You decided to implement influencer marketing to grow your business. Great! But now you are scratching your head: Which social media channel should I start with? Do I have to run my campaign on every social platform? If these questions sound familiar, don’t worry, you are not alone! We get these questions a lot from our clients.
It’s very common that brands and marketers are dazzled by numerous social media channels these days. YouTube videos, Facebook posts, Instagram stories, live streams… You name it!
We understand that it’s not an easy job to navigate in the sea of social media when planning an influencer marketing campaign. That’s why we are here, we have got your back!
In this post, we are going to give you the secret sauce of how to pick the right social media channels for your influencer marketing campaign.
Different social media has its unique features and user demographics. Running your campaign blindly on every platform could waste a lot of your valuable time and money.
Table of Contents
Five Important Social Media Channels for Influencer Marketing
Before we talk about how to choose the best social media channel, it’s necessary to know what are some important influencer marketing channels.
According to Mediakix’s survey, the most important social media channel for influencer marketing is Instagram, followed by YouTube, Facebook, Blogs, and Twitter.
89% of the marketers in the survey agreed that Instagram is the most impactful social media channel for influencer marketing. As for YouTube, 70% of the marketers found it impactful. It’s no surprise that these two social channels are dominating the influencer marketing world. Instagram continuously updates its features including IGTV, shopping features, and IG live, which led to its massive user growth. With the diverse functions and increasing user base, Instagram is now a powerful tool in marketing.
YouTube, this extensive video-sharing platform, plays a significant role in influencer marketing as well. As more and more internet users seek visual content, YouTube has become the biggest video provider with 2 billion users around the world.
How to Choose the Right Social Media Channel for Your Campaign
Now you know the most used social media channels for influencer marketing, are you wondering if you should be on all of them? It’s tempting to get your brand seen in every single social platform. We get it, we all want to shout from the rooftops to get everyone to know about our brand and products. But it could also be a marketer’s biggest mistake to invest influencer marketing in every channel all at once. Why? Different social media has its unique features and user demographics. Running your campaign blindly on every platform could waste a lot of your valuable time and money. If you want to run a killer influencer marketing campaign, you need to learn about each platform’s features to find the one for your business. So, instead of burning yourself out to run influencer marketing campaigns on all social channels, it’s more beneficial to focus on the ones that can effectively connect with your customers and drive qualified leads.
There is no one-size-fits-all solution to decide which social channel to use because it depends on your goals, industry, and target audience. But here are a few things worth considering when choosing the best social media channel for your influencer marketing campaign:
- If the social channel’s audience demographic aligns with your target audience
- If the content format can best demonstrate your brand and product
- If the price is in the range of your influencer marketing budget
Let’s deep dive into each social media channel, talk about their audience demographic, preferred content format, and influencer price points.
Audience: Instagram’s users are mainly Millennials and Gen Z. According to Statista, over 56% of the Instagram users are in the age range from 18 to 34. In terms of gender, Instagram is more popular among women: Instagram has 56.4% female users vs. 43.6% male users.
Regarding income level, Instagram is often used by mid to high-income level users. A survey shows that 39% of the people who make $30,000 to $74,999 are Instagram users, and 42% of those making more than $75,000 use Instagram.
This means Instagram could be a platform for brands to target female millennials with mid to high income.
Content Format: Instagram has various content formats such as posts, IG stories, and IGTV. Posts allow influencers to present your brand and product with visually engaging photos and videos with a descriptive caption. With the use of hashtags, influencers can make your brand content more searchable to reach out to the target audience.
The recent features such as IG Stories and IGTV enabled influencers and brands to share real-time content with their audience in an authentic way. The new Instagram Shop feature allows influencers to easily tag your brand and products on their posts then lead the users to a check out page. This shopping feature benefits brands, especially eCommerce brands from increasing sales and brand awareness more effectively.
Influencer Pricing: There are many different ways to determine price points. However, one way to look at it is to calculate by the number of followers an influencer has. On average, Instagram influencers charge for $10/post for every 1000 followers.
With that said, an influencer who has 10,000 followers could charge for about $100 per post, with 100,000 followers, an influencer could charge for $1000 per post. We have to point out that these are just estimated rates and they can vary greatly depending on the influencer’s niche.
Another way to gauge how much you should pay for an influencer is by engagement, such as likes and comments. This is a more result-driven way since it encourages influencers to create engaging content that can give your business qualified leads. On average, influencers could charge $250-750 per 1000 engagements.
Pro tip for Instagram: When influencers start posting the hype around your brand can grow quickly. It’s important to stay on top of your brand mentions, comments and DMs so your potential customers feel supported. The time required to respond to your Instagram community can become overwhelming. A tool like Mobile Monkey can provide you with Instagram automation that makes managing all the buzz around your brand less time consuming once your influencers start pumping out content.
YouTube
Audience: YouTube has a wide range of user demographics, among which, people from age 18 to 34 use YouTube most often. However, they are not the only ones that are in love with YouTube. It’s said that the 35+ and 55+ age group users are growing strikingly on YouTube.
In terms of gender demographic, YouTube’s female and male viewers are about 1:1. However, male viewers on YouTube dominated content categories such as sports, gaming, bodybuilding, and fitness. While female YouTube users are mainly watching makeup, skin and nail care, and weight loss.
Content Format: YouTube thrives on long-form video content that is authentic and engaging. Thus, YouTube is a perfect platform for influencers to showcase your brand, share a product tutorial, or review your products in detail. Influencers can also embed your business website, product links, or their affiliate links in the video description. With these features, YouTube is proven to be effective in converting consumers who are in the consideration phase to the purchase phase.
Influencer Pricing: YouTube influencers’ price may vary depending on their follower base or the number of views of their videos. It is reported that, on average, a YouTube influencer could charge about $20/video per 1000 subscribers. In other words, if you were working with a YouTuber with 10,000 subscribers, they would probably charge about $200/video. If you were working with someone who has 100,000 subscribers, it could be $2000/video. Another way to decide on the price is by the number of views. On average, YouTubers charge for $50 to $100 for every 1000 video views.
However, often YouTubers would have their specific pricing. You can contact them and ask about their pricing directly.
Audience: Facebook, by far, has the biggest user base among all the social media channels with 2.6 billion monthly active users. To reach out to the massive Facebook users, brands and marketers often incorporate Facebook in their influencer marketing strategies.
Facebook has audiences in almost all age ranges but the dominant user age groups are 25-30 years old and 30-39 years old. The younger generation is abandoning Facebook and shifting to other social platforms such as Instagram, Snapchat, and Tiktok.
As older age groups are the major audience on Facebook, they also come with higher income levels. Over 70% of mid to high-income people are using Facebook as their social platform.
Content Format:
Facebook has been improving its content features. Besides posts, it recently enabled Stories, Facebook Watch, and Facebook Live, which allow influencers to share real-time content to engage with followers. Facebook Group is a unique feature that makes Facebook a conducive space for discussions and communities.
If your brand is a community-oriented business or organization, Facebook could be a valuable channel to get your influencer marketing campaign running.
Influencer Pricing:
Facebook influencers may charge about $25/post per every 1000 followers. That being said, if you are working with influencers who have 10,000 followers, they could charge $250/post. But the price also depends on the content type. If you asked an influencer to post videos on Facebook, the price may be higher than that.
Blogs
Audience: Blogs also could bring your content to the mass audience. It might sound surprising to you but over 70% of internet users read blogs! Blog readers’ average age is 41 years old which makes blogs a good appeal to the older audiences, compared to the social channels we discussed above.
When it comes to the blog-reading differences between men and women, it is interesting that men read blogs more frequently than women. This may give brands an opportunity to reach out to more male consumers by running influencer marketing with bloggers.
Content Format: Blogs work best to produce long-form storytelling content. Blog content is effective to inform, educate, and persuade your audience. To leverage this, for example, you could ask Influencers/bloggers to write about their experience with your brand, your products, or how-to articles to educate your target audience. One of the common ways to cooperate with bloggers is sponsored blog posts.
Influencer Pricing: Typically, bloggers may charge $60 for a post to write about your brand. This could give you an idea of the baseline of the price, but there is no absolute pricing for bloggers or blog posts. The price of hiring a blogger to write about your brand or product depends on many factors such as the length or the topic of the post. Typically speaking, the longer the blog post the higher the price would be. The topics of the content would increase the cost of working with bloggers as well. For instance, if you want the bloggers to write about their experience at your fitness center, you might need to cover their cost of having a membership and buying fitness classes.
Audience: Compared to the social channels that we mentioned above, Twitter features a smaller audience base of about 330 million monthly users. Millennials are still the biggest user group on Twitter. But Twitter seems to be more popular among men than women. 65% of men in the US use Twitter versus only 35% of women are on Twitter.
Knowing Twitter’s user demographic, brands could utilize it to target millennial male audiences by implementing influencer marketing campaigns on Twitter.
Content Format: Twitter has a unique content format called “tweets” which allows users to use 140 characters to make a post. It’s short, quick, and engaging. With this limitation, Twitter is not an ideal platform for influencers to give more context to your brand or introduce details of your products. However, Twitter is perceived as a social platform for real-time information such as news and events. It works best when you use it to promote company events or industry news in short-form posts with hashtags.
Influencer Pricing: The price of Twitter influencers is cheaper than other social channels as WebFx reported. It costs about $2/post per 1000 followers. So if you were working with an influencer on Twitter with 10,000 followers, it could cost you $20 per post, and $200 for an influencer with 100,000 followers. Although it sounds like Twitter is the cheapest channel to run influencer marketing, remember that since Twitter is a platform for real-time short-form content, you might not see the result right away with one tweet from an influencer. You will need to use your budget smarter for a long-term strategy to make your campaign more effective.
Conclusion
Since social media keeps evolving and users’ preferences change frequently, it is wise to keep yourself updated on the latest influencer marketing trends. We hope this post gives you some helpful tips on choosing the right social channels for your upcoming influencer marketing campaign. If you still need more help in launching your campaign, go ahead and shoot us an email.
