How A-List Influencers Rock Their Influence
diving into what makes Internet stars so effectively special
There are a lot of influencers out in the land of the interconnected web. Some are more successful than others. However, there is one big rule of thumb that differentiates an account’s ability to influence choices and decisions over those that just have a large number of following attached to their names.
A good example of this is Arianna Renee.
With about 2.7 million Instagram followers, she failed to sell 36 t-shirts to her followers.
Then there’s Sorelle Amore — 929k subscribers on YouTube and 511k on Instagram. Her net worth is estimated to be around $5 million and making over $300k traveling the world.
What’s the difference between these two influencers?
For starters, it’s nothing to do with the numbers.
It’s to do with their ability to connect and therefore influence.
To make a living online, you don’t have to be a sensation viral hit. Rather, what you need is a core group of fans who are actively and consistently engaged with your content.
The difference between an influencer that is highly effective for marketing campaigns and those that aren’t is their ability to funnel follower engagement over to the sponsoring brand.
There are accounts out there with little genuine interactions but a high follower count. These followers may be legitimate but they tend to lurk, meaning that the overall engagement and conversion potential is on the low end.
A hollow influencer is just an account with a good looking number. But it doesn’t matter how big that number is, if an influencer can’t influence, then they can’t really qualify themself as one.
Deconstructing the anatomy of a real influencer
A real influencer is someone that has the ability to command an outcome based on their posts. This may come in the form of a call to action, a product review or recommendation.
It may be sponsored. It may not.
Whatever the case, a real influencer has the ability to make a decent income doing what they do base on the collective and consistent sale of their content.
Here are three core traits that make up a successful influencer and what you can do to emulate it.
Personality
When it comes to trusting someone on the Internet enough to follow through with their recommendations or request to do something, you have to at least like and trust them.
There is often a level of altruism in the way they present themselves. They give more than they appear to take.
That’s because no one wants to trust someone that seems to be selling all the time.
So how can you show a genuine personality in the content you create?
You need to figure out what makes you who you are. What are your skills? What are your obsessions? What is it that excites you?
While what you end up creating may not be your entire personality, these things make a good solid foundation to build and project to the world who you are.
Frequency
Consistency allows you to create a backlog of content. This results in a wiki effect that lets your fans fall deep down the rabbit hole, bindging on your content to a point where they feel an intense connection to you.
Why?
Because they’ve just invested all that time consuming your content.
This comes in handy for new fans and followers. It’s easier to hook and retain your audience if you’ve got the content to keep you at the forefront of their minds and maintain a certain level of relevance.
If you’re new, there’s a reason why challenges to create every day or every week exists. In part, these challenges exist because it gives you a premise to consistently create and therefore see eventual growth in engagement.
Platform relevance
Every platform has a certain style of communication. This means that certain voices are more effective than others.
LinkedIn is more formal than Twitter and Facebook. Instagram is not the same as TikTok, although they both appear to have similar vibes except for the differences of one being short video-based and the other being a photography app.
The real influencers have an uncanny understanding of how each of the platforms they inhabit works. They understand the type of content to post in order to get engagement — not just likes and hearts — but comments and conversations.
It’s the reason why Gary Vee modifies the same content to appear differently on each of the platforms he posts on.
It’s also good to note that the audience on each platform is different and will, therefore, interact differently.
Understanding the type of content for each of the different platforms you want to establish your influence will help determine what kind of content suits that particular audience group.
The trick here is to observe what others are doing but don’t do a direct copy of what they’re doing. Rather, experiment a little. Find your voice for each platform to enhance a certain level of uniqueness for your audience.
Sameness gets boring over time.
Find your platform spark and light it on fire with experimentation.
Everyone wants to be an influencer nowadays. However, if you want to make it financially in your online journey, you need to think beyond the money and work on building up your brand.
It’s not about the numbers.
Numbers are ultimately distractionary.
Branding is more than just logos and names.
Branding is a feeling. It is an evocation. It is something or someone that you can personally trust within a certain topic, skill or knowledge domain.
And that’s the main difference between the real influencers and the hollow ones. Real influencers have substance. And it’s in the quality of the substance that propelled them into the A-list. They are more than just selfies in your kitchen. They are real — in every essence of the word — and they know how to project it over the various platforms that they inhabit.
