With the race intensifying every day for boosting brand awareness and building engagement, brands are increasingly taking to leveraging the power of social media influencers. Instagram, in particular, has emerged as the platform of choice for brands across several industries to collaborate with influencers. Another reason for the sudden surge in influencer marketing is that brands have discovered that by engaging with micro and nano influencers, they can reach out to new target audiences without having to break the bank paying the stratospheric rates of macro-influencers. It has also led to many Instagram users with fewer followers considering a career in influencer marketing. Some tips to becoming a successful Instagram influencer:
Identify Your Niche
Unless you are a big-time celebrity, you will unlikely have universal appeal among Instagram users. It is, therefore, important that you identify and develop your niche right at the very beginning since the more focused you are, the easier it will be to grow a community of loyal followers who trust you. You will appreciate that both brands and followers will appreciate your being an expert on one subject rather than being a generalist. To discover your niche, you should ask yourself what is it that you are passionate and knowledgeable about the most, and could happily keep creating valuable content without any remuneration. Thereafter, you should proceed to discover the sub-topics within your niche that you will feel comfortable about creating content on. By getting focused on your expertise, you will find content creation and establishing a content calendar simpler.
Make the Effort to Post Consistently
With Instagram users having to deal with a flood of posts on their feeds and a general information overload, it is easy for them to forget you if you are not in their faces consistently. Unless you are consistently posting on subjects that are relevant, valuable, and entertaining, your followers will not view your posts and engage with you. If the rate of engagement is low, the Instagram algorithm will drive it further down the feeds of users, and you will soon be history. It is, therefore, imperative for influencers to post consistently at the times their followers are most active on Instagram. With a little bit of experimentation, you can discover the times of the day and days of the week that deliver the best response to your posts. However, as far as Instagram Stories go, you should be posting every single day as more than 500 million Instagram users view them daily, according to Search Engine Journal. With the information gathered by your experiments, you should decide on a posting schedule and stick to it consistently so that users know when you will be posting. You can create the content in advance and use a content scheduling tool to post it according to your schedule.
Craft Relevant and Value-Added Captions
There was a time, Instagram users were content to see only the pictures on their feeds; however, not including captions is a lost opportunity for making your posts more impactful. As more and more brands and influencers begin to appreciate the value of photo captions, their length has also been increasing and has doubled in the last few years. This is not strange as the current generation of Instagram users expects more out of posts by influencers than just a pretty picture. The reason why you should pay more attention to Instagram photo captions is that they represent a great opportunity to add value to the posts, encourage engagement, and help form meaningful connections with your followers. To extract the best value from your caption, you can try writing it like a mini blog post that provides additional information to users. Some of the things, you should know about writing compelling captions include, making the first line attention-grabbing, ending the captions with powerful CTAs, making the reading of the captions easy, and adding a bit of fun in the form of on-brand emojis.
Concentrate on Building a Community
Even though growth in the number of followers and the rate of engagement are two of the most important performance parameters for Instagram influencers, it is also vital for influencers to focus on building a high-quality community of followers. Influencers can go all out to increase the number of followers to impress brands; however, if you do not have sufficient influence over them because of a lack of trust, the effort can go to waste. By increasing the depth of the following, you are liable to end up with an audience that finds you credible, trusts your recommendations, and goes on to purchase the products, you are endorsing. One of the best ways of building a community is to respond promptly to comments after you post content. Stay on the app for about half an hour after you post to give your replies to the feedback of your follower and then go back later in the day to catch up with the rest. In the initial days, you may need to work with professional social media marketing agencies like Blastup.com to buy likes. Striking up a genuine conversation when followers DM you can help greatly. In addition to the conventional text responses, sending followers voice notes can add a much-needed personal touch. You should also encourage your followers to not only interact with you but also with each other with comments on their reactions to your posts.
Conclusion
If you want to kickstart your career as an Instagram influencer, you need to focus on getting brand endorsement assignments. In addition to creating and posting awesome content, you should check out some of the popular Instagram influencer marketing platforms and post your profile there to catch the attention of brands. You can also conduct an online search to discover PR agencies that work with brands in your niche so that you can contact them and ask to be considered for future campaigns. Whenever you are pitching for brand endorsements, make sure that you send your media kit detailing your presence on Instagram and other social media platforms. Provide details of your niche, audience size and demographics, engagement rate, and campaigns you have worked on. Do make it a point to include a verified analytics report to back up your claims and establishing your credibility.
