6 Influencer Marketing Tools you Need to Boost your Online Publishing Business

We all like to write and share our thoughts, ideas and articles with the world. Most of us feel much better when our articles are doing rounds on social media, and especially if they are categorised as viral. For this reason, we leave no stone unturned when trying to promote the very articles we write. This includes using influencers. In this article, we have aggregated a curated list of the best tools and services which help you identify influencers.

What is an influencer?

“I’m defining influencers as people who have an established credibility and audience; they are able to persuade others by virtue of their trustworthiness and authenticity. Influencers can be bloggers, customers, industry experts, or even celebrities.”

• Anna Ritchie, Content Marketing Institute.

Anna’s statement sets the tone for what influencers can do - that is, influence other people. This group of people can help you improve your newspaper’s inbound marketing strategy, if you know how to work with them. They must not be treated merely as tools, but as real people with real lives - don’t expect from others what you are not willing to give or share yourself. L. Williams shares various valid tips from his experience as an influencer in this article, which is worth a read.

What is an influencer marketing tool?

The list of tools presented below will help you focus on the type of influencer you need and, most importantly, the kind which will help you conduct research faster. All of these tools use their own proprietary algorithms to help customers find the best audience for their articles. They will help you gain exposure and, consequently, influencers which are a better fit for your newspaper audience and will give you what you’re looking for. The influencer tools help you find and manage the best communicators for your campaign.

This list does not follow any particular order, so no tool is ranked or rated above or below another - they are merely different tools which you can use in different scenarios, according to your needs.

Followerwonk is a tool that helps you analyse Twitter accounts and identify the most mentioned users, domains, and tweets, based on your keywords. It will provide information about any Twitter account, even presenting a colour map of activity over the last month, and a preview of some of the interactions.

The platform will help you find relevant Twitter users to follow, analyse the demographics of your followers against your competitors’, find out when your newspaper followers are most online, evaluate the number of followers gained and lost, and examine your tweets or those of your competitors, allowing you to see what is working (and what isn’t working) for the both of you, and how you can leverage your own Twitter experience.

Followerwonk has both free and premium versions which will help you manage and grow a relevant community on Twitter. However, it might be worthwhile noting that Moz, the current owners of Followerwonk, are reportedly looking for someone to take on this service and, as such, this product is no longer being improved.

The Buzzsumo Influencer Search not only lets you research your article topic, but also provides you with information about the influencers who usually tweet and share links about that same topic. It offers a Page Authority and Page Rank analysis of these influencers, letting you assess which influencers you should build a relationship with for your newspaper. You can filter the influencers according to their role or position in the community, whether they are bloggers, powerful influencers, companies, journalists, or regular people, and then look into many details of each, such as their Twitter bio, followers, or retweet ratio.

Buzzsumo will also help you identify links shared by the influencer, calculating the possibilities of that influencer sharing your content. You will be able to see links the influencer has shared over the past months and, with this data, you can take on a more personalised approach to boosting the conversion rate. This is a paid influencer tool.

Traackr is an influencer managing tool which values the relevance of shared content. It will help you find relevant influencers from all across the web. This tool will let you create your own keyword lists, and then provide you with information about the most used keywords by your most relevant audience.

First, you will have to choose an area and the keywords you are interested in. Then Traackr will generate an automatic list of people who use that kind of information. As a result, you will have a list of influencers for your newspaper. Unfortunately, you won’t be able to segment your search by geographic region.

Traackr’s database is updated on a weekly basis, so you will be able to keep up with all the happenings with only the slightest of delays. You’re still able to build relationships and measure the success of your campaigns. Traackr is currently a paid application.

Little bird will collect interesting data from Twitter, blogs, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube, and other social accounts, just for you. Following an analysis, this tool seeks to figure out how important different people have found your newspaper to be. This tool will help you build relationships with influencers who are more likely to be interested in your articles.

Identifying the most appropriate influencers is Little bird’s killer feature - you can use it to build relationships with different influencers for each field or section of your publication, possibly even on a single article. Their algorithms will analyse connections between people and determine who has more authority in the community within which you are researching.

Little Bird is a tool you will have to pay for, but one which will provide you with priceless information that you can then apply to the conversations that are important for you to build strong relationships with your influencers.

Keyhole specializes in hashtag research in relation to Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. It shows you how many people have posted something with the hashtag you are looking for, and then lets you see their bios and who they follow.

If you love using hashtags and you’d like to start a conversation with people writing on related topics, Keyhole is a great place to start. This paid tool will provide you realtime data about the hashtags and keywords you are using, and the campaigns you are running. You will be able to find information about others users’ accounts which might be directly relevant for your publication. Most importantly, you can measure the results of the work you are doing.

Anewstip will let you target influencers based on the presence of your keywords in tweets, news articles, and journalist profiles from their database. It has both free and paid versions.

One of Anewstip’s advantages is its extensive filters, which allow you to really pinpoint what you need for your publication. You will be able to extract your favourite influencers, including their contact details, and start building relationships from right inside the Anewstip platform.

Conclusion

Having a good influencer tool will help simplify your research process and, consequently, the creation of your marketing strategy. Finding the right people and voices to promote your message and increase your reach could be the key factors in the successful growth of your publication.

Nowadays, influencers are an essential part of any marketing strategy. If you can build relationships with influencers that share quality opinions about your publication and maintain this communication, you will be adding immense value to your business.

Remember - if nobody talks about you, you don’t exist.

P.S. Our list of influencer tools, whilst informed, is not necessarily a complete guide to all available tools. However, we have chosen to take the time and share the ones which we have come across and tried out ourselves. If you’ve got a great tool, or you work for a firm which carries out influencer analysis, feel free to reach out to us - we’d love for you to help us make this more of a comprehensive guide to influencer marketing tools.