Social Media Influencers: How to Find Them?

The world of social media is on an all-time changing spree, what works today, may not work tomorrow and might be totally outdated the day after. With around 93% of the all the brands that exist, riding the social media bandwagon and attempting to make their voices being heard, clutter is meant to be.

Every big brand today and at times not-so big ones too, boast of millions of fans and followers supposedly hooked on to their pages. However, when everybody is talking to everybody who’s listening it all?

In the times as these, need is to bring that commanding voice into your communication, which when talks, all else stops and people listen. Yes, we are talking of social media influencers, those 20% of the people who can drive the rest 80% to your brand.

Social Media Influencers are people, majorly experts, bloggers, and thought leaders, who have a slew of followers and whatever they say about a brand matters. Hence, they are gradually becoming imperative for a brand’s success online, for when they praise or loathe your brand while they tweet; there is a chunk of people who will make their next buying decision based on those 140 characters.

Industry expertise and wide reach of the influencers is what makes them click and are truly driving the social media revolution in the present times. Hence, brands need to move beyond mere social media presence and focus on engaging with the influencers that are relevant to them.

In the constantly evolving world of social space, where there is pressure to disseminate information influencer marketing is surely is a relatively inexpensive way, and an efficient one at that, to enable brands stand-out in an otherwise overcrowded place.

However, what has known to be troubling brands is how to determine these influencers. Now, there seems to be a way out to this one too: Little Bird App.

Little Bird is basically a search engine for influencers, wherein you need to feed in a subject, and after browsing through the social graphs in the vicinity of the issue, the app works backwards and throws up the names of people who are most influential about that particular subject. This apart, the app also lets you know of the other issues that these influencers are talking about or sharing.

Hence, Little Bird lists lay the foundation for any influencer relations and help in identifying the best voices out there. The app though, is still in (semi) private beta, and is gradually opening up with allowing close to 100 users a day.

As of now, the app indexes only twitter profiles and few of the popular blogs and next in the pipeline are LinkedIn and Google +, hence, there’s a lot of importance placed on who’s following you. Further, all the results thrown out, as in, numbers, lists, etc. is all explained and ordered.

It also has supplementary tools, like a scorecard, so one can compare all the Twitter accounts that have been listed and go about doing a little more analysis on that one.

Fans are also sensible and are not really interested in what a celebrity talks about a brand, for they might have been paid for it, but with an influencer, they feel a connect, for he/she seems to be a common man with an opinion.  Influencers are not just the kick you need for improving your image, gain visibility or revive sales, but also help a great deal in Online Reputation Management, in those times of crisis.

Thereby, what an influencer says about your brand can greatly impact how your brand is perceived in industry circles and among fans. There have been instances in the past when a campaign advocated by an influencer became a hit compared to the others that were not.