The first step is to find and identify influencers who can help you gain exposure and increase your visibility. You need to choose the right people who not only have a huge following, but who will help you achieve your specific business goals.

What to Look for

Here are the things you should be looking for when you search for key influencers:

• Relevance to your business. The individual should be someone who is related to your business. Otherwise, the new followers they will attract for you won’t do you much good. For example, if you interview someone on your podcast who is famous in a completely different field from yours, people will download your interview episode, but these people won’t become loyal fans and customers.

• Influencer’s reach. Of course, you should try to choose people to interview who have a great deal of reach. They should be people with a large following and fan base.

• The value of the person’s input. In addition to choosing someone famous and relevant, you also need to choose someone whose input will bring value to your business. Your interview isn’t just for show. You should choose interviewees who you and your audience can learn from in order to get the most value out of your efforts.
• The benefit to the interviewee. Some influencers will take the time out of their busy schedule for an interview with someone they don’t know because they’re genuinely nice people, but usually you’ll have to offer them something as well. If you already have a good following, you’ll get the interviewee additional exposure. But try to think about what additional value you can provide for them. For example, a web designer may offer a big-name marketer some free work for their time.

You should do a good deal of research on each influencer you’re considering. Don’t necessarily choose one based on their availability. The interview takes a great deal of time and effort for both of you, so consider carefully by using the above criteria.

Tools for Locating Influencers

A good place to look for influencers first is social media. Social media offers a wealth of information regarding who is influential and who people listen to. You can not only identify influencers on sites like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, but also learn valuable information about who they are and the extent of their reach by looking at their profiles and content. You can judge whether an influencer is relevant to your business or not.

As for reach, look at metrics. Numerical data such as search engine ranking, number of followers, Klout score, and so on can give you a good idea of how influential an individual is.

You can use the following tools to help analyze metrics for you:

Klout.com – Klout is a paid service that gives a “Klout score” for everyone who is highly visible online. Using Klout, you can prioritize and rank the quality of influencers from most to least popular. Klout scrapes data from all around the web, not just from specific social media sites like the other tools below.

Traackr – Traackr helps you find people who are relevant to your topic. You enter keywords related to the topic in which you want to find influencers. The system gives you back a profile that includes social insights, and you can contact the influencer directly through social media.

Little Bird – Little Bird is similar to Traackr but draws its data from Twitter engagement. It mines Twitter to find the biggest influencers related to your keywords. Once you have a list, there are a number of ways you can engage with this data. For example, after first locating your influencers on Twitter, it can then connect you with these influencers’ profiles on other social media sites.

PeerIndex – PeerIndex takes data from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Quora. It analyzes audience size and activity, as well as “authority,” or how well an influencer’s audience acts on their recommendations. This shows you not only who is popular, but also how many people actually listen to them. PeerIndex also offers insight into the influencer’s content, along with an alert system.

Keyhole – Keyhole is free and relatively simple. It focuses mostly on hashtags. Since you can search by hashtags, you’re able to find very specific information easily. If you’re looking for influencers who talk about Facebook Ads, for example, you can search for only these influencers, instead of using a broader search term like “Facebook” or “social media.” The service can also tell you who is influential at industry events.

BuzzStream / BuzzSumo – BuzzStream and BuzzSumo work together to help you find influential content based on keywords. BuzzSumo finds the initial content and influencers, and BuzzStream helps you refine your list and connect with them.

FollowerWonk – FollowerWonk is another simple and free tool that analyzes Twitter activity to identify influencers.

In addition to these tools, don’t forget that you can also learn a great deal by simply using search engines or social media. When using search engines, look for terms related to your topic and browse the websites and blogs at the top of the results. Inspect each website that you find and look for plenty of audience engagement; for example, try to find a blog with a lot of comments.

You can also perform keyword and topic searches on social media, or look at your feeds to identify people whose content is shared often by your connections. Many social media sites, such as LinkedIn, Quora, and Google+, have ratings systems for the most influential people who use them.

Other Ways to Find Influencers

Beyond web search and social media, there are other good ways to find influencers both offline and online.

Conferences – Find conferences related to your business and look at the listed speakers. This is a great way to find leads on potential influencers. Identify a conference and then research the speakers online and through social media.

Industry Publications – Check out publications in your industry. In industry publications, you can read interviews with influencers, look up the authors of articles, or find out more about the influential people that are mentioned.

Podcasts – Look for podcasts in your industry. Consider podcast hosts, guests, and interviewees as potential influencers for you to interview. Some podcasts have guests or interviews on every episode and can be a goldmine of good ideas.

Video Channels – Search for keywords and categories related to your business on YouTube, Vimeo, and other video channels. Find popular video producers in your niche. Look for individuals who have a high number of views, comments, and other forms of engagement.

Your Followers – If you already have followers on social media or elsewhere, check out their profile and see who else they follow. Who else do they engage with? The people they follow and engage with are good potential influencers for you to research further.

Your Influencers – Once you identify potential influencers in your field, you can see who they follow. You can find someone even more influential with an even bigger name. Pay attention also to who the people you follow yourself mention or share. 

Amazon – Amazon is a great resource for researching. Browse books in your field and pay attention to the authors. Look for authors whose books are selling well and have a large number of reviews.  

Narrowing Down Potential Influencers

At first, you should create a big list of potential influencers. You should hang on to this list even after narrowing it down because it can lead to more ideas in the future. Plus, as mentioned above, you can use this list to find other potential interviewees.

Start by gathering a list of twenty. Use a spreadsheet to help you keep track of their information and compare. List their names, URLs, scores, and qualitative information such as area of expertise. Keep twenty on your list at any given time, dropping those with the lowest score as you add better ones.

Again, you may want to keep the ones you’ve dropped from your list for future reference. You may decide to interview them in the future, or use them to get other ideas.

How to Interact with Your Influencers

Now comes the tricky part. You need to start interacting with your influencers, but you need to do so in an appropriate way. The appropriate way to do this is to start interacting with them in a casual, friendly way so that they’ll know who you are and it won’t seem abrupt when you contact them to ask for an interview.

Here are three DON’TS when it comes to interacting with influencers:

• Don’t Stalk. Be very careful that your activities don’t seem like stalking or pushy to the influencers you choose. Remember that they have interactions with a great number of people. You should be careful not to turn them off by contacting them too often. Also, while it’s okay to bond over something personal if the situation arises, doing this in an inappropriate way is a turn-off.

• Don’t Ask for an Endorsement. Don’t start off by asking for an endorsement when the person hasn’t even seen your product or what it can do yet. The whole idea is to set the stage well before you ask for anything. You don’t want to seem like yet another person bothering the influencer and wanting things from them.

• Don’t Name-Drop. Even if you have good names to offer who have supported you in the past, don’t do it. It’s not likely to score you points with a real influencer, who is likely to be concerned with the substance of your offering or what you do, not with the opinions of others. Plus, people generally like to see themselves as the first to know about something.

Now that you know what NOT to do, here are some good guidelines to follow when interacting with influencers.

Be Sociable.  Follow and interact with conversations that your chosen influencers are leading on social media. Comment on their forum posts, blogs, tweets, videos, and so on. Leave comments that are relevant and interesting. Try to contribute some type of value, but be genuine.

Create Value. Decide how you can create value for the influencer. Put yourself in their shoes and ask yourself, “Why would I want to be interviewed by this person?” Thinking in this way will help you decide how to make the person an offer.

Build a Relationship First. At first, all of your efforts should be toward simply building a relationship with the person. Don’t bother with promotion or sharing your links just yet. For now, interact genuinely with the person so that you’re on their radar. 

Promote the Influencer. Promote the influencer or their content or products. Tell others about them and this can put you on their radar. They’ll see you as a helpful advocate for them, making it much easier for you to request an interview. 

Send Referrals. A great way to be truly helpful to the influencers on your list is to send them referrals. If you overhear someone talking about how they need that influencer’s help or services, tell them about the influencer.

Follow the Influencer Offline. Like any fan would do, attend meetings, forums or presentations where your influencer will be. If they can see and interact with you face-to-face, this will go great lengths in strengthening your relationship.

Write Directly to Your Influencer. It’s always good to communicate directly with the influencers on your list, even if only to tell them that you’re a fan. However, you don’t want to write too much. Write just enough to introduce yourself and potentially get a conversation going. 

Gifts. A great way to build a strong relationship with an influencer is to give them a gift. Offer them something of value and they’ll definitely remember you. They’ll be more likely to be receptive when you ask them for an interview. Gift ideas include:

• A gift of your products or services
• Free content that you create for them
• Some kind of tech help that you can offer
• A sneak peek or preview of your new products. Influencers are often early adopters and like to be in the know.

Now that you know the best ways to find and connect with your key influencers in your market, it’s time to start implementing those strategies so that you’ll be ready to set up some interviews.