Social Media – Marketing Agency St. Louis

Social Media Audit: Simple 7 Step Guide

Henry Right — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 13:00:46 +0000

We’ve all seen it: a brand with 50,000 followers and about three likes per post. Or worse, a company’s LinkedIn page that hasn’t been updated since 2022. In digital marketing, if you aren’t moving forward, you’re being left in the dust.

A social media audit is more than just a routine checkup of your social media profiles; it is one of the best ways to ensure your brand is represented well online. A social media audit is a structured review of your brand’s social media platforms to assess post performance, overall audience engagement, and brand representation. A thorough social media audit helps businesses understand what’s working, what’s not, and where to focus social media efforts. The main goals of an audit are to identify areas for optimization and realign posts with the current brand image.

Think of an audit as looking under the hood of your online presence. Is everything working as intended, or are there parts that are outdated or need to be removed?

Key Takeaways:

If you’re short on time, here is the high-level strategy for a successful social media audit:

Audit for Intent, Not Just Likes: A successful audit measures brand sentiment and business-focused key performance indicators rather than just vanity social media metrics like follower counts.
Benchmark Current Progress: To see where you stand, perform a competitor analysis on 3–5 direct and aspirational rivals to identify gaps in their strategy that you can exploit.
Consistency is Key: During the audit, ensure your writing style and visuals are consistent across all platforms to build brand trust with your audience.

1. Take Inventory: Evaluate Your Social Media Presence

The first thing you are going to want to do is simple, but vital. You can’t start optimizing if you don’t fully understand the current state of your profiles. During this step, you will want to take stock of every part of your social media presence. You will want to look at what social media accounts you already have, how many followers you have, and what posts you currently have. During this step, there’s really no wrong answer; the main goal is to give you a starting point to grow your social brand and following.

The main things you will want to do during this stage are:

Catalog Your Assets: List every active and inactive account. Don’t forget those “ghost” accounts created for a specific campaign three years ago.
- It is important to note that if you find “forgotten” social accounts with your brand name that you no longer operate or use, either revive them or shut them down completely. It is important for building trust that when people search for your brand through social channels, they find a consistent message.
Check for Consistency: Are your handles the same across X, Instagram, and TikTok? Does your profile image match your current brand messaging?
Log the Baseline: Use a spreadsheet or a social media audit template to record current followers, engagement rates, and posting frequency.

2. Select Tools to Assist Your Audit

During this process, you will need to analyze and make decisions based on data. Here are some tools designed to make the audit process easier:

Meta Business Suite: This analytics tool helps you gather analytics for both your Instagram and Facebook pages. The great thing about this tool is that the data comes straight from the source, so you know it is reliable. This tool also lets you schedule posts in advance.
LinkedIn Analytics: This tool is similar to the one above, just for LinkedIn. The cool thing about this tool is that it gives you in-depth audience demographics data (like job title and company), so you can track B2B performance. Again, the data is coming straight from the source here, so you can trust what you see.
Hootsuite & Sprout Social: These 3rd-party tools are great at showing you competitor insights and overall customer sentiment. These tools are great for social listening and let you schedule, publish, edit, automate, and manage all your posts across platforms.
Canva or Google Slides: When it’s time to present the findings of your audit, these tools are great for visualizing your data in a way that makes sense and appeals to different stakeholders. Both of these apps have great templates that let you add your data and create a great-looking slide deck without doing any graphic design.

3. Competitor and Market Analysis: See Where You Stand

Once you have taken stock of your own social media presence, you need to see how you stack up against your competition. During this step, you will want to identify 3-5 competitors to compare your social media performance with.

The three things to look at when analyzing your competitors are:

Benchmarking: Use tools to track how often your competitors post and what their top-performing posts look like. See which post types and cadence work well, and apply them to your accounts.
Content Mix: Look at how often competitors post videos vs. pictures. If your competitors are posting video content twice as much as you are and getting 3x the engagement, it’s time to adjust your social media content mix.
Sentiment Check: Analyze how followers engage with their posts. If the engagement is relatively positive, take notes on how you can emulate it. If the engagement is largely negative, find out why the type of content is eliciting a negative response and learn from it to improve your content.

4. Listen Closely: Track Audience Sentiment and Trends

Social media isn’t just a one-way medium where you put your message out to the masses like a billboard. Social media is a two-way conversation where users actively engage with you and your brand. The best way to develop a social strategy for interacting with your customer base is through social listening.

Social listening involves monitoring and analyzing mentions, hashtags, and trends to understand how your target audience feels about your brand. These two steps will help you turn this data into insights for your future content strategies:
Monitor Mentions: Use social media management tools like Hootsuite or Sprout Social to track brand mentions and specific hashtags to see what people are saying about your brand. These tools give you a good sense of your brand’s overall audience sentiment.
Detect Trends: What are people in your industry talking about right now? By tracking sentiment, you can pivot your content to address current pain points before they become old news.

5. Check Content Performance and Brand Consistency

This stage of the audit is to do a deep dive into the content you have posted. You are going to want to analyze your previous posts to see whether your brand is consistently represented the way you want.

Consistency is the key to building trust with your audience. When analyzing your content, you are going to want to use these three tips:

Visual & Voice Audit: Review your visuals and captions against your internal brand guide. All of your content should align with your brand guide. If posts don’t align with the brand guide, evaluate whether they are worth retooling to fit it.
Format Effectiveness: Are your videos outperforming your images? If so, stop wasting resources on graphics that no one is swiping on.

6. Measure, Benchmark, and Set Goals

Now that you have a pretty good idea of how you will run your accounts moving forward, it is time to establish goals for them. When crafting goals, be honest with yourself and assess where your accounts stand compared to competitors and industry averages. During this step in the audit, you should:

Define KPIs: Align KPIs with your overall business goals; don’t just track likes. If your goal is to grow your brand awareness, track followers, and engagement metrics. If your goal is to grow website traffic, track CTR from posts. You can pick whatever KPIs you want, as long as they align with your greater business goals.
Set Actionable Goals: These goals need to be actionable and trackable; instead of saying “get more followers,” say “increase LinkedIn engagement rate to 4.5% by Q3.”
Align Teams: Make sure that all the different teams involved in social media, marketing, content, and creative are all bought into the goals.

7. Present and Act on Audit Findings

Now that you have all your social media analytics, benchmarks, and actionable goals, it is time to present the audit findings to the appropriate stakeholders. This audit report should be a clear, actionable roadmap for the next quarter that outlines how you plan to achieve your social media goals.

The key to this presentation is to create a story from the findings, give them reasons to care about the action plan, and explain how it helps the company achieve broader business goals. If you present a plain PowerPoint with all your data, with no clear story or rationale behind it, they will not care. Make the presentation more engaging by creating a visually appealing slide deck in Canva Docs or Google Slides, and give the audience a reason to care about your audit.

Here are some key things to cover during the presentation:

Create a Dashboard: Organize your analytics and insights into visual dashboards so stakeholders can see the data at a glance. This makes it easier for your audience to digest the “why” behind your plan.
Identify “Quick Wins”: Maybe it’s updating all your bios or pinning a high-performing post. Start with the easy stuff to build momentum. Show your audience that you are actively working toward the bigger goals through small actions.
Next Steps: Define a clear timeline for implementing the audit changes. Explain your actionable goals and why your plan will achieve these goals.

FAQs

What is included in a social media audit?

Everything You Need To Know About The TikTok Ban Bill

Riley Fitzmorris — Fri, 29 Mar 2024 15:01:13 +0000

The app that created the Renegade dance and chaotic Duolingo videos is now facing a potential ban as the House of Representatives passes a TikTok ban bill on March 13th in America. Members of Congress are concerned about the app’s Chinese-based owner, ByteDance, manipulating the app’s algorithm for American users to benefit the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

But why does the House view TikTok as a threat? What does the bill entail? What would happen if the bill makes it through the Senate?

Don’t worry! We are going to break it all down for you here.

Where The TikTok Ban Bill Has Been, And Where It Is Going

On March 5, Reps. Mike Gallagher (R-WI) and Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL) from the House Select Committee on the CCP introduced H.R. 7521, also known as the “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act.”

Two days after Krishnamoorthi and Gallagher introduced the bill, members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee unanimously voted to approve the bill.

And, by March 13th, just eight days later, the measure passed with a House vote of 352-65 votes. The bill had bipartisan support with the vast majority of representatives on both sides voting in support of the bill.

How Democrats voted:

155 voted “yes”
50 voted “no”
8 either did not vote or voted “present”

How Republicans voted:

197 votes “yes”
15 voted “no”
7 either did not vote or voted “present”

The measure is now awaiting its fate in the Senate, who does not seem to be in as much of a rush to push it along as the House. The lawmakers in the upper chamber are planning to do a thorough review before voting. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said he will be consulting with the relevant committee chairs to determine the TikTok bill’s path. The bill already appears to have some support in the upper chamber, however. Two lawmakers from the Senate Intelligence Committee, Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Mark Warner (D-VA), released a joint statement praising the bill, for example.

If the Senate passes the House bill, President Joe Biden has already stated that he plans to sign the bill if it comes across his desk. This decision has come under fire as Biden joined TikTok in February 2024 as part of his presidential campaign.

If the bill is signed into law, TikTok’s Beijing-based parent company, ByteDance, will have six months to divest for the video app to remain available in the United States.

If ByteDance does not divest, app stores like Google and Apple, as well as internet-hosting companies, would be barred from supporting TikTok and other ByteDance apps.

What H.R. 7521 Actually Entails

Before diving further in, it is important to break down what the bill says.

H.R. 7521 states it was created to protect the national security of the U.S. from threats of applications controlled by foreign adversarial governments. It uses TikTok as an example of one of those applications.

The bill would ban the distribution, maintenance, or update of an application labeled as being under the direct or indirect control of a foreign adversarial government. For example, although TikTok does not operate in China, it falls under the bill because its parent company, ByteDance, does. The application would also need to have users create an account to create, consume, or share content and have more than a million monthly active users. This bill does not include companies with the primary purpose of posting user-generated product reviews, business reviews, or travel information.

This act uses a definition for “foreign adversarial government” from section 4872(d)(2) of title 10, mentioning the following countries:

The Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea
The People’s Republic of China
The Russian Federation
And the Islamic Republic of Iran

Once the White House labels an application to be a national security threat, the application has 180 days to divest before the terms of the bill go into place. And, the President of the United States must approve the divestiture to prevent a ban of the application. The covered country cannot directly or indirectly own more than a 20% stake in the company.

And if the bill is violated, well, the application will have to pay a hefty fine. If users within the U.S. access, maintain, or update the application, for example, the fine is up to $5,000 per user. In regards to TikTok, with over 170 million U.S. users, this stipulation could lead to some large fines.

Why Lawmakers Are Supporting The Bill

Members of Congress who support that bill emphasize that this bill is not a ban on TikTok, but would force a separation of the app from its Chinese owner. They argue that TikTok can remain available in America if ByteDance sells.

Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI) says that there are classified and unclassified national security assessments that show TikTok is a threat to user data and privacy and has been used to interfere with elections. Before the House vote, all representatives received a classified briefing from intelligence and national security agencies. But, no publicly-available evidence proves the CCP is using TikTok for surveillance or propaganda purposes.

In a now-deleted TikTok video, Rep. Jeff Jackson (R-NC), a prolific TikTok user with over 2.5 million followers on the app, told his followers that he did not think that TikTok was going to be banned. He explained that the bill would force ByteDance to divest, and Americans would be able to continue to use the app. In a second video, he explains that he enjoys TikTok, but that the briefings he has been a part of raised security concerns that led him to vote “yes” to the bill.

As seen with previous TikTok ban attempts, the support for the ban stems from the potential of the Chinese government having access to American user data and the national security risks associated with that.

Why Lawmakers Are Opposing The Bill

The members of the House cite several concerns with how fast the bill went through, basing the security concerns on possibilities rather than facts, the effect the ban can have on TikTok creators and small businesses, and the infringement of free speech.

In an interview with CNN, Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) states that she thinks Capitol Hill is overstepping, and that it is not the place of the government to ban apps from the app store.

Rep. Ilham Omar (D-MN) took to her own TikTok account to explain her decision to vote against the measure. Omar explains that not only is she concerned about First Amendment violations, but that if the purpose of the bill is to prevent the spread of propaganda and hate, then the goal should be to set standards that all social media platforms would have to follow rather than target one app.

TikTok’s Response

TikTok has not been silent on the bill’s journey through Congress. After the bill’s introduction, users woke up to a push notification the following Thursday, lobbying for users to call their representatives and speak out against the

bill. This action, however, had the opposite effect than intended. Several lawmakers used the notification as further reason to support the bill, arguing the platform was using its influence over users to manipulate United States politics.

After the House vote, the President of TikTok, Shou Zi Chew, posted a video on the official TikTok account explaining his thoughts on the vote. He stated that the company has invested in keeping user data safe and free from outside manipulation. Shou Zi Chew also clarifies that if the bill is passed into law, it WILL lead to a ban on TikTok in the United States. He also raises concerns for the American small businesses that depend on the video app to market their business and reach consumers.

History Of Trying To Ban TikTok

This ain’t the U.S. government’s first rodeo trying to ban TikTok. There have been several attempts with varying levels of success. Here are some of the most notable attempts.

1. Donald Trump Attempts To Ban TikTok

In August of 2020, the Trump administration attempted to ban TikTok and WeChat in the United States, citing concerns about the Chinese-based owner of TikTok posing a national security threat. The social media platform had until November 12th to prove there was no threat posed. This ban would have removed these two apps from the app stores of U.S. users and prohibited updates until the apps inevitably broke.

A handful of federal judges blocked the ban in the following months, citing that the concerns for national security were posed in the theoretical, the right to due process wasn’t being observed, and that the ban infringed on the right to free speech.

But a lot has changed since 2020. Trump has come out in opposition to the current TikTok ban bill, stating that this ban knocks out a main competitor to Facebook (Meta), whom Trump claims is a threat to U.S. security.

2. TikTok Banned On Government Devices

In late 2022 and early 2023, both the United States and Canada took steps to ban the use of TikTok on mobile devices issued by the government due to concerns about privacy and cybersecurity on the Chinese-owned app.

China responded to the ban on government devices, describing it as abusing state power and suppressing foreign business.

Several other countries and governing bodies have banned TikTok on government devices, including India, Taiwan, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the European Union.

3. Montana’s Attempt To Ban TikTok At The State Level

In May of 2023, Montana became the first state to ban TikTok at the state level. Governor Greg Gianforte says the ban is to protect the private and sensitive data of Montanans from the Chinese Communist Party.

Additionally, Gianforte directed the state’s chief information officer and executive agency directors to prohibit any social media apps tied to foreign adversaries on state equipment and for state business.

In November of 2023, a federal judge blocked the Montana’s ban before it went into effect. U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy cites concerns of overstepping state power and potential violations of the First Amendment.

What Happens If The Bill Passes

While users wait patiently to see what the Senate does with the bill, we can take some guesses on what might happen if the bill is passed.

First, looking at previous ban attempts, we can assume that this ban will go to the courts. Each TikTok ban at the federal level has been blocked by federal judges for concerns of free speech infringement and an overall lack of evidence of security threats. This scenario is likely to happen again, halting the ban’s 180-day deadline to divest until the case has subsided.

With the rough value of TikTok being at 100 billion dollars, few could actually purchase the platform. And a lot of the big names that can afford it are unlikely to purchase due to antitrust concerns. These companies include Meta, who owns Facebook and Instagram; Alphabet, who owns YouTube; and Microsoft, who is under scrutiny for their relationship with OpenAI.

But there are a few individuals who have shown interest in purchasing TikTok. Former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has reported that he is going to get an investor group together to purchase the video app if the bill passes into law. Kevin O’Leary from Shark Tank has also shown interest in the purchase of TikTok, but has expressed concern about the tight deadline.

While there is interest in a divestiture on the side of the United States, that might not be the case for China. The divestiture—and subsequent acquisition of the app by another company—would require approval by the Chinese government, who is most likely going to reject it.

A spokesperson for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that the bill is at odds with the ideas of fair competition, international trade rules, and that the phrasing could suppress excellent companies in the name of national security.

Final Thoughts

A ban or forced divestiture of a social media application at the federal level is unprecedented, so there are a lot of pieces up in the air as Americans wait to see what the Senate does in the coming months. But businesses, agencies, and social media managers alike need to prepare for every scenario. The situation is moving fast, and it is important to keep up.

Businesses on TikTok should have a plan for what to do if the bill is passed and it does not look like the application will be sold. Businesses should ask themselves the following to get a plan started:

How will you move your following from TikTok to your other active channels?
What platforms will the 170 million users shift to if the app is banned?
How will you change your digital marketing strategy to accommodate the shift in channel priorities?
What are you going to do with all your content if users still want access?

Need Help With Social Media Marketing?

Need help navigating the potential ban of a crucial channel to your business? Give us a call! As a top team of digital marketing experts, we would love to help you build a social media marketing strategy and discuss exciting ways to generate video content to help you reach and connect with your target audience.

Use TikTok for Business Like a #Pro

Kristen Greif — Wed, 19 Oct 2022 19:18:21 +0000

Social media marketing is one of the best ways to make sales; according to one study, 80% of consumers made a purchase as a result of something they had seen on social media. While Facebook may have been the undisputed ruler of social media advertising in the past, times are a-changin’. Now, TikTok is the social media platform that businesses and advertisers should turn to, especially if they want to reach newer, younger demographics.

TikTok boasts a billion active users every single month. And those users are spending money there too. In 2020 alone, TikTok generated an estimated $500 million in revenue in the United States. That means incorporating a TikTok business account (featuring both organic video content and paid TikTok ads) into your social media marketing strategies can open opportunities for generating brand awareness and sales!

TikTok for Business Owners – 10 #Hacks & Tips

From organic to paid, keep the following in mind if you want to increase the chances of going viral and getting engagements on this platform.

1. Understand Your Target Audience

According to Statista, the largest percentage of TikTok users are from Gen Z, with younger Millennials coming in second. This audience, combined with the platform’s short-form video format, means that posting to TikTok is going to look much different than posting on LinkedIn. Many advertisers subsequently struggle to find a successful content marketing strategy for this platform, even if they’ve been successful on other social media sites.

The key to success on this platform, however, is really quite simple: coming across as authentic.

You see, many TikTok users view the platform as an organic social network populated by real people offering real experiences. They interpret these experiences as sincere, relatable, and—most importantly—trustworthy. This trustworthiness can explain why Gen Z is more likely to use TikTok or Instagram for discovery than Google! Younger people, in other words, are less likely to use the likes of Google and Yelp to find places to eat or destinations to visit. They rely instead on what they believe to be more reliable, honest video reviews from TikTok content creators.

No matter what you post on this platform, keep in mind that your young audience will crave relatability, originality, and sincerity above all else.

2. Know When to Post

While finding the right target audience is critical to your campaign’s success, so too is finding the right time to post.

TikTok ad pricing starts at $10/CPM, and the minimum spend on a campaign is $500. As such, posting at the right time can help you get the most bang for your buck.

Not sure when to post? Social media management platforms like Buffer can help you better decide when to release your content into the wild.

3. Connect with Influencers

Love ’em or not, influencers rule social media. According to one Oracle study, 37% of consumers trust influencers more than they do brands. Furthermore, 32% of Gen Z on social media use influencers to discover new brands and products. That means that forming partnerships with TikTok influencers can be beneficial for your business.

But influencer marketing doesn’t mean just throwing money at the biggest names you know. It means working with people who are relevant to your industry (and can fit inside your existing marketing budget). For small businesses especially, local or micro influencers can be a boon for your company, particularly if your business model depends heavily on the local economy (restaurants, flower shops, etc.). These influencers typically have a small but dedicated following and are popular in a specific geographic area.

See if there are any micro influencers in your area that work in your industry and reach out to them—you may just form a partnership that takes your business to the next level.

Collaborations with the right influencers can boost your brand!

4. Optimize Your Hashtags

Don’t let your efforts be a major #fail. Make the TikTok algorithm work for you by using the right hashtags. From staying on top of the latest #trending tags to utilizing classic #throwbacks, using the right hashtag at the right time helps TikTok’s algorithm put your videos in front of not just more people, but people who are more likely to engage with your content.

Great tags to add to your videos (if relevant to your content and industry) include:

#throwback
#trending
#hack
#lifehack
#jobtips
#tiktokchallenge
#recipe
#quotes
#motivation
#howto

You can also get creative and make your own hashtags! Just keep everything simple and easy to understand at a glance, because that’s all the time you have to grab users’ attention.

#Hot#Tip – Make sure you do a little research to understand the context of any trending hashtags. You might think you understand what a trending tag means, only to discover on closer inspection that it means something else entirely!

5. Stay on Top of Trends

Trends rule TikTok. Besides staying on top of trending hashtags, it’s also important to stay on top of other trends. Are there new dances rippling across the platform? Is there a new challenge taking users by storm? Use current trends to your advantage to build brand awareness.

For example, if there is a trending cooking challenge, restaurants can post videos (with the proper hashtags) of their crew members participating in said challenge. This content will reach new audiences when tagged correctly and make your brand seem fun, fresh, and—most importantly—authentic.

TikTok makes it easy to see just what content is currently trending and what is relevant to you. Each TikTok account has a “fyp” or “For You Page” that features both trending content and content that TikTok’s algorithm curates for you based on your interests. Explore #fyp to find what’s new and relevant!

6. Vary Your Video Content

Posting the same content day after day? Booooring.

Varying your content? #Winning!

TikTok is home to different kinds of content, from helpful tutorials and hacks to silly viral memes. What keeps people coming back to the platform is this wide offering of content. That means, to avoid stagnation, your business needs to vary content (while still staying relevant to your industry). Create different kinds of content to discover what works best for your company and keeps your followers’ feeds fresh.

Try, for example, to offer both snippets of office life and helpful tips or tutorials relevant to your field. These videos paint your business as full as real people who know how to have fun while also getting work done. #Officegoals!

Varying your video content (and finding what works best) can help you attract and keep a loyal following while keeping feeds fresh.

7. Be Original

Performing the latest dance craze is great, but offering something new and exciting has its own merits too. Remember, TikTok users love authenticity, which includes having original content. Think of new information to offer users, or new ways of presenting it. Above all else, think outside the box for ways to reach users with short-form videos.

For example, try showing a #fail in your TikTok videos. Explain how your business tried something that didn’t quite work out… and how you fixed the issue! This type of content can show vulnerability and sincerity, which many TikTok users enjoy and find more relatable and, therefore, more trustworthy.

8. Don’t Stop Believing (and Keep Posting)

It can be easy to get discouraged when the video you lovingly (and painstakingly) created doesn’t immediately become a viral hit. You did everything right, after all. So, what gives? Where are the results?

Unlike some other sites, (organic) success on this platform often boils down to pure luck. Yes, you can optimize hashtags and make killer content, but sometimes even the funniest, most optimized organic content just doesn’t get picked up by TikTok’s algorithm. The best way to increase your odds of success? Have a lot of content for the platform’s algorithm to notice.

So, no matter how discouraging it may seem, keep posting regularly. It can help you build a reliable following while still increasing the odds that something you post will go viral.

9. Use Different Video Ad Formats to Achieve Your Marketing Objectives

Organic posts have their place, but paid advertisements are a big part of TikTok too. And don’t worry about advertisements coming across negatively on a platform that prides itself on authenticity. One survey found that respondents viewed TikTok ads as “more favorable than ads on other platforms.”

TikTok marketing is versatile, so you’ll never want for lack of options. Some of the ad formats available to advertisers on this platform include the following options.

TopView Ads

TopView ads are top dog on TikTok. These full-screen ads, as the name suggests, are the first thing users see in their feed after 3 to 5 seconds, and they can last up to one minute.

But people don’t just see these ads. They engage with them too.

A lot.

One survey found that TikTok’s TopView ads “ranked first across all engagement-related attributes tested,” even when compared to other social media platforms! So, when it comes to paid ads on this platform, TopView ads are a great option to explore for generating sales, awareness, and engagement.

Brand Takeover Ads

Brand Takeover ads are full-screen ads that completely cover the screen as soon as someone opens the TikTok app, and they can direct users to landing pages, a Hashtag Challenge, or In-Feed ads. Unlike other kinds of ads on this platform, they don’t have to be videos, but can also be still images or GIFs. Given how front and center these ads are, it should come as no surprise that they offer incredible ROI for advertisers.

What makes Brand Takeovers so successful is that TikTok only shows ONE Brand Takeover a day, meaning lots of uncontested opportunities for spreading brand awareness. Considering how valuable these ads can be for businesses, it’s no surprise that they’re incredibly expensive—around $50,000 a day! So, while these ads are incredibly useful for exposure, they’re more for larger businesses, particularly ones who want a surge in brand awareness, such as for the release of a new product or service.

In-Feed Ads

In-feed ads are full-screen advertisements that users see in their feed along with organic content. These ads have to be eye-catching, or users will scroll right past them given the fast-paced nature of this platform. What makes an ad on this platform eye-catching? Pops of colors, great sounds, and interesting images can all stop users from scrolling long enough to watch your entire ad.

When executed correctly, these ads can stay with users even after they continue scrolling through their feed. But don’t just take our word for it. One Neuro-Insight study found that “TikTok In-Feed Ads achieve 23% higher detail memory than TV ads.” These ads, in other words, are more likely to leave an impression on viewers than ads seen on TV.

Perhaps best of all, these ads are significantly more affordable than Brand Takeovers and TopView ads, making them a better option for businesses with smaller budgets. From spreading awareness of your brand to generating sales, these ads are worth exploring to achieve your #businessgoals.

Branded Hashtag Challenges

Branded Hashtag Challenges allow businesses to engage a wider audience across the entire TikTok community and can even result in brand-related, user-generated content, or UGC. UGC generation is incredibly valuable on any platform, but especially on TikTok, as consumers overwhelmingly consider UGC more trustworthy when compared to other media varieties, which can lead to even further engagement and potential campaign success.

Take, for example, the #InMyDenim Hashtag Challenge that Guess, a clothing brand, launched in 2018. Guess created the #InMyDenim hashtag and encouraged users to show off their denim clothing and styles. The brand further promoted #InMyDenim through a Brand Takeover.

The result?

This campaign was an absolute success for Guess, resulting in:

5,550+ UG videos,
10.5 million views on their tagged videos,
12,000+ new followers, and
An incredible 14.3% engagement rate!

Branded Effects

Stickers, games, and filters—oh my!

Branded Effects are special effects, like filters or games that users can engage with (and may even encourage them to generate their own UGC); TikTok’s creative team designs and personalizes them to your brand. They offer users an immersive, personable experience with your brand, which can be invaluable for generating awareness and even brand loyalty.

Even better, the results you see are not just with younger audiences. Personalized, immersive experiences, like those offered by Branded Effects, are key to driving sales among all age groups. According to Salesforce, a whopping 74% of Gen Z respondents said they “prefer personalized products or services,” and a majority (57%) of Baby Boomers surveyed did as well. These preferences translate well for your bottom line, as one Salesforce report found that 97% of marketers saw “improvement in business results due to personalization” of their products or services!

Mucinex, for instance, used Branded Effects as part of a comprehensive TikTok campaign that resulted in a jaw-dropping “+42.7% lift in purchase intent.” Working with a creative team at TikTok, Mucinex launched #BeatTheZombieFunk, a Branded Hashtag Challenge that encouraged users to dance along with Mucinex’s mascot, Mr. Mucus, who was brought to life thanks to the magic of Branded Effects. Combined with original music, it’s no surprise that this robust campaign resulted in such a positive reception, including UGC that had nearly 6 billion views.

So, if it’s within your company’s budget, trying out Branded Effects is one of the best ways to deliver a customized, immersive experience straight to your target audience.

Branded Effects deliver a personalized, immersive experience to users.

10. Make Use of the App’s Built-In Tools

Not confident in your video-making skills? Not a problem when you use this platform’s built-in tools that use artificial intelligence to enhance your video ads… or create them for you. The best part? Many of them are free with a business account!

TikTok tools for businesses worth exploring include the following.

Smart Video – Upload video and image files so this tool can work its AI magic to create a customized ad for your business account.
Smart Video Soundtrack – This tool’s AI finds a catchy tune for your ads, so you don’t have to sift through hours of copyright-free music to hunt down something yourself.
Video Template – Easily upload your own text, images, and logos into pre-made templates for quick and easy ad content to wow your target audience.

Sometimes, though, the best help you can get is not from AI and other tools, but real people. If your business wants to explore TikTok content creation, but isn’t quite sure where to start, give us a buzz. We would love to discuss new and exciting ways to generate video content that will engage your target audiences.

5 Reasons To Advertise on YouTube

Digital Strike — Mon, 09 Sep 2019 18:25:32 +0000

YouTube has become the second largest search engine with more than 1.8 billion monthly users. Every generation is using YouTube to learn new things, create new videos, and be entertained. With that said, below are five reasons your business should be advertising on this platform.

1. Reach

As mentioned above, there are billions of people searching for things on YouTube every day: Currently, YouTube is more popular than any broadcast or cable network among users ages 18-49. That’s a pretty big chunk of the population. And YouTube offers advertisers the opportunity to learn all about these audiences and discover what they are most interested in.

2. Influence

Many people use YouTube to research products or services they might be interested in subscribing to, signing up for, or even buying. Well over half of YouTube users—68%—have watched a video to help them make a purchase decision.

But it’s not just Gen X and millennials using YouTube: One in three baby boomers uses YouTube to learn about a product or service. Google quoted Barbara, 58, saying, “I use YouTube to get information in a usable format — especially when it comes to techy things that I don’t want to ask my daughter to help with.”

3. Targeting

YouTube offers a vast majority of targeting options to reach your customers.

Some of these can be broad, like topic, demo, keyword, category, and placement.

They also offer three more in-depth audiences to help advertisers meet certain goals.

You can use affinity audiences if your goal is to raise brand awareness. YouTube built affinity audiences for businesses that currently run TV ads and that want to expand their reach and online presence. Use this Google-curated audience to reach potential customers at a scale.

With that said, you can create custom affinity audiences that are more tailored to a brand. To build these custom audiences, you need to use a combination of interests, commonly visited URLs, types of places that people are interested in, or apps that the ideal customer may be using.

The second in-depth audience is an in-market audience; use this if the goal is to drive engagements. The people in this audience are actively considering buying a service or product like yours. Use this audience to help drive remarketing and to reach consumers close to completing a purchase.

Additionally, you can create a custom intent audience to help you reach new customers based on the terms they use to search for your product or service.

The third specialized audience is a life event audience. Use this option if you want to reach potential customers when their purchasing behavior shifts due to a life milestone. You can target someone who just graduated from college, someone who is moving into a new home, a newlywed couple, and more. By understanding people’s behavior at moments like these, you’ll be able to tailor each piece of advertising to the right person.

4. Multiple Ad Options

There is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to advertising and the same goes for YouTube. Currently, there are five different types of YouTube ads you can run, all with a different purpose.

TrueView In-Stream Ads is the most popular type of advertising; they appear before or after the video and are skippable after five seconds.
TrueView Video Discovery Ads appear in the search results or Related Content section when someone is already watching a video. This format allows the user to navigate to watch the ad instead of them being forced to watch it.
Pre-roll Ads are non-skippable ads and can be placed before, during, or after the video. Their ads are restricted to 15-20 seconds in length. This format may be annoying to the consumer, but are extremely valuable to the marketer—just make sure your message is clear and concise and captures the viewer’s attention.
Bumper Ads are non-skippable six-second ads. Google encourages advertisers to use this format as a complement to a larger video campaign. Create a bumper ad when you want to tease a brand announcement, amplify your current longer-form videos, or echo your message to users with a message or product update.
Outstream Ads are disguised as a native ad that usually appear on partner sites or within apps outside of the YouTube platform. Use this when you want to increase brand awareness.

5. Cost

Unlike paid search, where an advertiser pays for each click of an ad, YouTube uses a variety of cost options based on the formats described above.

TrueView In-Stream Ads operate with a cost-per-view model. This means you pay when a viewer watches 30 seconds of your video (or for the duration of the ad if it’s shorter than 30 seconds) or interacts with your video, whichever comes first.
TrueView Video Discovery Ads operate similarly to a cost-per-click model. You only pay when viewers choose to watch your ad by clicking on your thumbnail.
Pre-roll Ads—the non-skippable ads—operate with a cost-per-thousand-impressions model. You pay based on impressions. This type of ad uses target CPM bidding, so you pay each time your ad is shown 1,000 times.
Bumper Ads also use the CPM bidding model described above.
Outstream Ads operate with a similar bidding model of the bumper and pre-roll ads, but with a slight variation. You’re charged for these ads based on viewable cost-per-thousand impressions (vCPM), so you’ll only be charged when someone sees your video for two seconds or more.

Now, that you’ve made it this far, you’re probably wondering what kind of budget to start out with. We recommend starting out with at least $1,000 per month when entering the YouTube advertising space.

Beyond that, we’ll monitor the campaign(s), make adjustments as needed based on your company’s goals, and determine if the budget needs to be increased further.

If you are curious about learning more, give us a call or check out our more in-depth article on YouTube Audience Targeting.

3 Types of YouTube Audience Targeting You Should Be Using

Digital Strike — Wed, 19 Jun 2019 20:23:19 +0000

Over a billion users come to YouTube every month to watch something that will educate or entertain them. And those users aren’t just millennials or gen Z-ers. YouTube is getting more popular with users of all ages. So, all the more reason to reach your audience on this platform. To make it easier on advertisers, YouTube offers a wide range of targeting options to reach your customers.

Some of these options are fairly broad, like demographics, topics, or interests. Others, like keywords and placements, are a bit more specific.

Finally, there are some very specific targeting methods: affinity audiences, in-market audiences, and life events. These last three are the best to use to create a successful YouTube ad campaign.

Keep reading to dig into these audiences and find out how they can best be used.

1. Life Events

Within the Google platform, anybody can target a user based on age and gender, but adding a life event can set you apart from your competitors. Life event targeting reaches potential customers when they are going through a major life milestone. For example, if you’re trying to reach a younger demographic, instead of only setting an age range, you can also target people who are about to graduate and could be looking for a new job.

Google gathers data based on a user’s search queries to determine what is happening or about to happen in their lives. There are many categories to choose from on the campaign dashboard, including business creation, college graduation, home renovation, job change, marriage, moving, new pet, purchasing a home, or retirement. Additionally, this type of targeting is exclusive for YouTube and Gmail campaigns, which gives you an edge over your competition.

2. Affinity Audiences

Affinity audiences are primarily used for building brand awareness. In fact, this type of audience was defined the same way TV audiences are defined because advertisers love using this audience on TV advertisements to help drive offline actions or purchases among their audience. So, Google created a similar audience targeting option in order to expand both reach and presence online at an efficient price.

Currently, Google has a large list of predefined audiences to reach your potential customers on a large scale. These audiences include anything from banking and finance to media and entertainment to vehicles and transportation. Just like in life event targeting, each category has an additional drop down to get even more targeted.

3. In-Market Audiences

An in-market audience is the best choice if your goal is to drive engagements. It is a way to connect with the people who are actively researching your products and services on YouTube, Google Display, or within the Search Network. Think With Google says, “In-market audiences can drive incremental conversions, helping you to connect with consumers as the last step before they make a purchase decision.”

These can be defined anywhere from apparel and accessories to event tickets or travel; each comes with additional drop downs for more specific targeting. Google offers a predefined list of in-market audiences which you can download here.

Digital Strike Bonus Tip: Customize your audience!

Another way to really target your intended audience in your campaigns is to build a custom affinity or custom intent audience. A custom affinity audience reaches people who are still in the research phase. To build a successful affinity audience, you need to use a combination of interests, commonly visited URLs, types of places that your audience maybe visiting or have shown interest in, or apps that they might be using.

A custom intent audience reaches people who are further along in the sales funnel and who are about to make a purchase decision. To build a custom intent audience, you need a list of keywords as well as a list of commonly visited URLs. Google recommends focusing on 300-500 general keywords to reach as many people as possible.

To get the most out of your YouTube campaign, make sure you’re leveraging these types of audiences in order to raise more brand awareness or encourage someone to complete an engagement on your site.

The New Celebrity Endorsements: How Social Media Influencers Changed the Game

Digital Strike — Fri, 27 Jul 2018 15:19:29 +0000

In the streaming mob of content that is consumed daily on the internet – from whatever people see at work to their social feeds – a lot gets missed. Your content is probably getting missed.

Getting eyeballs and standing out is getting harder and harder but there are a few tactics you could try.

You could pay for eyeballs through paid search or paid search marketing. Of course, you could also build up your audience the slow and steady way through creating outstanding content. Or you could go the traditional route with television, radio, or even through direct mail pieces. Anything to start the word of mouth mill.

But not everyone has deep pockets or time to wait for visitors to show up.

When you have smaller budgets, you don’t have the luxury of shotgunning your advertising dollars to all channels so it’s important to try to be as targeted as possible. So this could mean you only choose paid search, paid social advertising, or search engine optimization.

When you have a little more to spend, you can take some risks with new marketing trends or techniques.

Sing it, Jean-Ralphio

One of those latest trends is social media influencers.

Social Media Influencer Primer

Using social media influencers is like word of mouth on steroids.

Sigh, I never get that many likes on anything. Gif credit

You’re more likely to listen to your friend’s endorsement of a product or service because there’s already established trust. It’s the difference between seeing an ad on TV for a product and hearing your best friend tell you how great it is.

But there’s a little more to it than that.

You have to form a relationship with these influencers because their audience and yours are going to be able to sniff out insincerity like a hunting dog finding a rabbit in a bush.

There’s just a different feel and tone when you’re reading a post written by an influencer who genuinely likes the product and uses it in their daily life and a post written by someone who was just paid to write that, and they’ll never use it again.

Using social media influencers as a part of your marketing strategy allows you to tap into a smaller, but more loyal, pool of potential customers who already trust the voice telling them your product is good.

You’re using someone else’s brand loyalty to grow your own.

Sounds amazing, right?

It is amazing, but it isn’t as easy as it sounds.

Social influencers are fiercely protective of their audience and their brand. They aren’t going just to give you a shout-out for free unless they already really love your product. You’re going to have to build a real relationship with your social media influencers if you want it to work in your favor.

You + your social influencers starting your relationship Gif credit

That’s the thing that makes social media influencers so, well, influential. They’ve spent all of this time and effort growing an audience that trusts them and engages with them on a regular basis.

So when that person you’ve been following for months or years recommends a product to you, you’re more likely to treat that as if a friend said they liked it.

That influence is very valuable to companies looking to expand their reach, but getting started can be tricky, and there might be some confusion about who social media influencers actually are, what they do, and how you can form relationships with them.

Influencer marketing vs. celebrity endorsements

Oprah endorses bread (and Weight Watchers). Gif Credit

Honestly, there’s some overlap. A company is paying a person with an established audience to endorse their product.

But an influencer’s followers trust that the endorsement comes from a well-researched, more sincere place, rather than something as simple as a signed contract between a brand and a famous person.

While there is usually a formal agreement between the two parties, influencers are usually more selective about their affiliations. They choose to partner with brands that reflect their own unique personal brands so as not to alienate their followers.

They worked hard to build their following, so they aren’t going to risk it by endorsing a product that doesn’t fit their brand or appeal to their followers.

Celebrity product endorsements are less about engagement with a niche audience and more about attaching a person’s name recognition to a particular brand, regardless of how wide the audience is.

Launching a social media influencer campaign

Okay, so you want to start a social media influencer campaign. Where do you even begin? What do you consider when you are setting your goals and looking for an influencer to work with?

Expertise

What are the influencer’s niche and expertise? Is the content of your campaign going to make sense coming from this influencer?

If you’re a fitness company, it wouldn’t make sense for you to partner with an influencer known for baking intricate pies, for example. You’d want to reach out to an influencer who is sharing workout tips and healthy foods on their Instagram.

Reach

Do they have reach on the social media channels where your audience spends its time? Or are they on a platform that you’re trying to break into? Can this influencer engage your audience?

Consider how many followers they have – make sure they’re real and not purchased – and is it on a platform you’re already successful on? If you already have followers on Instagram, then an influencer on Instagram is a good choice for cross-promotion.

Demographic

Is this person’s following similar to your buyer persona? Do they affect the same people?

Do the followers seem like the kind of people who would be interested in your product? Would your ideal buyer persona already be following this influencer? If yes, partner with them!

Notoriety

Are they well liked? Is their fame split between admiration and condemnation or are they a person who appeals to most people? The person of mass appeal is who you want, so you don’t alienate potential customers.

You don’t want to step into a trap where your company partners with a controversial person – unless that is your initial goal, of course. Maybe you don’t mind bad press.

Social Influencer Marketing Benefits

As TV, newspapers, and magazines were replaced by social media as the primary entertainment and communication channels, brands have been forced to get creative with how they get their product in front of potential customers and stay in the minds of their current customer base.

It’s a challenge to stay relevant in such a fast-paced social environment, but it has its benefits as well.

Social influencer marketing isn’t pushy

Consumers are tired and frustrated with traditional advertisements being shoved in their face. Ad blockers are increasingly popular. In fact, a study by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) showed that two-thirds of consumers are using ad blockers.

So, no matter how hard you’re pushing your ad content, two-thirds aren’t going to see it.

That’s the beauty and ingenuity of influencer marketing. It doesn’t feel or look like an ad. What’s that saying? If it looks and quacks like a duck?

Influencer marketing doesn’t look or quack like a duck. It feels genuine and like a friend is letting you in on a secret.

Influencer marketing is credible

The most successful social media influencers spend a considerable amount of time and effort to win the trust of their followers. It doesn’t just happen overnight. They craft an engaging story that attracts their followers and keeps them coming back.

With an engaged audience, you build trust and instills loyalty. They believe in the person they’re following, so they’re more likely to trust their advice and recommendations.

Social media influencers are “regular” people. They’re that person taking a photo of their artisan burger at the pub, yes, but they aren’t necessarily celebrities, and that makes it easier to trust their recommendations.

It’ll boost your SEO

If you’ve hired Digital Strike for SEO services, you’ve heard us talk about backlinks (perhaps incessantly). They’re a significant ranking factor because they signal to Google “hey, other people like this content and think it’s so useful they linked to it on their own website.”

When you work with social media influencers, you’ll naturally get links back to your website from their blog or their social media accounts. Not only are they links back to you, but they’re also quality links.

It’s practically a two-for-one deal. Increased traffic and an SEO boost for your website.

Social influencers provide value

They have thousands of followers for a reason. Their followers aren’t just following them to fill their feeds or to have more content to browse.

People follow influencers because they believe they can derive some kind of value from them.

Someone who follows a fitness enthusiast wants to get tips for staying fit and healthy. They want useful insights. That is the perfect environment for product recommendations because they’re already looking for that kind of help and guidance.

Social influencers don’t cost that much money

Sure, if you want Kim Kardashian to promote your product, you’re going to pay out the nose for it.

But for an influencer who has way fewer followers than Kim, you might be able to pay a few hundred dollars for a sponsored post. For just a few hundred dollars, you could reach 10,000+ people who are ready and willing to hear what the influencer has to say.

You’ll get relevant leads

How many times have you run a PPC campaign and you’ve gotten a bunch of leads, but they weren’t relevant? Sometimes you just get the wrong people no matter how well you target your campaign.

Successful influencers have a niche that defines them. It’s the reason their followers clicked the follow button to begin with. If your product is directly related to the influencer’s niche, you’re more likely to generate more relevant leads.

It’s a tailor-made audience, ready and willing to hear about your product.

More than 1 type of social influencer

There are the Kardashians of the world, people who have 5,000-10,000 loyal followers, and people somewhere in between.

There are those you have to pay to endorse your product and those who just love it so much, they’ll recommend it for free or in exchange for something else like a free product.

The thing every social influencer has in common with one another is their passion, sincerity, and fierce protection of the following they’ve built regardless of how big or small it is.

Micro Influencers

At the time of writing, @pia.jeraldine16 has about 1,800 followers. It’s impossible to tell whether she got paid or if she’s hoping to get paid if she posts more #ads like this.

A celebrity would be considered a macro influencer, so everyone else would be a micro influencer.

Not everyone has a million followers. Not everyone has over 100k followers. But a lot of people have somewhere between 5k-99k followers.

Micro influencers are “real” people who have formed a small community around a specific interest, and it’s usually on Instagram. They’ve cultivated a niche community around their content. It’s usually more personal and focused around their specific tastes.

Micro influencers have tapped into audiences who share common interests and characteristics, so you can partner with micro influencers who have audiences similar to your target market.

While not true for every case, micro influencers may often see higher engagement on their posts because their communities are usually more active and engaged.

Micro influencers don’t have the higher price tags associated with some larger influencers. Depending on their reach, engagement, and experience, brands might be able to partner with dozens of micro-influencers for the same price as partnering with a single macro influencer.

Earned Influencers

I found this by searching #notanad on Instagram. @akmakansi is just someone who really likes Underwood Wine and wanted to share it. They’re giving Underwood Wine free publicity.

Earning marketing comes from unpaid or preexisting relationships with influencers – those who are natural brand advocates. For example, Patrón has a bunch of influencer advocates for its tequila – people who drink the liquor and endorse it because they enjoy the product.

Another example is beauty bloggers who recommend the products that work for their skin or makeup they love to wear. Sure, those could turn into paid sponsorships, but they usually start out with someone just recommending the products they love.

Earned influencers are a natural byproduct of selling a good product that people love.

For example, when Rihanna launched her new beauty line, Fenty, it got massive support and a following because of how good it is. Everyone, from regular people to beauty bloggers to celebrities were praising the products because they were color-inclusive, felt good on the skin, and worked really well.

Everyone wanted to get their hands on the products and see how good it was for themselves because of the infectious word of mouth spread after the product’s launch.

Paid Influencers

Kim Kardashian isn’t going to just promote a product for free. Olay definitely paid a lot of money to get to Kim Kardashian’s audience. Instagram has even started tagging promoted posts like this with “Paid partnership with [company name].”

You don’t have to be a Kardashian to be a paid influencer, but they are one of the best examples. They have millions of people in their audience, so they’re the great white whale of paid influencers. If you can afford to pay them to endorse your product, you’ll reach a huge audience.

Except, it might not be as sincere coming from someone you just gave thousands of dollars to say they like your product than if the recommendation came from someone who actually uses and enjoys the product.

The audience also isn’t a niche group with a particular interest. Kardashians are massively famous, so even though their audience is enormous, their audience isn’t interested in just one thing like fitness or health food or fashion.

That’s not to say that paid influencers can’t be the genuine article. Maybe they were an earned influencer who you decided to pay for more endorsements. If you can find influencers who already use and love your product so much that they’ve posted about it for free, then you’re more likely to form a positive relationship with them for paid endorsements.

Beware of Fake Influencers

If you google “social media influencers,” you will find a bunch of articles written by people testing just how easy it is to become a fake influencer and get companies to send you free products or money. Fake social media influencers are a unique form of ad fraud that is becoming more and more commonplace.

With the ability to buy followers, likes, and comments, it’s pretty easy to make it look like you’re a social media influencer with a dedicated following when you aren’t.

When you’re trying to make it look like you’re a social influencer, one of your biggest hurdles is to have enough content. To keep up with the demand, stock photos and straight up stealing content from other accounts and claiming it as your own is the general practice.

How to spot a fake social influencer

Then you aren’t getting in on the social media influencer game! Gif Credit

It’s a little bit like playing Where’s Waldo, but once you learn to spot them, you’ll always be able to pick them out from the crowd.

Evaluate the engagement rate

If you can see thousands of followers, but not many likes per post, then that’s not a good sign. It means they probably bought their followers but then didn’t spring for the likes and comments.

If they have a few posts with significantly more engagement than the rest of their posts, you should scroll through the likes on that photo. If you see a lot of accounts with odd usernames including a string of numbers or a lot of accounts that don’t have a profile picture, those likes were likely bought.

Is their follower growth steady?

A sudden and significant spike in followers in one day? Probably fake.

Unless you know for sure they just got a lot of publicity recently.

But as a rule, the following growth of a real influencer is steady and relatively consistent. And it’s not really about the numbers. 5,000 engaged followers are much more valuable than 50,000 bot accounts.

What’s the engagement quality?

People who buy their followers have caught on to the rule above and have started buying their followers in smaller batches to look more real.

So you need to look at the quality of the engagement. Does it seem like real people commenting or is it a bunch of two-word comments and random emojis? You’re going to have to use your judgment here.

Finding Real Social Media Influencers

Now that you know how to spot the fakes, let’s talk about how you can find social media influencers who are the real deal.

If you have no idea where to start or who is out there already influencing your targeted corner of the market, there are a few tools that can help you.

Buzzsumo

With the help of Buzzsumo’s influencer and outreach feature, you can find the top writers, bloggers, and publications in your field using the same keywords you’re targeting too.

You can sort via influencers, bloggers, companies, and regular users who might not have the status of an influencer.

Influencers aren’t only just those who have a high number of followers. Look at their total number of shares per article and their site’s domain authority.

I know what you’re thinking. LinkedIn? Isn’t that so I can find a job? Well, yes. But LinkedIn is explicitly designed so you can network with those inside your industry. So why not use it to find influencers?

You can enter specific keywords or phrases into the search box that pertain to your industry. If you’re looking for someone to promote a cookbook or a kitchen product, search for “food blogger.”

Twitter

Even if you’re looking for influencers who are popular on Instagram, it’s likely they have a follow on Twitter too. And since Twitter has an advanced search function and more words on their platform in general, it might be easier to find an influencer there.

How can social media influencers help with your campaign?

There’s no wrong answer for this. It all depends on what kind of campaign you’re running, how much you’re willing to pay them, and what they’re willing to do for you.

You can ask influencers to interact with your campaign by:

writing a guest blog post
sponsored posts
collaborating on an event
becoming an affiliate
posting product reviews
giving products to influencers who might then run a giveaway for their followers

Create a mutual goal with your influencer. They’re going to need to get something from working with you too, so it’s crucial that both parties do the heavy lifting.

Think about forming a relationship with social influencers for the long run. Don’t just ask them to do one sponsored post and then forget about them. You have the opportunity to grow together and gain insights from one another.

Social Media Influencer Success

Who’s using social media influencers successfully? Who can you look to for inspiration for your own social influencer campaign?

ModCloth

ModCloth gets free social content and publicity from their fans with their hashtag, #marriedinmodcloth

It doesn’t even have to partner with people who have huge followings. Their following is made up of regular women who love their stylish clothes. They have thousands of earned influencers at their disposal, and they take full advantage of it.

ModCloth even has a page on their website called the Style Gallery where they post photos of their fans share wearing their clothes. They have a hashtag, #marriedinmodcloth, which is a collection of happy brides wearing their line of wedding dresses. What better endorsement do you need than a happy bride?

That’s content they didn’t have to create themselves, and it’s all because their customers love and are loyal to their product.

Their greatest strength is in their followers and their followers’ willingness to share their love for the brand on social media.

Sprint

They got the Verizon guy to switch teams! I don’t even need to mention his name, and you know who I’m talking about. “Can you hear me now?”

And then he switches to Sprint? Legendary.

Not only did they get that guy, but they are also using a variety of social media influencers like Lele Pons, Gerard Adams, and Rachel Cook for their #LiveUnlimited campaign.

Sprint’s industry is competitive to say the least, so they’re leaning into the social media influencer market.

Sperry

You know those boat shoes people wear even when they aren’t on a boat?

People love them.

They love them so much they’ll post pictures of them on Instagram for free, and Sperry reposts them and tags the photographer. Sperry doesn’t just work with micro influencers. They can use content from regular people who just happen to love wearing their shoes.

That’s a genius way to get free content, it gives your customers a thrill to know you saw the photo you tagged them in, and it’s a great way to brag to your competitors that your shoes are beloved by all.

Bottom line: Is a social influencer campaign worth it?

It depends on what you want them to do and how engaged their following is. It also depends on how hard you work to cultivate your relationship with them.

This could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship, or maybe you only work together on one thing and go your separate ways. Either way, if it results in more sales and engagement with your product, then it’s worth all of the effort in the end.

If you’re looking to expand your digital marketing strategy, the experienced team at Digital Strike can help. It all starts with a free consultation and then we’ll go from there. Drop us a line!