Who or What Are Social Media Influencers?

Okay. Welcome everybody. I wanted to follow up on the Facebook Live video I did the other day about what makes an influencer, who's influential, and all that good stuff. Today I wanted to follow up and get a little more specific, and I wanted to talk to you all about social media influencers in particular, because that's what most people are looking for in terms of finding influencers, at least in the influencer marketing space. This is true. And this is what I have spent much of my career in influencer marketing doing, is finding social media influencers who are a good match for my clients, my brand, even me, entrepreneurs, whoever. With all that being said, I want you to— I want to reiterate something to y'all, and that is that I'm available for consultation. So you get 30 minutes for free if you want me to consult with you about something, your business, your product, or whatever it is, and you want to use influencers for that. After that, after the 30 minutes, I've got to charge because I've got to put bread on the table too. But the other thing I want to encourage you to do is to join my Influence Marketing for Badasses Facebook group that's free to join, and it's a good place to learn and interact with others who are doing this as well. And then also I have a premium level class, online class course, but I require that you watch my masterclass before you even think about attending that. And in that masterclass, I talk about what I call the 7 steps to making your competition irrelevant. And it's pretty much a recap of my personal journey and how I got— went from doing PR for a major corporation and how I changed and started doing influencer marketing back in around 2007, 2008. that timeframe. And then I joined an influencer marketing firm and did that from 2009 all the way to about a year ago. And since then I've been on my own. So anyway, all of those things are in there. I'll put them in the show notes so that you can see them. And if you want to reach out to me and contact me about any one of them, please do. Okay, so social media influencers, like who are they? Where are they? How do I tell if they're really influential? And how do I go about evaluating them as an influencer? How do I, how do I tell whether they've got real influence as opposed to just being posers? Some of that I'm going to get into in the next video. I'm going to talk about how to find them, and then the video after that I'm going to talk about how to assess them. Assess them, because those are two big topics, and there's a lot of information there, and I want to make sure that I spend enough time talking about each one of those so that we go into depth and we're not just skirting the surface. So again, social media influencers—who are these people? Like, how do I know that they're really social media influencers? How do I know that? It's somebody that I'd like to work with or for my brand or my company, help get my fledgling business, get more recognition, more awareness, all these good things. So how do I do that? Well, I'm going to share my screen here with you and we're going to go through some of that. Let's see, share screen, desktop. Okay. Okay. I think you should all be able to see that now. What I'm going to do here is move this down a little bit. Okay. First up, let's talk about Facebook because Influencer Marketing for Badasses is located in Facebook and we all interact there for the most part. So let's start with that. And I'm going to show you here an influencer online. Her name is Trish Lito and she has a Facebook group called Making It Rain with the Hustlers. And this is a really great group. You can see that she's got about over 2,000 members at this point. Some of them are also members of my group, Influencer Marketing for Badasses. But Trish does a lot of live videos. She talks a lot about being an online entrepreneur and different business ideas. And you can even schedule a time to get interviewed with Trish inside her group, which I've done before. To be really, really successful. It was rewarding and a lot of fun too. So, um, somebody like Trish commands a nice engaged audience in here. Again, if you're going to try and market laptops or cosmetic creams or something like that, this is not going to be— this is not going to be a group for you. There are— but there are thousands and thousands of other groups being managed by people like Trish inside of Facebook. One of the things that you might want to keep in mind is with the recent algorithm changes inside Facebook, they are making groups do better organically in terms of search and stuff. So groups and groups like this one here that I have on the screen are— they're going to be doing better and better as time goes on. The gurus and all that stuff that are trying to push their crap through all the ads and everything. I'm not sure that, that all that stuff is going to be as readily findable. I'm sure the ads will, but the, you know, the organic stuff that a lot of these gurus are doing probably won't. So they're probably going to be starting more and more of their own groups if they haven't already done so. But anyway, so Trish is just one influencer here. This is her here. You know, she's, she's, she's pretty, she's cute, she's, she's got a great smile, she's very bright. She doesn't take any sass from anybody, which I like about her. But I recommend you check out her group if you're interested, like if you're interested in being— learning more about being an online entrepreneur or something like that. Somebody I mentioned yesterday. Or the other day, excuse me, is Dan McSweeney's group. Let me see if I could pull that one up. Financial Freedom Forever. All right, let's pull up Dano's group. All right, here we go. Ba-boom. All right, Dan, as many of you probably know, some of you crossed over from his group into mine. Dan runs a really dynamite group here. He's got over 3,000 members. Okay, it's not huge, but it doesn't have to be huge. It just has to be engaged and it has to be worthwhile. And for it to be worthwhile means that Dan continually posts quality content and gives a lot of value inside of here. So, you know, other people post in here, members of this group are posting in here. You know, Dan talks a whole bunch, a whole bunch of different topics, cryptocurrencies. He's even got a video of mine in here. Thank you, Dan. Um, and you know, he's got a lot of other things. He's, he talks about podcasts with Mikhail Thorup. Mikhail Thorup is somebody that I met through Dan. So a lot of this stuff is being able to connect with other people and build relationships with them because relationships, folks, are really key Where influencer marketing is concerned, it's not as some of us on the LinkedIn community call smash-and-grab tactics, which is just go out, get some ads with some Instagram influencers, boom, get some traffic, get some conversions, boom, that's it. That's really not influencer marketing. That's really just well if it is influencer marketing, it's like the lowest tier of influencer marketing you could be doing, and it's tactical. It's not strategic. And yeah, it works, especially for certain things like if you're promoting some affiliate products, it can be really, really good and beneficial for that. But if you're doing something bigger with your personal brand or a brand that you're working for or a client of yours, you're going to want to think bigger than that. And you're going to want to think a lot more holistically than that. So again, getting back to Dan, Dan's group here is really a dynamite one. And, you know, just through working with Dan and getting to know Dan, he's introduced me to people, he's introduced me to different ideas. It's through him that I met Mikhail Thorpe and got onto the Expat Money Show. Um, so really, really good things have come out of being a part of this group. Now, if you want to be able to promote your business or something like that, Dan is somebody that you could reach out to and see what you might be able to do. Whatever you do, don't spam his group and don't just go in there trying to promote your your stuff because Dan's going to kick your ass out and you will have violated that trust. So don't do that. Don't violate that trust. All right. So let me give you another example here. Okay. This is a completely different group. This is Webree. This is a private group. I'm giving you a little sneak peek into a private group. This is run by a guy. Named Ryan Stewart. He's an SEO expert. He's based out of Miami, Florida. And I'm going to tell you something, Ryan is probably one of the best SEO guys I have encountered. And he looks at SEO from a very technical perspective. He looks at it from on-page as well as off-page. He looks at it from not only the point of view of those technical aspects, but he looks at it from a content point of view too. Now, other SEO experts like Brian Dean are much more content-oriented in their approach, and that's totally legit. But I'm just going to tell you, Ryan has got a really dynamic way of looking at SEO. I've learned a lot from him. One of the things I like about Ryan is that, you know, he is approachable. He puts out a lot of content. He's put out a lot on HubSpot and other notable places where SEO gets talked about. So guys like Ryan are definitely people to know. If you're interested in affiliate marketing, you're going to want to know these guys. These guys are Andrew James and Steven Esposito. They call their business Elevated Entrepreneurs. I'm a client of theirs. I actually have learned quite a bit from these guys. Here they are here. This is Andrew and this is Brett and this is Stephen. These guys are dynamite and they provide extreme value. Their webinars are awesome. I've actually learned more about affiliate marketing than I ever could have dreamed of from these guys and they live the laptop lifestyle. that so many other, you know, so many gurus talk about, but these guys actually live it. And I think Andrew's still living in Medellín, Colombia right now. I think Stephen lives in Miami, but, you know, they go back and forth and stuff like that. But these guys, Elevated Entrepreneurs, so these are influencers in their respective niches. These are all influencers. So let's, let's move to a different platform. Let's talk, let's talk about A different place to find people. And one of those is Twitter. Okay. I am not a fan of Twitter. I really don't like it very much. I've never found it to be overly useful. I think a few years ago it was, it was a bit more useful. I know that a lot of the politicians today trade, you know, insults and everything back and forth on Twitter. On Twitter. Twitter does have some real value to it in the sense that if you want to know what's going on in the world, you're going to hear about it faster through Twitter than you probably would on any other platform. So if there's an earthquake in the Philippines, if there's, you know, some other event somewhere, you're going to hear about it on Twitter probably before anywhere else, even before Facebook. The person I've got up here is Robert Scoble. I've got Robert here because I know Robert. I know he's a genuine— excuse me— technology influencer. If you're going to try to get somebody to review your laptop product or some gadget or something, Robert is not your man. Robert is interested in ideas and, and big topics. He says so in here in his description. So he's interested in self-driving cars. He's interested in artificial intelligence, cryptocurrencies, digital assistants, augmented reality, virtual reality, all of these technologies that are disrupting business, industry, and our lives even. So this is the stuff that moves Robert. This is what he's really interested in, and he has a genuine audience. He's got a listed here over 400,000 followers. He's following about 45,000. He's got over close to 70,000 tweets. I wouldn't doubt that at all. Robert was one of the first adopters of Twitter. But all that said, that's great. And that's terrific. And this is a great place. Twitter is a great place to find influencers like Robert. You just have to know how to sift through the crap and the bullshit artists to get to the real influencers because Twitter is a highly gamed platform. And by gamed, I mean it's easy to buy fake followers for Twitter. It's very easy to create fake accounts even and make the accounts look like they're real people. The better ones at this, I mean, you know, Ryan Stewart, who I mentioned earlier about SEO and on Facebook, Ryan wrote this fantastic blog post about a year ago about how black hat SEOs used to create, and maybe some of them still do, they create fake accounts on Twitter, they populate them with profiles that look real, and they sprinkle it with all of this little personal information to make it seem like it's really a person, like dog lover, coffee drinker, all that kind of stuff. And then what they do is they, they, they program it so it's really a bot. And the bots go out there, thousands at a time, and they will like content, they will follow content, they will co-promote content, uh, they will do all these things. And what it does is it pops up whatever content that you're trying to promote. If you're using this strategy, it pops it up and it makes it look like it's really popular when it's all in fact Bullshit. So that's what I don't like about Twitter is it's so easily gamed in that sense. But anyway, getting back to Robert here, I know Robert's legit. And I've known him for many years. He's helped me out on many, many occasions in many ways. And we still talk on the phone once in a while just to swap ideas and see how each other is doing. But anyway, one of the, one of the resources that Robert provides is lists. Yeah. And he's got his lists here, and he's got a list for automated— autonomous vehicles, tech companies, artificial intelligence, crypto, blockchain, ICOs, um, AR/VR investors. If you're interested in who the investors are in artificial reality and virtual reality, well, here's a list of them. Um, he's got AR/VR people. Um, he's got tech journalists. If you're looking for technology journalists, Robert's got a whole list of them right here. So Twitter, by allowing you to build lists like this, can be a really, really terrific resource for you to use as a research tool and to find all these other people that might be hard to find otherwise. Okay, so that's an example of Twitter. So let's take a look at Let's take a look at Instagram. Okay, Texas Armazari is my hobby account. It's for my historical European martial arts group. It's got 2,800 followers, but it's a really niche thing. I'd be surprised if there were many accounts in my niche that were even as large as mine. There probably are a couple, maybe a couple that are even larger, but I doubt there are many. So anyway, let me, let me pull up some people here that I know are genuine influencers. Um, whoops, I'm gonna pull up Wolf Millionaire. This guy, I think his name is Anthony. Um, this guy is a genuine Instagram influencer. He went from— the story is he went from like $100,000 in debt. Um, he worked at a couple of major corporations in the past, so he Knows the corporate environment, knows how it works. And what he did was he got laid off at one point or something like that, and he went out— Anthony Carbone, uh, he went and started building his Instagram accounts. Uh, Wolf Millionaire is just one of them. Um, he's, he's got, um, a course that he offers. Uh, he's got multiple Instagram accounts. And in his course, he tells you about— he talks to you about— he teaches you how to build up Instagram accounts and turn it into a business. Anthony does something that a lot of others don't. He will actually get on his YouTube channel and he will, he will run through examples of what he considers to be a good Instagram account, a poor Instagram account, and then fakes. He will go out and act— he will actually call out fakers. And, you know, that to me is something that is really valuable because it teaches me something as an influencer marketer, what to look for. Because there's always things that these faking fakers are doing to try and stay on top of things, try to keep you fooled. So Anthony is somebody I follow because not only do I learn about Instagram and how to build an Instagram audience there, but I learn about how these fakers do things and Anthony calls them out. I think that's pretty cool. He does a real service to the rest of us in the community. Anyway, Anthony's got multiple accounts. This particular account has 331,000 followers. Anthony though has multiple accounts, like I said, and he commands an audience of probably millions. Now, I want you to think about that for a second in regards to something like a magazine like Vanity Fair, which I posted about recently in the Badasses group. The editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair recently stepped down. And Vanity Fair as a magazine is very well known, very well established. It's very influential, but it's dying on the vine. It has over a million subscribers now, but I want you to think about this. Vanity Fair has a million subscribers, or a little over a million subscribers. But a person, a single person like Anthony here, Anthony has millions of followers. He's multiple times bigger than Vanity Fair. So think about that shift that's happening. Individuals like Anthony— and it could be you next if you want to build yourself into an influencer. It'll take some time and effort, but if you're willing to do it and put in the work, as Andrew Edwards says, that if you're willing to put in the work, well, then you can make good things happen for yourself. And Anthony's one of those people. Anthony commands an audience of millions of people, and it's in multiple niches. It's not just automotive stuff like here. He does— he's got multiple accounts in multiple niches. So he is a major influencer. Now let me show you somebody who I know is legit and is an up-and-coming influencer. And this young lady's name is Elena. She runs a fitness account on Instagram. It's called High on Sweat. She's just broken the 33,000 follower mark. I started talking to her when she was at the 25,000 mark. And I'm working with her a little bit to help her with her Instagram strategy and to help her build herself and high on sweat into a brand. But you'll notice here a few things about Elena's page, and that is, is that, you know, it's a very nice concise bio. She gives you contact information, and then her page is very structured. Some shots of food, shots of her doing the Pilates and the yoga stuff. She's got a very compelling story. She's got quotes. in here. And here's something to consider about Instagram influencers. When an Instagram influencer, or any influencer for that matter, has a smaller audience size, that audience tends to be more engaged statistically than somebody with millions of followers on a page like this. So let's say High on Sweat had a million followers. Well, the engagement rate on that page would be much, much lower Because, well, when you get to that critical mass size like that, people just don't, they don't even really engage that much anymore because they know that you're really not going to be able to respond to them because you're just a person, one person running the account. You're probably not going to— they're probably not going to have that much interaction with you. So just keep that in mind. Smaller accounts on something like Instagram can be much more engaging for you and much more worthwhile if you are looking to work with somebody on Instagram To help promote your brand, your product, or your service, or whatever it is—your affiliate, your affiliate products. So keep that in mind. It doesn't have to be 100,000. The 100,000 mark in terms of followers is something that brands look for if they're going to start working with an influencer. They want to make sure that that influencer is actually you know bona fide and actually built that up. When we go into like how to assess influencers and tools to do that with, I will. I will run through that with you and I'll show you some of that, how to, how to do just that. All right, so let's move on. Let's go to YouTube. Okay, we're gonna hit the biggies here today. YouTube, uh, Andrew Edwards. I know Andrew Edwards. I've worked with Andrew Edwards for a long time. He's part of our Influencer Marketing for Badasses group. Um, I post information that, that Andrew, you know, puts out there as examples. Uh, I think today earlier I posted about A post that Andrew had done, a video that Andrew shot about YouTube and changes that the YouTube algorithm has been made to it in regards to, you know, you need a certain amount of subscribers or something like that before you can start getting ads or something, whatever it is. Andrew is somebody who's really put in the blood, sweat, and tears to build his audience. As you can see, Andrew's on Facebook. He's on Facebook. He's on Snapchat. He's on Instagram. On Instagram, I think he's got about 32,000 followers. Here he's got subscribed 149,000 on YouTube— excuse me, on Gear Live's actual site. I don't know how many subscribers he's got there, but it's not small. But the other thing I know about Andrew is that he doesn't really even say this here, which is interesting. Uh, maybe he doesn't about— let's see what he says about— um, okay, so Andrew, Andrew is all about consumer electronic hotness. So Andrew reviews gadgets, laptops, desktops, TVs, handheld products, whatever it is, Andrew will take a look at it. He even looks at associated products with all those things. So if you've got, you know, an iPhone and you've got the case on it, like this is a Tech21 case, Andrew will, um, Andrew will do stuff like, well, he'll review even that stuff too. So, um, those are all things to consider when looking at somebody like Andrew. Um, he'll even review games, everything else. But one of the things to know about Andrew, um, and that is that he is an Amazon.com Vijay. So Andrew reviews products on the Amazon.com platform. And if you think about it, that's where millions of people are shopping every day for all sorts of stuff. And Andrew is somebody who's talking about products and stuff on there every freaking day. So Andrew is a very, very valuable influencer to know if you're in the technology space, the gadget space, and you want to get your product in front of lots of buyers. So again, Andrew is a bona fide influencer. You can see it just in his bio there, everything he talks about. He promotes his own site, GearLive, and then he's got tons and tons of just great content here, videos. He does giveaways, he does reviews, he does unboxings, he does all sorts of stuff. Andrew is a one-man dynamo. I think he does most of his work himself. He might have some people virtually who help him with some of it, but he does a lot of this work himself. So look, this— these are, these are social media influencers. And one of the things I wanted to point out to you about Andrew is, and it's one of his big strengths, if you're looking at somebody like Elena, Elena here on Instagram, Elena is only on Instagram right now. So she's limited to that platform. The same is with Anthony Carbone, Wolf Millionaire. He's limited really to Instagram, although I think he does have a— he does have another— he does have a website. So he's a little bit— he's branching out a bit. But that's something that you need to think about if you're going to work with influencers, especially if you're doing something strategy-wise in regards to your business. Or even for a product you're about to launch or something like that, you want to make sure that as many people as possible, your ideal consumers, see it. So that means getting out onto multiple platforms and being talked about on multiple platforms by influencers. So some influencers like Andrew— Andrew is, to me, a bigger-time influencer because he's on multiple platforms. If you work with Andrew, you can say to him, look, can you push this out on Facebook too? Can you do something on Snapchat? How about some shoutouts on Instagram? You know, you can work all these kinds of deals with somebody like Andrew because he's there. He's present in all of this stuff. Another one in our group is Dave Taylor, Ask Dave Taylor. Dave Taylor's been in the technology game as long as I have. Even longer in some cases. So somebody like Dave Taylor is active on multiple platforms. Another one, if you want to look at— let's look at a website. I'm going to go to geardiary.com. This is another tech influencer that I've worked with a lot in the past. And continue to work with. She is dynamite. Her name is Judy Stanford. She is in our Influencer Marketing for Badasses group. I've worked with Judy for years, like I said, but she covers mobile computers, games, cars, music, fashion reviews. Judy gets flown all over the world by brands to go and cover the events, to cover their products that are launching there. You know, she's somebody really, really serious, and she has some dynamite content on her blog. Now again, Judy is present on multiple platforms, so she's— you'll find her on Facebook, you'll find her on YouTube, I believe, you'll find her all over the place. So that's something to look for. You want to make sure that if you're doing something with an influencer who's really from a strategic point of view, you want to see if you can get at least a mix of them who are present on all of these different platforms. The nice thing about having your own blog like this, you know, Gear Diary in Judy's case or Gear Live in Andrew's case or, you know, here's another one. I've done a lot of work with a lot of tech influencers as you can tell. Geekazine. Let's go to Geekazine. Geekazine is owned by a guy named Jeffrey Powers. I've worked with Jeff Powers quite a bit. Jeff does B2B stuff. Jeff does B2C stuff. Jeff loves to review tech products. He just loves that. He eats that stuff up. Something else that Jeff loves to do is he loves to go to events and he loves to interview people. So for instance, Jeff is on— well, he's on Twitter, he's on Facebook, he's on Google+, he's on YouTube, he's everywhere. He's on multiple platforms. He's got this dynamic, wonderful website here. He goes to CES, the Consumer Electronics Show. He went out there and covered that. I know he's doing a lot of work with HP on the B2B side. So he does, you know, virtual brown bags where he and Alistair McLean will go and they'll set up inside a company and they'll work through actually a virtual build on something. So that's really, really pretty cool stuff. And Jeff gets flown all over the place. I mean, he's going to Israel, he's going to Europe, you know, he's doing all this stuff. So he is an influencer who— a bona fide influencer who has built up his audience over time. And the wonderful thing about about a guy like Jeff or Judy or Andrew or Dave is that they're really good people and they're really easy to work with. As long as you're respectful of them and their time and you approach them professionally, you know, in a way that's, you know, friendly, they're gonna want to help you. At the very least, they're probably gonna give you some advice. If they don't necessarily want to do anything with you, at least they can point you in the right direction. At least ask them, if they even turn you down, ask them, Look, do you have any other influencers in mind who might want to work with me? So look, I hope that really has helped you guys. I'm sorry if the video went a little long, but I had a lot I wanted to cover here. So God, these stupid notices keep popping up. I got to turn them off. Okay. So remember, Influencer Marketing for Badasses. It's free to join. Just pop over and, you know, fill out the questions. Please answer the questions. I— it helps me to better understand you and what you want. And then I can take that and turn that into content for the whole group. If you need a consultation with me, I am available. The first 30 minutes are for free. After that, I've got to charge you folks because I got to put bread on the table too. And also, if you're interested in my premium online class, well then please watch the masterclass. That'll— the notes of that or the link to that will be in the show notes here. So please keep that in mind if you want to do that. And that includes a consultation with me and that includes interacting with me on a deeper basis inside a secret Facebook group I've got created for that particular course. So anyway, I am available though. Reach out if you've got questions, if you've got concerns, if you, if you want me to cover something, throw it out to me, let me know what it is, and we'll do something on it. So anyway, hope you all are well, and until the next time, we'll see you. Thank you.