10 Yetis Insight Blog: Influencer Identification at Its Finest - 8 Tips To Follow

The PR industry has moved beyond traditional public relations, with the need for PR for SEO and online public relations now at the forefront of any campaign. Part of this development has seen a shift in focus from journalists to influencer outreach.

Now, don’t get me wrong journalists are still a HUGE part of a PR campaign, but they are no longer the only group of people who can make a difference to your campaign. Influencers can make a big difference to your online PR campaign.

So, firstly what is an influencer? Well, an influencer is basically someone who influences or has an impact on fellow people in the field. An influencer can be someone who is an expert speaker or writer in a certain field, or simply someone with a high number of followers on Twitter. In short, they are someone who people listen to when they speak.

Any half decent online PR agency will make influencer outreach and identification a key part of their online PR campaign. An integrated social media agency and digital PR agency will perform key influencer identification before outreaching for any campaign.

What can an influencer bring to your campaign? Well, first of all it can mean coverage for your client or work. This is always the aim of any campaign run by any sort of PR agency, so it’s a great win. Secondly, and probably the main reason for targeting influencers, is that they can influence others. Journalists, bloggers and anyone interested in the topic will look to an influencer to see what they think and what is current.

So, how do you target these influencers? Well, there are a number of ways, so sit back, relax and let me take you through my top 8 ways to identify influencers. It's important to note that these ways of influencer identification are not the be all and end all. It's important to consider every aspect of what makes an influencer, from social followings and DA, to who they know and what they do. For example, just because their Klout/Kred/Domain Authority/ Follower Numbers is low, doesn't mean that they are not influential in other ways. There is always more to life than numbers!

1. Define Your Influencers

It’s important to firstly define your influencers before you start your campaign. You need to think what you need from the campaign and what part your influencers will play in that. Do you want them to write about you, your client or a product, or do you want them to simply share it to their followers? You need to decide this before getting started with your influencer identification, as it will definitely differ.

2. We’ve Done The Hard Work For You

Now, you don’t have to all thank us at once but if you’re looking for tech journalists then we’ve done the hard work for you. Well, us and a lovely French man called Pierre-Jean Camilleri…

He created a site called Game of Angels, which pulled tech influencers and who influenced them. Us helpful Yetis pulled all the data from the site into a comprehensive list of the top technology influencers and journalists. We’ve included their name, twitter handle, social stats, cred score and a lovely little bio to help you find the key influencers for your campaign. You can find it here.

3. Harness the Power of Topsy

There are a number of tools out there readily available to help you in your campaign of influencer identification. Topsy is one our favourite tools here in Yeti towers as it is easy and readily available to use to identify the influential journalist who focus on the topic in question.

How does it work? Well, you find a link of something that is of interest to you, i.e. is similar to your product or client, and paste it into the Topsy search bar. It will then show you everyone who has talked about the link on Twitter. The results display an ‘influencer’ tab, which enables you to see all those who are influential on Twitter that have shared the link.

For example, if I head to Topsy and enter the link to my piece on the 42 most influential journalists and influencers in tech start-up from the 10Yetis blog then I can see that 13 people have tweeted about it. I can also see that 3 influential people have tweeted it; @10Yetis, @Laurenwilden and @psychobel.

It’s a great way to see who’s talking about the link and which influential tweeters you could target.

4. #Hashtags

In my opinion, the easiest way to carry out influencer identification is to keep a keen eye on Twitter’s #hashtags. In case you’ve been living under a rock for the past few years, a hashtag (displayed as # on Twitter) is a label or tag used to group mark keywords or topics in a tweet. For example, if I was tweeting about the Arsenal v Liverpool game on Monday night, then I would tweet with the #ARSvLIV. This would then group my tweet with others on the game.

So, how can we use this to determine who the influencers are? Well, through searching for a hashtag, say #ARSvLIV, it enables us to see all tweets with this hashtag. Twitter introduced a filter function for searchers recently, which filters them into ‘top’ tweets, ‘live’ tweets and so on.

Through looking at the ‘top’ tweets, we are able to see those who are influential and that are tweeting about the topic. Influential can be someone with a high number of followers, or someone whose tweet has received the most amount of interactions.

The top tweets show influential people who have tweeted about #ARSvLIV. The top tweet is by @TaylorTwellman, an ESPN journalist who has over 255k followers. Obviously, he is an extremely influential person and would be a key contact for any online PR campaign.

5. Kred

I’ve mentioned before about some of the amazing tools available to help you with your influencer identification. Kred is another one of these tools and is really helpful in separating those that can be influential in promoting your campaign to those who will not.

Kred works in that it evaluates a Twitter users’ timeline and tweets in order to give them a score. It is an influence measurement which uses a dual score to distinguish a person’s influence and their outreach. It is based on trust and generosity.

So, with a score out of 1,000 for influence and 12 for outreach, we are able to identify key influencers. This tool is particularly useful as we are able to identify the influencers who are most likely to share our content (using the outreach score).

What is a good Kred score? Well, looking at my ‘global kred’ I have 718/1000 and 7/12, meaning I am semi-influential. If you compare me to Head Yeti Andy Barr (@10Yetis), you can see that he is a lot more influential with 851/1000 and 9 out of 12.

You can pit influencers against each other to see who would be the best to target. For example, @Alex has a Kred score of 985/1000 and @Jonrussell has a kred score of 977/1000. These would be considered highly influential people.

6. Following

Using a lot of the methods of influencer identification, you should have found at least one influencer by now. We can now start to find other influencers using their profile.

Go to your influencer’s profile and click on the ‘following’ button to see how they are following. Influencers (usually) only follow those that are also influential.

For example, if we go to blogger @stevebooker, who has 69.7k followers, we can see that he only follows 327 other accounts. He follows 78% less people than how many followers he has. This may seem strange but this is because accounts and bloggers like Steve want to follow those that can influence them, interest them but also keep them up-to-date with what is on-trend. This is imperative for bloggers and influential people. Looking at Steve’s following list, the majority of these are influential tweeters, ranging from @romrosenthal (5,647 followers) to @Chris_Kendall_ (357,000 followers).

You can use people’s following list to get a hold of other influencers and the people who influence them.

7. Bloggabase

Our very own www.Bloggabase.com is an extremely useful influencer outreach tool for the PR industry. It connects marketers with bloggers, who have opted in to the database. This is great as you know that they are PR-friendly and are willing to cover your stories.

You can use Bloggabase to search for a topic and identify influential bloggers that are worth contacting about your brand or product. You can quickly identify the influential bloggers through their unique visitors per month, Google page rank and unique search rank.

8. Lists, Lists, Lists

A really easy and quick way to identify influencers for your PR campaign is simply to do a quick google search and identify the lists already put together by others. It may seem like cheating, but why do the work when someone else already has?

There are some great lists available, all you need to do is search for influencers within your field. For example, if I Google ‘technology influencers’ it brings up a great lists of the Top 100 Tech Influencers in Europe, put together by Wired.

So there you have my top 8 tips for influencer identification. If you want more content like this, then please do subscribe to our awesome newsletter here.

You can follow us on twitter here and follow me here.