Influencer marketing is an inseparable part of digital marketing today. It is a way to reach new audience segments while working with top creators on social media platforms. You can also boost the engagement of your own brand social media accounts by reposting content from influencers. At the same time, influencer marketing is becoming an effective way to boost brand credibility.
While there are so many benefits of running an effective influencer marketing campaign, there are also challenges that you have to overcome before you can enjoy those benefits. Choosing the right influencers to work with is the biggest hurdle to overcome when you are just getting started. Fortunately, there is an excellent way to find influencers for your brand.
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Leveraging Web Scraping
Web scraping is not a new thing. It is a known way of collecting information from websites, including social media platforms. When using web scraping, you can be very detailed about the information you gather from websites. You can, for instance, specifically look for email addresses if the purpose of web scraping is generating leads from public websites.
For influencer research, however, there are two things that you need to prepare. First, you want to make sure that your web scraping operation runs smoothly. That means using the right tools for the job and using residential proxies to hide your real IP address. A reputable proxy provider can offer millions of residential IP addresses for the job.
With the tools in place, it is time to think about keywords and scraping parameters. What you want to do here is find social media accounts that regularly discuss topics that match your brand perfectly. If you are in the hosting industry, for example, look for social media accounts that regularly talk about web development.
By setting the scraping parameter to seek relevant keywords, you will end up with a list of people that not only talk about your brand but also topics relating to your business activities. This is the first step towards identifying the right influencers to work with when using this method. You will end up with a list of social media accounts as the result of this operation.
Refining Your Options
The next part is making sure that the accounts that get identified by your web scraping operation are accounts with enough reach and influence. Adding parameters to identify the number of followers is a great start. You can also identify the number of likes and comments (for example on Instagram) to get a better understanding of the engagement rate of those accounts.
Engagement is important if you want to make sure that your influencer marketing campaign generates enough responses from potential customers. Fortunately, most social media platforms allow engagement numbers to be accessed publicly in the form of comments, likes, and shares. These details will come in handy as you gather more information about the influencers.
To further refine your options, you can also research the specific accounts directly. Let’s say you have a handful of accounts with the highest engagement rate. You can then use tools like Brand24 or Social Insider to do in-depth analysis on the accounts. You have already reduced your options through web scraping. Now, you are pinpointing the right accounts to work with.
Combined, the data from web scraping and in-depth account analysis is powerful. You don’t only have the option to find top accounts to work with based on relevant keywords, but also accounts whose audience groups closely match the audience segment of your business account. With the accounts identified, you can continue planning your campaign.
Maximizing Impact
Influencer marketing is not a new thing, so getting in touch with the influencers you have identified will not be a problem. Some accounts will be more than happy to work with you in crafting a suitable campaign for their audience. Others may prefer to hear campaign ideas from you before deciding to engage your business in a collaborative effort.
Maximizing the impact of an influencer marketing campaign is easy since you already have the high engagement of the influencers to utilize. You can study these key elements to refine your campaign plan further:
- The type of content that your influencers normally post.
- The most engaging content on their feed.
- The way influencers communicate with their audience.
- Other content that the audience consumes on a regular basis.
Once again, you can use web scraping to gain more insights on the fourth point. Web scraping can be used to identify content that is being consumed by the audience of an influencer (or multiple influencers). The insights are invaluable for planning your own influencer marketing campaign.
This is how you do influencer marketing effectively. Combined with other digital marketing efforts, you can create a big impact, boost your business credibility, and expand your audience base on social media platforms.
