Influencers are social media celebrities. These people have a significant influence on their followers in mostly everything, including promoting different brands. But you should consider that LinkedIn is no regular and traditional social network.
I mean, anyone with many followers is considered an Influencer on platforms like Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, etc. Yeah, usually LinkedIn influencers (the macro ones) have tons of followers and connections, but it is not like you will get the perfect result in working with these people.
The important thing is that is their followers their real audiences? Do you actually want to know how to find influencers on LinkedIn? We are going to talk about strategies here, not just how you can search for these people.
How to find influencers on LinkedIn?
How to find influencers on LinkedIn? There are a lot of ways to do that, like going for the top 500 voices selected by LinkedIn itself, searching these influencers in the search bar, or asking your connections if they know any of them.
What we are going to talk about here are the tips you want to remember while you are making a list of influencers.
As you may know, LinkedIn has a list of 500 official influencers. These big shots usually are not into working with small businesses, especially if it is about influencer marketing.
They are too busy and out of reach to be accountable. That is why it is a better idea to go for micro-influencers. You know, the people who do not have that blue influencer badge next to their name and usually don’t even have tens of thousands of followers.
I am trying to say that LinkedIn is not like other platforms where tens of thousands of followers have a considerable effect; I mean, yeah, it is effective at some level. Yet, there are many people with 10K+ followers and connections that cannot be considered an influencer.
The number of their followers does not define an influencer on LinkedIn, but the quality of their influence on their audiences, the depth of their relationship with their followers, and the ability to change people’s perspectives. Now we all know that thought leaders can have a huge effect on the way people think, so why not the macro-influencers again?
Well, it might be hard to accept, but you need to know that most of them have their own social media teams, which means a team will write their posts and answer the comments.
They even do not answer their private messages themselves, so what is the point? Really want to work with a non-responsive influencer who will probably not even tend to work with some smaller business?
Micro-influencers are people who have the time, passion, and consideration to make a deep relationship with their followers.
This relationship usually has some perfect results when they try to affect people’s perspectives. I have had tons of similar experiences myself.
I once worked with this macro influencer with millions of followers and stuff. I personally did not see any results from that cooperation, but just after some time, I tried the same project with some micro-influencers; the exciting thing is that one of them sent me more than twenty clients, and she was the one with 2500 followers if I’m not mistaken! Do you see? It is about how an influencer interacts with his/her connections and followers.
Who cares if I have millions of followers when I cannot even get one client out of them? You need to find out if an influencer has the ability to shift their followers’ perspectives or if their followers just happened to be on that list?
I am not saying to go for those with tens of thousands of followers; just do your homework before that.
See if they are willing to go for a one-on-one session or if they are willing to participate in an event, an episode, podcast, live stream, etc., to ensure they are reachable and responsive.
But I personally would connect with people who have 2000 to 5000 active and engaged followers. Personal advice, try to find influencers who have similar approaches to you, and never go for those engagement baiters.
People who insist on posting polls more than once per week are just trying to encourage the viewers to engage with their posts. There are no actual purposes behind these posts, usually.
When you are looking for influencers, view their profile to see if they spent enough time to have a decent profile.
It doesn’t have to be perfect but an incomplete one can be interpreted as a lack of responsibility. Then you have to look at their network size, yeah we said that it doesn’t matter if they have 2M followers or 2000 ones, but people with less than 500 followers cannot really do anything for your brand.
You can also do a bit more digging and see if their followers and connections are similar to yours at any level or not.
It is essential to find an influencer with a similar thought stream with similar followers. See if these followers are interested in the same industry. Also, read some of the influencer’s posts to ensure they are not engagement baits.
As we said, you can always go for the top 500 influencers, although most of them do not accept the invitations, so the next stop would be the macro-influencers and the Micro ones.
You can find them using the LinkedIn search tool. Type a keyword or tag, and narrow down the list by selecting filters like connections, locations, etc. one of the best ways to find influencers on LinkedIn is to follow the hashtags.
When you follow a hashtag, you will see tons of notifications about it, making it easier to find the influencers interested in your industry topics.
Also, it is strongly suggested to select the correct keyword to help LinkedIn algorithms find the right users for your purpose.
You can also join groups to find these leading voices in any industry. To reach the best result, you need to know how to find influencers on LinkedIn and, more importantly, the things you need to bear in mind while doing so. So be patient and precise and find that influencer.
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