers, so you very much want to engage them, as well as put out new micro influencers you can use to spread the word about your business.

How to Identify Influencers

So how do you identify these influencers and how can you tell if they’re influential? For one thing, if they’re tweeting on your topic, and when they tweet there’s a lot of engagement, meaning people like their tweet, people retweet their tweet, that’s one way to tell that they’re influential. In addition, look at how many followers they have. Because sometimes, people might have hundreds of thousands of followers, but they might have bought them. So it’s important very much to see that they’re relevant to your business, and when they talk about it people listen and engage.

How to Engage Micro-influencers

So it’s important to make it easy for your customers and your followers to really talk about your business. Sometimes it takes as much as find them and engaging them and say hey can you tell people about it. For brand new folks, it takes a little more effort to build up a relationship – you might want to follow them, let them follow you, share content with them, like their content, so that they start to gradually build up a relationship with you.

Answer their questions, and once you have some back and forth going, and they know who you are, you might reach out and say hey I have a new product offering or I have this promotion going on, would you like to tell folks about it. So macro influencers are the folks that have tens or hundreds of thousands of followers. So it starts out similar to micro influencers – you want to start building a relationship rather than just out of the blue trying to reach out.

So by engaging their content, commenting on their content, a lot of people like to know that when they tweet, people respond to them. So by engaging with their content, you’re saying I’m interested and I have something to offer too, and they might pay more attention to you. The other thing we found is, if you do something that’s interesting, that influencer might want to share with their followers, and that’s even better.

For example, for the movie list site, they created a Harry Potter movies list. Now we use that to engage not only movie influencers, but also because the topic is Harry Potter movies, use that to engage Harry Potter influencers. And one of the Harry Potter influencers with 200,000 followers actually retweeted that content and shared it with a lot more people. As a result, that site got a lot more clicks, a lot more retweets, and a lot more shares, thanks to that influencer.

Some Tools to Find and Engage Influencers

There are also some tools that could be helpful to you. There’s BuzzSumo, which helps you find influencers, as well as our own, GrowEpic, which can help you find and engage influencers. So you really want to make use of those twitter influences to tell others about your products and services get the word out. All it takes is a little creativity a bit of time.