Are you considering working with bloggers to promote your business and reach more relevant people? Blogger outreach can be a great way to target niche audiences.
Other than the obvious first task of matching the blogger and their audience with yours, what else should you consider to decide if you’ll reach enough of the right kind of people?
Well first of all, be sure to look beyond just the number of followers they have on social media channels such as Twitter and Instagram…
1. Check Their Social Media Followers
This is to work out if they’re real or not. Because what’s the use in a blogger promoting your business to a bunch of fake users on social media?
Do many have misspelled or strange usernames or bios? Do the followers have followers themselves, and do they ever post? If there is a large amount who don’t look like genuine active users, you should be suspicious. The blogger may have paid for fake followers.
Note that it is possible to inadvertently acquire a few fake or ‘bot’ (robot) followers. But they would be rare, not in large amounts. Large numbers of dodgy looking followers = alarm bells.
A sample Twitter following.
2. Check Engagement
For Instagram, how many comments and likes do they get on each photo they post? You need to go beyond that still and check the actual comments. Are they from genuine fans and followers? If it’s just other bloggers or their friends and family then they won’t have as much sway as a blogger who gets comments from genuine fans.
This is less obvious, but some bloggers band together and agree to comment on each other’s posts to get the appearance of popularity. You can easily check this by clicking onto the profiles of the blogger’s recent commenters and seeing if they mention that they too are bloggers. If all of the comments on the blogger’s instagram feed are from fellow bloggers rather than genuine followers and fans, then this is not indicative of the engagement they might pass on to you if they were to promote your business.
For Twitter, again check who is following them and who is retweeting, liking and replying to their tweets. If it’s other bloggers or accounts that don’t look genuine, then the blogger is unlikely to be genuinely popular. And hence unlikely to get you good exposure for your business.
For Facebook it’s harder to check as followers can be bought. If followers on Facebook have been paid for they may still be genuine fans, they were just acquire by paid ads and posts. It’s worth checking who is commenting and liking their posts as if they are from the wrong demographic to your target audience there’s not much point engaging the blogger.
You get the picture. You can follow this approach on any social media channel.
Sample Google Analytics metrics.
3. Check Their Blog
Quality is a big giveaway on any platform. Is their content genuinely engaging and interesting? Are their photos good? If not, consider whether this is really a blogger you’d like to have promoting your business or brand.
You’ll want to ask the blogger for their Google Analytics stats. Monthly unique visitors and page views will give you a good indication of how large the blogger’s audience is, and therefore how much exposure your business will get if they were to include a backlink to your business website. Even more important for SEO purposes is to check the blog’s domain authority (DA): that is, how authoritative it is in Google’s eyes. The higher the DA, the more powerful a backlink on their site would be for you, which means SEO success!