How to find influencers that are relevant to your business? – A 5 step process

Through social media you can develop strategic partnerships with key influencers in your niche and stay informed about the ins and outs of your industry. Only a small share of adults online creates the largest share of online content that influences people. Moreover, only a very small percentage of those influencers also influence in social media. The easiest way to filter those influencers and to find the influencers that are relevant to your business is to create a short list of key influencers. The five steps below will describe how to create such a list.

1. Make an initial list of target influencers
   The objective of this first step is to find about 10 to 20 influencers and list them in a document with the URLs of their social media profile(s). Keep in mind that during this initial phase it does not matter if you are not completely sure about the relevance of certain persons. Just add them and continue with finding more, because you can always decide to leave some out later.
2. Use ‘influence-scoring’ websites to help you rank the influencers
   Influence-scoring websites like PeerIndex and Klout determine the influence of an individual social media user. Using a specific term that is relevant to your business on one of those websites will provide you with a number of influencers that you could add to your list. Another useful website is Alltop, which lists the most popular blogs on a number of topics.
   Social platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook are also good places to find influencers. Organizers and active members within LinkedIn Groups, for example, are often influential. To find popular and active pages on Facebook you could use Facebook’s search function.
3. Monitor and communicate with the influencers on your list
   Google Reader and HootSuite are tools that make it easier to communicate with your list group. As almost every major influencer will own a blog with an RSS feed, Google Reader can create one list of blog content from your short list. In this way you can become part of the conversations your list is creating and contributing to. Using HootSuits in combination with LinkedIn Groups and Twitter list is a useful tool for segmenting and filtering Tweets from people you are following. Twitter allows you to create focused lists of influencers, which you can then add to your HootSuite dashboard which gives you clear overview of the relevant conversation and makes it easy to monitor. LinkedIn Groups your influencers are part of should also be added to your HootSuite dashboard.
4. Keep your list updated
   Although the hardest part has been done, you will have to keep in mind that should continuously refine your list of influencer. While monitoring your influencers you will probably find new influencers and decide that some individuals are not really influential, or at least not for your industry.
5. Build relationships with the influencers on your list
   During the initial phase of building relationships, you should mainly listen because listening is one of the most powerful uses of social media. You could build relationships with the influencers on your list through promoting their content, providing assistance, comment on their content, attending their events, etc.

Although creating a list of key influencers can be very useful, you should keep in mind that there are other reasons for using social media as well. For example improving customer service and increasing client retention. Use the five-step process described above to improve your efficiency and effectiveness in social media and soon your key influencers will be adding you to their list.