5 Hot Ways to use Social Media to Boost Social Influence

How to Use Social Media to Boost Social Influence

Do you want to gain more social media influence? As an entrepreneur or business owner, by having more influence, you can massively boost your success in the online world, as it will help boost your authority, your traffic and much more. In this blog post, I’m going to share the 5 top ways that you can use social media to boost your social influence.

Why would you want to gain more social influence?

By boosting your social influence, you are effectively working towards becoming a thought leader in your particular niche. And this comes with a host of benefits, such as:

• You’ll gain more influence over your audience
• You will be able to reach a bigger audience
• Get more traffic to your blog and website
• Find leads and customers more easily – or even have more coming directly to you!
• Improve your website’s domain authority
• Become one of the go-to sources for questions, best content and more in your niche
• Get more followers and more engagement on social media
• Connect with your consumers

As you can see, having more social influence can have a lot of benefits that will help you grow and scale your business faster, and more efficiently. And although building up and gaining social influence can take some time and effort, the results are very much worth it.

Here are the 5 main ways of using social media to boost your social influence:

1. Share the best, most informative content – and show your expertise

The first step towards building up your influence is to use social media to always share the best, most informative or most entertaining content.

One of the main reasons why entrepreneurs, business owners and so on, manage to become social influencers is that they have managed to become a go-to source for the best information in their niche.

In order to do this, you will need 2 things: first, a blog of your own where you tackle subjects that are of real interest and value to your audience and second, a method for curating other people’s best content.

You can then use social media to promote your blog and kill two birds with one stone: drive traffic to your blog and website and help grow your social media influence.

When sharing others’ content, it also helps to bring your own input and opinions to the table – considering just anyone can share content on social media, this is how you can stand out, as well as show that you know what you are talking about.

But it’s your own blog that is the most valuable tool at your disposal; that is where you expose your points of view, your takes on different subjects in your niche. Try to provide high-quality content on a consistent basis and be controversial where possible – when you bring a new point of view to the table, it helps you stand out amongst other bloggers and thought leaders in your industry.

Of course, just sharing great content on itself is not going to make that big of an impact to turn you into a social media influencer. But, used together with other influence-building techniques, it can help you reach thought-leader status.

2. Connect with other influencers to help boost your own influence

Social influencers are kind of like the cool kids in school – and if you stood enough by them as their friend, you too could become one of the cool kids, just by association. The same thing can happen with social influencers; having the support of a few key influencers can help you boost your own influence. Here’s how to find and connect with social influencers:

First, find relevant influencers. You can use a tool like Agorapulse to see if you have any influencers already following you on social media, or something like Buzzsumo to search for other relevant influencers in your niche. If you’ve only recently started using social media or have a small following, it would be best to start off with smaller influencers (under 100k followers) and work your way up as you grow and evolve.

Once you have a list of influencers ready, the next step is to start building those relationships and engage with them as much as possible, but in an organic way. Follow them on social media and their blog, ask them questions, answer their questions, share their content and compliment their best work, jump into other’s conversations with them, leave comments on their blog posts and so on. The more you engage with them, the better – so try to engage on different platforms, such as on social media, their blogs and websites, as well as in real life, for example at industry conferences and other events.

As these relationships with social influencers grow, you will start seeing the results of your work – they will help share your content, they will link to it in their own, you’ll get more traffic, more engagement, more followers, and your social influence will grow. And along the way, you’ll probably meet some great people that could help you even more during your career.

3. Be active, available, helpful and always engaging

One of the most common traits among social influencers is that they are very active on social media and constantly engaging. In my experience, an influencer will usually use one social network the most often, but they will also have a presence on other relevant social platforms.

The top social influencers are always extremely active, always posting new content and always engaging.

In order to gain social influence, you will need to be active as well – join several social networks, but only as many as you are sure you can handle properly. Next, make sure to check your latest mentions as often as possible so that you can quickly respond to them and also log in to your accounts to find opportunities to engage with other users, preferably a few times a day, every day. If things are getting too difficult to handle, get a social media management tool to help you manage your social media more easily and to make sure you don’t miss any mentions.

The more you engage, the more you will be able to grow your following, as well as your social profile.

4. Be up to date and informed in all the latest news from your niche

Another trait you’ll see in a lot of social influencers is that they are always very informed. They know all the latest news, the latest tools, and apps that have come out, they are up to date with all the latest developments in their niche and so on.

To gain more social influence, you too will need to demonstrate your knowledge of all the latest news and developments in your own niche. You can use a content curation tool like Feedly to subscribe to the top sources of information in your industry – this will also be useful as a source for top content to share with your audience.

When you share news and other top content from your niche, try to bring your own input to the table, as I pointed out earlier; for example, if you disagree with an idea, mention it in your update. Or, if you agree with it, explain why. Anyone can share great content, but it’s by adding your own unique input that you can really stand out from the rest and help grow your influence.

5. Hold Regular Twitter Chats

As you grow your social influence, you can use Twitter Chats as another way of showing your expertise and engaging users.

Think of subjects that you are not only knowledgeable about, but that you also know will be of real interest to your audience. Once you’ve set up your talking point, start promoting your Chat on your social media and on your blog and website, and use the influencer connections you’ve made to help promote it.

The hashtag you use is also very important; try to make it as unique as possible, so there won’t be other users jumping into your Chat by mistake and make sure it’s not too long so that people can easily discuss the chosen topic, without being too constrained by the character limit.

Ideally, turn the Chat into a regular occurrence – as your Twitter Chat grows in attendance and notoriety, it will also help build up your social influence.

To make things easier, you can use tools like Twubs and TWChat to help you set up and participate in a Twitter Chat.

Boost Social Media Influence: Conclusion

Having social influence can help you in a lot of different ways, but most importantly as an entrepreneur or business owner, it will help you grow your business much faster. Are you working towards building up your influence? What are the methods you’ve found are most useful to grow your social influence?

About the Author:

Highly regarded on the world speaker circuit, Lilach has graced Forbes and Number 10 Downing Street. She’s a hugely connected and highly influential entrepreneur. Listed by Forbes as one of the top 20 women social media power influencers and was crowned the Social Influencer of Europe by Oracle. She is listed as the number one Influencer in the UK by Career Experts and is a recipient for a Global Women Champions Award for her outstanding contribution and leadership in business.

Contact info: www.lilachbullock.com