Grow your influence, not just your followers

Influence has currency, both online and in the wider business world. It’s what opens doors, makes things happen and ultimately helps you reach your personal and professional goals.

One way you can build influence online is to use social media to build meaningful professional relationships with people who can help you reach your target buyer.

These people are known as influencers and may not themselves be your target buyers. 

The idea behind this is that it’s a lot easier to build professional relationships with a smaller number of people who, in turn, have the ability to influence their followers, than it is to try to build meaningful relationships with all those end followers directly.

Of course this approach can be used in a sleazy or inappropriate way. But it can also be used to build mutually satisfying business and maybe even eventually, personal relationships.

How do I find influencers?

The influencers in your sphere will become apparent the more you research your target buyer. Who do your buyers follow? Regularly read? Share, comment or otherwise engage with? 

A lot of the techniques I outlined in this post will also help you learn more about your key influencers.

It pays to keep an open mind here: your influencers may be several steps removed from the translation or localisation world.

For example, when I’m looking for information on the latest SEO strategies, I head straight to the horse’s mouth – Moz, Hubspot, or QuickSprout are my main ports of call.

But when it comes to information about tax, regulations, or other country-specific information relating to small business, my main sources of information tend to be the general press, and maybe, my accountant (they’re not terribly proactive, to be honest).

So someone looking to influence my buying decisions relating to SEO training, software, or even SEO-friendly web design or copywriting, for example, would do well to feature in a guest post on Moz.

A seller of bookkeeping, legal or other professional services, however, would be guaranteed my attention if they were referred to me by my accountant, or quoted in an article on small business in the Sydney Morning Herald.

The point here is, you need to think upstream, downstream and sideways from the interests, needs and desires of your target buyers to find the influencers that are likely to magnify your marketing efforts.

That’s what’s going to see you get the best return on the resources you invest in your online marketing.

Then what?

Once you’ve found your key influencers, you can work out where your interests and goals overlap. Use this to build an appropriate outreach campaign.

Social media is always a great place to start, but make sure you move to a mode of communication that can facilitate a deeper connection over time, such as email, calls, face-to-face meet ups, and so on.

Again, the ultimate goal here – as it is with all networking – is to build a mutually satisfying and meaningful relationship. (And that just doesn’t happen on social media alone.)

Now, doesn’t that sound a lot more interesting than chasing random and meaningless “followers” on your social media accounts?!

Go for it!

Further Reading

• Episode #28 of The High Income Business Writing Podcast, hosted by Ed Gandia: John Corcoran is the go-to guy on networking these days, and in this podcast interview he summarises his approach. There’s lots of actionable tips on identifying influencers and networking in general – check it out, especially if you dislike networking 🙂
• Chapter 7: Outreach of The Complete Guide to Building Your Blog Audience, by Neil Patel: OK, this is targeted at bloggers. But honestly, it’s like a super-dooper primer for everything you’d ever need to know about reaching out to influencers, including email scripts and spreadsheets (oooooh, spreadsheets!). Read it.
• How to Find Influencers Who Already Want to Share and Link to Your Content, by Mark Trueman on the Kissmetrics Blog: This very detailed post does just what it says on the tin, but forget about the content aspect – use the same techniques to research exactly who is sharing content on translation in your field, and you’ve got yourself an incredible list of influencers right there. Awesome stuff.

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A Social Media Challenge!

Your mission, should you chose to accept it, is to do one thing each day in October that will have an impact on your social presence in the longer term.

Each weekday in October, I’m going to suggest a task to work on for whatever pocket of time you can carve out that day. You can choose to follow my suggestion, adjust it to suit your circumstances, or come up with an alternative – whatever makes most sense for you. Or just dip in and out as it suits.

Follow along on Twitter, Facebook, or here on the blog. Let me know how you’re getting on by using the hashtag #socialtranslator (so I can find you!). If you find it helpful, please give me a thumbs up, a like or a share – that’s how I’ll know you’re finding it useful, and it’ll help other translators join in too.

Why share content in the first place?

Sharing content on social media is a fantastic way to take the temperature of your potential buyers.

With some forethought, you can use your content to move people through your sales funnel.

Checking in with your metrics on a regular basis and adjusting your content accordingly allows you to educate yourself about your clients and their needs.

Some parts of this are easy, some parts not so much…

Let’s face it – in an era of information overload, it’s not hard to find content to share online.

What’s harder is sharing content in a way that’s quick, easy and feels “natural”.

The way to do that, is to integrate sharing with your normal content production and/or consumption habits.

(I know the term “content consumption” can sound gross to delicate linguist ears. But it so neatly summarises the multitude of ways we can interact with and draw meaning from a range of media… So, until a better term comes along, I’m afraid I’m going to have to stick with it. But for good reason, I promise, so stay with me!).

Thankfully, with all the content sharing tools available, it’s not hard to do that either.

Which means we can easily have access to a ready pipeline of shared content across our social media platforms.

What’s harder is sharing the right content.

And this is where being clear on your audience and your goals can save the day.

Here are three quick tips on how to handle some of the harder aspects of planning your content on social media.

1. Get really effective

If you want to take things up a notch, you could overlay your sales funnel, your client’s buying cycle and your existing content to see where the gaps are.

This way, you’re clear on the content your audience is looking for AND on what you want readers to do when they find it, which is a magical sweet spot.

(Remember, we’re looking for action, not just eyeballs here).

Planning my editorial calendar in my local library this week

A photo posted by Sarah Dillon (@sarahmdillon) on Feb 6, 2015 at 5:31pm PST

(Image above) The not-very-high-tech way I planned a year’s worth of content for a blog, social media channels and newsletter once.

Plug all of this into a calendar of some sort, and you’ve got yourself a potentially potent starting point for your online marketing.

2. Recycle your updates

Remember: good content can and should be shared multiple times across multiple platforms.

Here’s why:

Unlike email, social media is a constant stream of noise that people dip in and out of, as they choose.

There’s not the same sense of having to keep up, not miss anything or catch every single post and update. So the chances of everyone seeing your update the one time you share it? Nil.

For this reason, share your updates multiple times, at different times of different days, to catch different sets of people each time.

3. Maintain a content library

Create and keep a library of evergreen resources that you know resonate well with your audience. That way, you have a constant stash of updates you can recycle and share across your platforms.

This also makes it easier to review what’s working well, and where your gaps are.

Example workflow

In general, when it comes to social media, I keep my sharing activities and my interacting activities completely separate. I find this helps me to be more effective with my time, and I just enjoy it more.

Here’s how I find useful content to share, in a way that’s quick, easy and in line with my goals:

• I use Feedly to keep up with my favourite websites, and I check in there every couple of days.
• If I find an article I like, and I know is likely to resonate with one of my personas, I add it to Buffer with one click either from Feedly or (my preferred route), from the article itself in Chrome.
• I can also choose which platform I’d like to share it to at this point. I use different social media accounts to appeal to different audience profiles, but at the moment, I’m focussing on my Twitter account @sarahdillon so that’s where I’ll generally send it.
• I’ve set up my Buffer to share a steady stream of content on specific days at specific times, to cover the multiple time zones I know my audience are located in. So when I add something to my library, it automatically queues it up to be shared at the next most appropriate time.
• For time-specific things like event reminders, regular recycling of my own content (e.g. 10, 30, and 90 days after publishing, etc), or content related to particular cultural holidays or events, I’ll generally use either Hootsuite or Buffer to schedule updates 2 – 3 months in advance. This just depends on whichever platform is easiest for me to access when I think about it.

For more engaging, real-time interactions, I do the following:

• I’m currently checking in to Hootsuite every day or so to interact with people and see what’s happening in “real time”. This is unusually frequent for me.
• When I log in (almost always on my phone), I’ll check and respond to replies, mentions, and so on, and chat with a couple of people for about 10 – 15 mins.
• If I find something shareworthy during this time, I’ll either add it to my Buffer to be “dripped” out over time, or I may share it straight away.

And that’s pretty much it.

The thing to remember here is there is no award for spending the most, or least, amount of time on social media.

What matters are your goals and your personal communication style.

So get planning!

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A Social Media Challenge!

Your mission, should you chose to accept it, is to do one thing each day in October that will have an impact on your social presence in the longer term.

Each weekday in October, I’m going to suggest a task to work on for whatever pocket of time you can carve out that day. You can choose to follow my suggestion, adjust it to suit your circumstances, or come up with an alternative – whatever makes most sense for you. Or just dip in and out as it suits.

Follow along on Twitter, Facebook, or here on the blog. Let me know how you’re getting on by using the hashtag #socialtranslator (so I can find you!). If you find it helpful, please give me a thumbs up, a like or a share – that’s how I’ll know you’re finding it useful, and it’ll help other translators join in too.