With more than 500 million users worldwide, X, formerly known as Twitter, is one of the most influential social media platforms in the world. The hum of activity on Twitter offers huge potential for partnering with popular accounts and boosting your brand message.
While Twitter influencer marketing can be a great way to increase brand recognition, tap into new audience segments, and understand the general sentiment around brands like yours, it’s crucial to approach this marketing strategy in the right way to ensure your efforts pay off.
In this post, we’ll go through five tips for effective X/Twitter influencer marketing.
1. Write Great Outreach Emails
Even when you’re targeting influencers with a modest follower count, it’s important to give your outreach emails their due diligence, ensuring they’re personalized, convincing, and up-front with the kind of compensation you’re willing to offer members of your program.
Influencers across various industries are regularly inundated with emails from brands inviting them to their programs, with a lot of these being from spammy, low-quality businesses. As you can imagine, it doesn’t take much for an influencer to scan a few lines from an email and send it straight to the trash folder.
To make sure your Twitter influencer marketing campaign doesn’t fall at the first hurdle, it’s essential to personalize your emails to express a clear, authentic interest in the influencer and their work. Address them by name and reference their content in your subject line to pique their interest, then quickly and clearly outline the most compelling features of your product or service, as well as a value proposition that shows how a partnership will benefit the influencer.
By taking the effort to craft great outreach emails, you’ll maximize interest from potential collaborators and start your partnerships on the right foot.
2. Think Engagement, Not Followers
One of the most common mistakes made by brands getting started with Twitter influencer marketing is prioritizing influencers based on their follower count alone, rather than looking into how “switched-on” those followings are.
Obviously, you’ll need to ensure the influencers you partner with have a decent following before you decide to invest in them, but it’s important to consider the amount of inactive or “dead” accounts that can make up large profiles’ followings, and who won’t offer any value to your campaign.
When you’re assessing potential accounts to partner with, be sure to look past the simple influencer count and investigate the kind of engagement influencers enjoy from their audience.
Some Twitter analytics questions to ask influencers to gauge the value of a partnership include:
- What’s the average engagement rate on your tweets?
- What’s the average number of retweets and replies?
- How many link clicks per post have you seen from previous collaborations?
- What’s your average view count for video content?
By asking these kinds of questions, you’ll build an understanding of your prospective partners that not only covers how many people you’ll get your brand in front of, but how likely each post is to bring in the kind of engagement you’re looking for.
3. Make Sure Your Audiences Intersect
For your partnership to drive interest and action, you need to ensure there’s a decent level of intersection between your target audience and the audience of the influencers you’re thinking of partnering with.
Seeing as you’re reading this, you may have already drawn some basic audience parameters for finding potential influencers, looking at broad categories such as the average age of the audience or their geographic location. However, if you have the time and resources, there are many more datasets you can investigate to ensure you’re finding a good match for specific audience segments.
Some audience analysis methods you might want to consider include:
- Using social listening to analyze a following’s interests, hobbies, and common points of discussion that show whether the audience is interested in topics that are relevant to your brand.
- Assessing the quality of comments and retweets of a post to see if there’s a sense of cohesion in an influencer’s audience and how predictable their response is going to be to future campaigns.
- Asking to see any polls and surveys the influencer has conducted with their audience and finding points of comparison with your audience research.
- Analyzing the audiences of influencers who your competitors have had success with, and looking for common traits shared between both audiences.
4. Find Influencers Who Are Related to Your Field of Work
When you’re drawing up a prospective list of influencers to partner with, knowledge in your niche should always be prioritized before reach.
Nothing will undermine the potential of an influencer partnership faster than posts that are overly scripted and missing a level of genuine interest on the influencer’s part.
The influencer’s audience is going to be very familiar with their unique tone of voice. If they’re seen to be warping this voice while promoting a new product, their followers are going to notice immediately, making it less likely that they’ll engage with you.
Ideally, you should be partnering with accounts that demonstrate knowledge and passion for the topics you’re going to be promoting. This will allow them to promote your brand while sharing their genuine opinion and delivering your message with their own tone of voice. By keeping Tweets authentic and interesting, you’ll ensure influencer campaigns lead to more interest and better engagement.
5. Avoid Micromanaging
It’s good practice to guide your influencers on how you’re trying to frame your product. However, micromanaging their content will only undermine the impact it has with their audience and leave you to recoup a wasted investment.
Some brands make the mistake of giving influencers overly-pedantic instructions on the copy they want influencers to tweet or read, the appearance of images and videos, and other aspects that tend to keep the results very “inside the lines”. When you’re developing your influencer marketing, it’s important to remember that their influencer accounts aren’t TV channels or blogs, and that their value as a promotional channel hinges on the organic relationship they’ve built up with their audience over several years.
Just as you should prioritize niche experts to give influencer content a certain authenticity, avoiding micromanaging will give your partners room to create, and let them bring your product to their audience in the way they know is best.
Twitter Influencer Marketing Done Right
Twitter influencer marketing can have widely variable results, but when you follow the right practices, the returns for your brand can be huge. We hope this guide has given you some useful pointers as you search for influencers and find a mutually beneficial partnership fuelled by a genuine interest in your brand.
For more support on finding prospects for Twitter influencer marketing, sign up to Highperformr for free and discover our robust analytics suite!
