3 Tools to Help Small Tech Companies Find Influencers

Apr 14, 2015 | Marketing, Startups, Trust

A small technology company doesn’t have time to search thousands of contacts to find the right people who can write a blog post or article, share information on social media or invite them to write a guest post on their website. These right people are influencers who have a large following that allows them to amplify your reach. When they mention your business in any shape or form, it sends traffic, retweets and mentions soaring.

Influencers aren’t necessarily celebrities. They’re well-respected and trusted people in their fields. They can be thought leaders, executives, connectors, journalists, bloggers and authors.

How do you find and engage the influencers who cover your industry and reach your target market? You can do it the old-fashioned way by searching the Internet and people’s social media lists. This comes with a high price of your time.

The other option is to use influencer marketing tools. These tools can help you find influencers in less time and provide tools to help guide and manage your influencer marketing efforts. Because of all the influencer- related platforms available out there, it’s clear that influencer marketing is working for a lot of businesses.

But some are too pricey for the small business. Here are three free or low cost options that would work for small tech companies. For a comprehensive list of influencer marketing tools, please see the end of this post.

3 influencer marketing tools for small tech companies

These three influencer marketing tools have little in common, which should make it easier for you to choose the one that might meet your needs.

influencer buzzumo

www.buzzsumo.com

BuzzSumo finds the most shared content by topic and influential authors. It can also find this information by URL. (Think competitors.) For example, if your software can sync Outlook, you’d search for “sync Outlook” to find the most popular content as shown in Image 1. The results list the shares for five social networks.

buzzsumo screenshot influencer

Now that you know what kind of content does well for “sync Outlook,” you want to find the influencers who might talk about this topic. Image 2 shows the list of influencers BuzzSumo provides based on your keywords.

buzzsumo screenshot influencer

These options aren’t exactly what is needed. Keep playing with the keywords until you find the right influencers. Once you do, start following them and listening to what they say. Retweet their content, answer their questions, and engage with them with the goal of helping them without expecting anything in return. This mindset will build the relationship to the point where you earn their trust and they might return the favor.

You can use BuzzSumo free, but it has limitations on the number of searches and the results. A 14-day free trial is available to see how of all of BuzzSumo’s features work. The Pro account has a monthly fee, but there’s a discount if you sign up for one year. For a small tech company, one month might be enough to kickstart your influencer marketing efforts.

commun.it influencer

www.commun.it

Commun.it is a Twitter community management tool that provides Twitter analytics and tips on who to follow or unfollow as well as what content to tweet. The well-organized dashboard suggests tweets to share, people to re-engage, influencers to un/follow, and replies to consider. Before un/following, you can a Twitter user for to view the bio for more info as Image 3 shows.

commun.it screenshot influencer

The Monitoring feature shown in Image 4 watches for tweets that mention your brand, site, blog, hashtag, and more. The Leads feature suggests top people to connect with based on their interests, bio, recent tweets, and frequently used hashtags.

commun.it screenshot influencer

The service is free with limits on the search keywords, scheduling tweets, and reports. The Pro account offers unlimited weekly engagements, eight twitter profiles with no ads, and unlimited reports. A free trial is available.

klout influencer

www.klout.com

Klout scores social media users’ influence on a 100-point scale to measure their online impact. The average score is 40. The web-based app provides suggestions of influencers to follow and content to share for your selected topic as shown in Image 5. For small tech businesses, this could be computers, information technology, gadgets, technology and science, or a combination.

klout screenshot influencer

When you find content you want to share, you can schedule the content and track its impact. Everything in Klout except for Klout Business is free to use. Klout Business allows companies to create campaigns in which Klout connects your brand with influencers. For example, you might create a campaign that sends 1,000 copies of your software to relevant influencers in hopes of generating authentic earned media. You’ll be able to track and measure campaign statistics.

23 more influencer marketing tools

The prices and options vary greatly. Not many of these are ideal for small tech companies. Most target marketing agencies and teams. If you’re working with a marketing agency, they might be using these tools and you can ask about it.

Appinions: Identifies what issues and topics are important to your target market to help you figure out what to write about, who is influential, where to distribute content and measure content marketing effectiveness.

Augure: Identify your influencers, manage contacts, share content, engage with your target market, monitor social media, organize your clippings, and measure your impact.

CommandPost: Monitors, measures, and provides insight into the people, content, and platforms that drive your company’s social value.

Exposely: A social advertising platform that connects brands with engaged online influencers. You set a budget, select the influencers and tell your brand story.

FindTheRipple: Identify influencers based on topics, profile influencers, measure results of your influencer engagement strategy, and gain insights about your target audience.

GroupHigh: Blogger outreach tool to identify influential bloggers who write about topics related to your brand. Rank and evaluate influencers, coordinate outreach efforts and measure results.

Influitive: Find, organize, engage, recognize, and reward B2B customer advocates and measure results. Works with Salesforce.com.

Inkybee.com: Helps agencies run campaigns for clients that engages influencers, tracks interactions with them, monitors mentions, measures outreach efforts, and provides traffic data.

InNetwork Inc: Find and invite influencers to your campaign, and track traffic, engagement, impressions, conversions and ROI each influencer generates.

InPowered: Find engaging content, promote stories to target audience most likely to engage, and receive alerts when new content is written.

Insightpool: Find and connect with new influencers and prospects, create personalized messages and track results.

Kred: Scores social media users’ influence on select networks using a 1,000-point scale to help you create an influence network, share content and grow your influence.

Little Bird: Find and engage relevant influencers, discover and share content, monitor industry trends and measure the results of efforts.

Markerly: Track users engaging with your brand advocates and influencers, create a strategy, identify influencers. Content amplification distributes content, tracks engagement, and helps optimize campaigns.

NeoReach: Launch campaigns on cost-per-click model in which you create a campaign, get matched with influencers, and track results.

Onalytica: Influencer relationship management tool that helps identify industry influencers and improve relationships with them.

Social Chorus: Helps employees and brand ambassadors consume, share, and create branded content.

Salesforce – Social Studio: A Salesforce feature that helps you listen, analyze, publish, and engage with customers.

Tap Influence: Find relevant influencers, create content assignments, invite influencers to collaborate, publish content, and measure results.

Tellagence: Identify people with conversations relevant to your brand or product, build content for target audience, and distribute content through influencers.

Traackr: Find influencers, nurture and manage influencer relationships, and measure the impact of relationships.

Voziq: Finds industry influencers, tracks their online activity, builds a profile for each influencer and discovers engageable moments where the influencer’s activity matches your company’s goals.

Zuum: Shows marketers what type of content will maximize impact through benchmarking, content publishing and community.

What do you use? Any missing from the list? Let us know in the comments.

Who else should read this? Please share!

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