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I have experimented with influencers for a notebook that I sell. It has been a mixed bag, but mostly unprofitable. My target audience is musicians - not lifest

by memset 7y ago

I have experimented with influencers for a notebook that I sell. It has been a mixed bag, but mostly unprofitable. My target audience is musicians - not lifestyle bloggers - so the people I've tried to work with don't quite have the following as the person in this article. Also, I have never experienced an "entitled influencer", though I have come close. Here was my process: 1. Email 20 people with > n followers asking if I could send them a free book, and if they like it, if they'd be willing to post about it to their followers. 2. 10 of them email me back saying "sure! here's my shipping address." 3. sends 10 books 4. 3 people actually post. Of those: 1 person: for $100 I will post in an IG story. I try this, as they have 90k followers, so even a story mention must be good, right! This results in 1 sale. 2nd person: posts a beautiful picture on their IG. Land a couple of sales. 3rd person: doesn't think of themselves as an influencer, just really likes the product, and mentions it to her viewers, and this results in $300 worth of sales. Awesome! I think the trick, then, is to find people who don't self-identify as influencers, and who aren't already doing lots of advertising on their channel. Rather than trying to craft a genuine portrayal of life, find people who are actually genuine! (If anyone on HN has tips, always interested in advice!)

mysterydip 7y ago
Sounds like genuine interest is worth more than number of followers. The question is, how do you discover users who would have genuine interest and would share with like-minded friends? hashtag searches?
- vageli 7y ago
  > Sounds like genuine interest is worth more than number of followers. The question is, how do you discover users who would have genuine interest and would share with like-minded friends? hashtag searches? Analyze follower of followers once you've identified a few users who seem like potential fits for your space. I've seen this strategy work well in other social channels as well like twitter.
  - yumaikas 7y ago
    Would you be willing to explain this a little bit more?
    - dumbfoundded 7y ago
      Step 1: Read the comments of their post. Get an idea of the nature of the interaction. Step 2: Look at who actually follows them. Are they real people? Are they bots? Step 3: Look at how many products they promote through all their products. The more the worse.
- memset 7y ago
  Maybe the production quality of someone's social media is an indicator?
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
louisv 7y ago
I've also dealt with a lot of Instagram influencers for sales promotions, and there's one factor that I found has correlated a lot with the success of my campaigns: The fact if the account has promoted/is promoting a lot of products. I found that the fewer products an account promotes, the more your sales/ product awareness increases. This is not just because followers become saturated with promotions - I believe it's also because Instagram purposely reduces the reach of those accounts that use the "swipe up" link feature too much.
- faeyanpiraat 7y ago
  I'm not sure how Instagram works, so sorry if my question is too far off topic: Your insight seems reasonable, but what is your opinion about Youtube influencers, where the audience is huge, truly engaged, and all of their videos contain ads in the beginning and at the end aswell ALL the time? Some channels even come with an enragingly subtle transition where you only realise you are watching an ad when you watched half of the ad, but the content is so good you cannot hate them enough to stop watching the channel? Do these ads perform poorly aswell?
  - louisv 7y ago
    In my experience, it really depends on how the product fits their audience. In general, I don't think most products can find good ROI when using Youtube influencers, simply because of 2 reasons: • There's no easy way of leading people to links on Youtube. This means that even if you have a great ad, one that is super relevant to your audience, a lot of those people simply won't take the time to go to the video's description to click on a link. On Instagram, you can just put a practical swipe-up link on stories. • Even when the ad is good, people want to see the Youtuber doing whatever made them click on the video. For this reason, ads are mostly ignored - and when you add this to the surprising amount some big YouTubers charge for ads, it really diminishes any decent ROI.
goblin89 7y ago
I would almost completely ignore follower count, it’s more of a red flag than anything. Blue checkmarks are similarly useless. If you are enticed by the supposed reach, perhaps the quickest first pass at validation would be to review the nature of interactions in comments and cross-check other networks they participate in. It may help to pick someone popular in your field whose reputation you would not question, and use their account as a reference point for comparison. For example, I recently saw an account with 260k IG followers and blue checkmark whose posts average 100+ mostly generic short comments. I compared them to Andrew Kramer, who despite having 90k followers receives as many replies on posts, and those replies are longer and contain substance. Both are within video making industry. This is not to imply that the 260k guy or their followers are necessarily bots, but their audience is largely disengaged and may be unlikely to convert into paying customers. (Personally I don’t hesitate to use blocking on inauthentic-looking accounts to avoid becoming a node in a fake network—let bots follow other bots.) In my opinion, “valid” follower counts rarely a few thousands. If it’s much more than that, the person either purchased followers and won’t get you any leads, or (if their name is actually well-known) isn’t going to be interested in promoting products for monetary gains.
- dumbfoundded 7y ago
  ^ 100% this. I bootstrapped my business through Instagram influencers. You have to be extremely targetted around the audience. When judging if an influencer is worth working with, figure out who their audience is and the nature of that interaction. For example, Imagine I sell an awesome new cat toy for helping shy cats be more social. I don't want to find the cat pages with millions of followers. I want to find the cat expert person who helps their small group of followers deal with their shy cats. Micro-influencers also work really well. If you can get a person to talk about a product to their group of friends, the ROI is usually much higher than these giant pages. You just have to have a lot of them.
  - siruncledrew 7y ago
    What cat toy do you sell? I have a cat, and would check it out.

by memset 7y ago

mysterydip 7y ago

Sounds like genuine interest is worth more than number of followers. The question is, how do you discover users who would have genuine interest and would share with like-minded friends? hashtag searches?

vageli 7y ago
> Sounds like genuine interest is worth more than number of followers. The question is, how do you discover users who would have genuine interest and would share with like-minded friends? hashtag searches? Analyze follower of followers once you've identified a few users who seem like potential fits for your space. I've seen this strategy work well in other social channels as well like twitter.
- yumaikas 7y ago
  Would you be willing to explain this a little bit more?
  - dumbfoundded 7y ago
    Step 1: Read the comments of their post. Get an idea of the nature of the interaction. Step 2: Look at who actually follows them. Are they real people? Are they bots? Step 3: Look at how many products they promote through all their products. The more the worse.
memset 7y ago
Maybe the production quality of someone's social media is an indicator?

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

louisv 7y ago

I've also dealt with a lot of Instagram influencers for sales promotions, and there's one factor that I found has correlated a lot with the success of my campaigns: The fact if the account has promoted/is promoting a lot of products. I found that the fewer products an account promotes, the more your sales/ product awareness increases. This is not just because followers become saturated with promotions - I believe it's also because Instagram purposely reduces the reach of those accounts that use the "swipe up" link feature too much.

faeyanpiraat 7y ago
I'm not sure how Instagram works, so sorry if my question is too far off topic: Your insight seems reasonable, but what is your opinion about Youtube influencers, where the audience is huge, truly engaged, and all of their videos contain ads in the beginning and at the end aswell ALL the time? Some channels even come with an enragingly subtle transition where you only realise you are watching an ad when you watched half of the ad, but the content is so good you cannot hate them enough to stop watching the channel? Do these ads perform poorly aswell?
- louisv 7y ago
  In my experience, it really depends on how the product fits their audience. In general, I don't think most products can find good ROI when using Youtube influencers, simply because of 2 reasons: • There's no easy way of leading people to links on Youtube. This means that even if you have a great ad, one that is super relevant to your audience, a lot of those people simply won't take the time to go to the video's description to click on a link. On Instagram, you can just put a practical swipe-up link on stories. • Even when the ad is good, people want to see the Youtuber doing whatever made them click on the video. For this reason, ads are mostly ignored - and when you add this to the surprising amount some big YouTubers charge for ads, it really diminishes any decent ROI.

goblin89 7y ago

I would almost completely ignore follower count, it’s more of a red flag than anything. Blue checkmarks are similarly useless. If you are enticed by the supposed reach, perhaps the quickest first pass at validation would be to review the nature of interactions in comments and cross-check other networks they participate in. It may help to pick someone popular in your field whose reputation you would not question, and use their account as a reference point for comparison. For example, I recently saw an account with 260k IG followers and blue checkmark whose posts average 100+ mostly generic short comments. I compared them to Andrew Kramer, who despite having 90k followers receives as many replies on posts, and those replies are longer and contain substance. Both are within video making industry. This is not to imply that the 260k guy or their followers are necessarily bots, but their audience is largely disengaged and may be unlikely to convert into paying customers. (Personally I don’t hesitate to use blocking on inauthentic-looking accounts to avoid becoming a node in a fake network—let bots follow other bots.) In my opinion, “valid” follower counts rarely a few thousands. If it’s much more than that, the person either purchased followers and won’t get you any leads, or (if their name is actually well-known) isn’t going to be interested in promoting products for monetary gains.

dumbfoundded 7y ago
^ 100% this. I bootstrapped my business through Instagram influencers. You have to be extremely targetted around the audience. When judging if an influencer is worth working with, figure out who their audience is and the nature of that interaction. For example, Imagine I sell an awesome new cat toy for helping shy cats be more social. I don't want to find the cat pages with millions of followers. I want to find the cat expert person who helps their small group of followers deal with their shy cats. Micro-influencers also work really well. If you can get a person to talk about a product to their group of friends, the ROI is usually much higher than these giant pages. You just have to have a lot of them.
- siruncledrew 7y ago
  What cat toy do you sell? I have a cat, and would check it out.