Becoming an influencer can lead to a lucrative side hustle or a full-time career. Discover what it takes to get started in this area of social media.
An influencer is a social media professional who has built a sizable following around a relevant topic, and can therefore influence their followers to take an action thanks to their credibility and authority. While influencing can be a crowded space to break into, it can also be a lucrative career—or side hustle—for creatives who enjoy finding and building audiences across an array of platforms.
In this article, we'll discuss how to become an influencer. Afterward, strengthen your social media knowledge and skill set with the Meta Social Media Marketing Professional Certificate, where you'll learn how to develop effective social media posts and create a strong social media presence.
Influencer marketing is an increasingly important part of a marketing organization's social media strategy. It refers to the practice of collaborating with relevant social media professionals, aka "influencers," to promote a company's brand or products across social networks.
An influencer—sometimes called a social media influencer—is someone who leverages their social media channels to influence followers’ buying decisions. As an influencer, you can earn money working with relevant brands to promote their products through various campaigns thanks to the connections you've built with their target audiences.
Influencers don’t have to be celebrities in order to accrue followers. Successful influencers typically offer value on social media by creating and posting quality text and videos that tend to offer:
Specialized knowledge
“Edu-tainment”
Insight into a niche topic
Distinctions like macro, micro, and nano influencer have worked their way into this industry’s terminology to indicate the size of an influencer’s audience. Macro influencers have 500K to 1 million followers, micro-influencers have 10K to 50K followers, and nano influencers have up to 10K followers.
Content creators are another term in this space. In the table below, we’ve outlined a few similarities and differences between that role and influencers:
Content creators | Influencers |
---|---|
Leverage their expertise to attract potential customers. | Leverage their large social media followings to promote other brands. |
May sell products, services, and subscriptions directly to consumers or sell ad space on their content. | May accept compensation in exchange for promoting or endorsing other brands. May also earn commissions through affiliate links on social posts or sell their own products directly to consumers. |
Create video, audio, photographic, and text-based content. | Create video, audio, photographic, and text-based content. |
May prioritize website SEO and generating high-quality content like video and audio material. | May prioritize building relationships with an audience and creating unscripted, behind-the-scenes content. |
Becoming an influencer can be an exciting endeavor, one that you pursue as a side hustle or as a full-time career. You can inspire your audience, share your passions, and generate income. Follow these steps to make your influencer journey a rewarding and successful one:
An important first step in becoming an influencer is to approach it like you would a business. By adopting business approaches, you can systematically attract your target audience and generate income.
Here are some basic tasks to complete:
Draft an outline of a business plan that articulates your goals (such as building a following around your passions, working with specific brands you admire, and generating income), summarizes what you offer, and analyzes competitor influencers in your category.
Gather influencer tools, such as Canva for designing simple graphics, or Linktree for aggregating links to the URLs you want your audience to click.
Determine the prices you want to charge brands for promoting their products.
Find payment software that makes it easy to send invoices and receive payments from brands.
A niche market is a highly specific market segment of consumers that an influencer can market to online. Your niche can be based on a category of content that you share on social media as well as the demographics (age, location, income, etc.) and psychographics (values, beliefs, interests, etc.) of your target audience.
To gain clarity about your niche, reflect on:
Your passions
Content you most enjoy consuming and that you’d like to create yourself
Products you love using and would like to promote to others
Successful influencers you already follow and the channels they use
You may find it useful to research industries, content categories, and hashtags on different social media platforms for inspiration. For example, Instagram’s Explore page may suggest content categories to you, like “indoor gardening,” “animal photography,” and “college sports” that you could narrow down or tweak to reflect your unique angle.
Once you’ve identified your niche, conduct market research to understand your target audience. That way, you can develop a lasting connection with that audience by posting valuable content that satisfies their interests and goals—and grow your followers accordingly.
It can be helpful to find out:
The content your audience responds to the most
The type of comments your audience makes on other social media influencers’ content
The questions they have and the challenges they face
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Think of your influencer brand as you would a personal brand. It's a coherent presentation of your personality, values, and passions, and offers followers authority on a specific topic.
Take some time to get clear on the impression you want to leave and what you want to become known for. You may choose to create an aesthetic for your influencer brand, complete with colors, fonts, and even a brand voice.
Read more: What Is a Brand Strategy? And How to Create One
A large part of an influencer brand is the content you share on social media channels. To start building a content strategy, make a list of individual pieces of content that explore different facets of your topic. You'll also want to determine how frequently you post in order to grow your audience.
Tip: Set up a content creation calendar that determines the frequency and structure of your posts. For example, Monday posts could offer a glimpse at your morning routine, Wednesdays could be reserved for “Ask me anything” live-streaming, and Friday posts could offer educational tutorials.
Before officially launching your influencer brand and posting content in earnest, take time to optimize your online presence as a whole, so that you can build brand equity. Your online presence can include:
Creating social media accounts for your influencer brand or converting your existing accounts into influencer accounts.
Building a website that social media followers and brands can visit to learn more about you, subscribe to your email content, and read blog articles or other longer-form content.
Setting up an email marketing system specifically for your influencer brand.
Did you know? Some social media platforms allow you to switch your account type and enable different capabilities such as running paid ads or monetizing content. Instagram, for example, offers three settings: personal, business, and creator.
Along with optimizing your online presence, you need to select the social media platforms and marketing channels through which you’ll influence and inspire your followers. Being selective about your channels offers two main advantages. One, you can focus on mastering the features of one or two channels. And two, you can choose the platform or channel that works best for the type of content you share.
Here are some general differences between platforms:
YouTube influencers tend to perform well when promoting products requiring an explanation or video tutorial.
TikTok influencers perform well in categories like entertainment, dance, pranks, fitness, and home improvement, and typically cater to Gen-Z audiences.
Instagram influencers perform well when their content leverages imagery. Popular categories on Instagram include fashion, beauty, food, travel, and fitness.
Once you’ve set up your online presence and selected the channels and platforms you’ll appear on, it’s time to start posting content. Remember that it can take time to see tangible results from your content efforts. Consistency is key.
In addition to posting regular content on social media, it will be important to engage with your audience members to increase your “know, like, and trust” factor. Here are some engagement methods:
Like, comment on, and repost content by your followers and fellow influencers in your niche.
Respond to comments on your posts in a timely fashion.
Start conversations on social media by asking your audience questions about their interests and opinions.
Message your most engaged followers to ask them what kind of content they’d like to see you create.
As social media users start to take notice of your content, follow your accounts, and look to you for entertainment or information, brands may reach out to you to collaborate. You can also pitch brands directly.
Make a list of the brands you’d like to collaborate with.
Decide how you want to collaborate with them, including through sponsored posts and affiliate marketing, and how you want to monetize your efforts.
Draft a description of content that you can create to promote various products that you can use for your website or for contacting brands via email or messenger.
Draft a template for pitching these brands directly.
Create an Influencer profile on sites like Influence.co and Intellifluence to increase your visibility and connect with brands.
As your list of followers and brand collaborators grows, commit to the regular upkeep of your influencer business:
Set aside time periodically to research social media trends and new influencer tools and techniques.
Note which content gets the most engagement from your audience and adjust your content strategy accordingly.
Stay connected to your audience and seek to understand their interests, goals, and challenges more intimately.
Practice different ways to connect with your audience on video or audio content, using body language, vocal intonation, and word choice.
Use GenAI to help analyze your audience and make recommendations to improve your strategy.
Build and strengthen key social media skills through online learning. Consider enrolling in the Meta Social Media Professional Certificate. Over six courses, you'll learn how to establish an online presence, build a following, and manage your social media accounts, as well as how to evaluate and interpret your success.
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