Collaboration with social media influencers is a proven method to increase brand awareness and sales or site traffic. But have you thought about the various ways to collaborate with influencers? Luckily there are many ideas to keep your content fresh.
While quality content is an essential element to the success of a campaign, there’s another aspect that’s crucial: Find influencers that match your brand’s image and the goals of your campaign.
Take a look at the influencer’s performance metrics and demographics of their audience, as well as the style of their feed to determine if they’re appropriate for your campaign. Even if you have the most creative content idea, it will fall flat without the right collaborator.
With that in mind, here are some suggestions on how you can work with social media influencers.
Giveaways
People love freebies and love winning things. If you’re hosting giveaways through an influencer’s account, it’s a great opportunity to increase the followers and engagement of both the influencer as well as your brand. Also, it puts your brand’s name in people’s minds.
Since giveaways typically require that participants follow your pages as well as to comment and/or like the page, they can result in an increase in followers and engagement rate. Now, some of these new followers may become loyal, engaged customers. But expect some of them to drop off once the giveaway ends.
Giveaways are great in content that is easily seen and simple to come back to, such as static Instagram posts.
Takeovers
It’s both exciting and a little daunting when you give the control of your brand’s social media accounts to an influencer. But takeovers provide a fresh perspective to your company’s social media posts. Influencers add their unique voice and imagination to your feeds as well as entice the attention of their followers to your brand.
You must ensure that you have signed the deal in an agreement, or at the very least, set guidelines on how you would like the takeover process to work. If you’re not sure about giving an influencer full access to your profile, you can ask them to create and submit the content to you for prior approval and publication.
Takeovers can be utilized in all sorts of formats for content. You can utilize photos, Instagram Stories, TikTok videos…whatever content is most effective for your business and lets the influencers best express themselves.
Unboxings
If done correctly, unboxings are a great way to build confidence in your product because people can see exactly how it arrived and when it’s opened for the very first time. This creates a feeling of the product being authentic with no noticeable influence from marketing teams.
The most important aspect of success in unboxing is an influencer’s spontaneous reaction. The first impression they get sets the tone for how their audience will perceive your company. Therefore, it’s crucial to choose an influencer that is in tune with your brand’s goals and enthusiastic about your products.
Unboxings are best performed on livestream or video, so that users know they’re watching an authentic reaction. Depending on the type of product, you may want to create a long unboxing and set-up video, or just a short clip showing off the product. The point here is you can work with YouTubers, Instagrammers, or TikTok creators alike. Just decide which is best for your target audience.
Demos
If you’re looking to demonstrate to users how to make use of your product or show the capabilities it has, then influencers can also help. The major social media platforms provide video formats which allow influencers to publish short or long demos of your product.
This kind of content is ideal for brands with visual appeal. Businesses in the beauty, art or DIY industries would probably benefit from demonstrations. Instead of merely displaying the product’s packaging, demonstrate the results users can achieve from the product. A pack of pencils isn’t that interesting, but a drawing made with them can be.
Live experiences or Q&A
Live streaming is a fantastic way to collaborate, since it lets the viewers interact directly with the influencer in real time. Live streaming increases the authenticity of collaborations too, since the audience is aware that the influencer won’t be able to polish their content until it’s perfect.
Live streaming is extremely engaging due to other social media features as well. For instance, Twitch streamers can give their followers special prizes when they earn “channel points” or in essence, being committed viewers.
Or, users can also interact with the influencers live stream via chats. This means that the streamer will respond to questions in real-time. This can stimulate discussion about your company or product, and make sure that the audience finds out what it wants to know about your brand and product.
Conclusion
These are only some of the ways to work with influencers. There are a myriad of options for content formats today, so let your imagination run wild. Make sure to reach out to influencers for ideas, too. They’re the expert content creators in the end, and they may provide ideas you might not have thought of.
