Influencer Marketing — An Influencer’s Perspective

The way I see it, there are two type of influencers on social media. One with their face as their avi, their name displayed on their profile and those behind a niche account, if that makes sense. Let’s take me for example. By day I’m Jenna Jackson. I’m not really an influencer. I have 5,000 followers on my personal account but no brand is ever going to reach out to me. By night, I’m @str8boytexts. I only have 50,000 followers, which may seem like a lot. But, there are many Twitters out there like mine, with hundreds of thousands and sometimes even millions of followers. You may think these accounts are just run for fun, tweeting relatable content, but they’re made to make money. I’ll get into that in a later blog post.

What’s my experience with influencer marketing? Well, to be honest, my big influencer marketing moment is when I reviewed an emojibator. Yes that is the eggplant emoji as a vibrator. I received the product for free and my tweet has thus far received 430 retweets and 1,153 likes. Not bad. Furthermore, my tweet has 188,981 impressions as well as 66,403 engagements. You’re welcome emojibator.

I got this product for free and Emojibator didn’t have to spend much money to get their tweet in front of 50,000 people. They liked this so much, I then got their new chili pepper emojibator and a t-shirt to post about. We also sorted out a type of affiliate program because hey, I want my cut of the profits I’m bringing in for them! So basically, I review emoji vibrators on Twitter. I hope my parents are proud of me.

So, how do you reach out to these type of influencers? It’s not quite as simple as liking each others tweets and offering them a product to review. These influencers aren’t quick to “ruin” their feed for just anything. In my experience of running niche accounts, followers can get pretty annoyed if you’re constantly doing promotions. This will bring engagement down, which is not ideal. But if they’re like me and love free stuff, they’ll reach out to you. I actually tweeted Emojibator first. Unfortunately, it’s not likely that your brand will already have this attention that influencers will want to reach out to you. Many of these influencers will have a business e-mail in their bio. Shoot them an e-mail. But, be prepared to shell out some cash for a promo. All in all, if you connect with the right niche, it’ll be worth it.