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Influencer marketing has become wide-spread.
There are only a few of them out there though!
Successful people were always busy. Nowadays they get flooded with requests.
These days everybody and their aunt are practicing influencer outreach.
Thus it’s almost impossible to contact real influencers by now.
Can so called engagers be the viable alternative to the influencer hype?
Spoiler alert: Yes! They are.
Peak outreach
Who are influencers in the first place?
How do we deal with peak outreach? Let me explain below!
By influencers I don’t mean moderately successful people like myself. I mean the top dogs of the attention economy.
Flocks of people are using influencer outreach tools like BuzzSumo!
Also almost every marketing blog recommends reaching out to influencers.
So it is next to impossible to get the attention of influencers.
Why? Influencers not only are busy as ever.
Now they have to deal with a flood of outreach messages that look more or less the same. Additionally
outreach has become a bit deplorable over the years
and sadly often resembles SPAM messages. How do I know?
I get a lot of outreach messages for the seo2.blog and because of my other – mostly dormant – bike blog.
Yes, I also used to write about bikes in German.
Sadly by now I don’t do it for lack of time or rather funding.
Yet, basically every day I still get PR messages of all kinds.
I can’t even read all of those let alone respond or act upon them.
Advanced tools like Buzzstream‘s profile influencers!
You can discover the most influential people for any given topic (like SEO e.g.) with a click:
You will find the likes of
- AJ Ghergich aka @seo
- Cyrus Shepard
- Aleyda Solis
These high profile experts are not my peers today anymore. Why that?
It’s because of their stellar success and huge following.
Each one of them has more than 100k of followers on X/Twitter alone!
Even though they followed me back in the past the attention economy is against me.
They are by far too busy to listen to my grumpy tweets by now.
What about you then? New to the search marketing realm?
You can’t just contact such influencers out of the blue!
It takes years to get inside their inner circle of people they even notice.
When AJ’s site went down in 2023 I tried to contact him.
Yet he did not follow me back anymore and so I couldn’t send a DM.
I had to write a public tweet just like everybody else:
Yet even that got overlooked or ignored.
Did I accidentally embarrass AJ by pointing out that his site is down? I was just trying to help!
Yet many people get offended nowadays when you point out their mistakes publicly.
I will never even know what happened.
Ever since I gave up on reaching out to AJ.
He’s got more important things to do than to respond I guess.
Yet it’s not about AJ! It’s nothing personal. It’s just that I’m not one of the VIPs now.
Cyrus did not even “like” a post of mine when I featured him as a source in an article and mentioned him on LinkedIn.
Later I de-emphasized it in an update. Why? Maybe he did not want to be associated with my post at all?
I wrote long comments on many posts by Aleyda but rarely got a reaction.
It’s a matter of attention economy. Popular people can’t talk to everybody. Likewise I limit “unequal energy exchange”.
Instead I rather talk to people similar to me – my peers.
Influencers vs peers
Over the years I have been advising people to band together.
Connect with like-minded individuals focus your efforts on socializing with peers.
In a way that’s the opposite of “influencer ass-kissing“.
Yet with peers you also assume that there is some kind of hierarchy based on authority or popularity.
Peers are less influential than influencers and thus there is not already a huge group of people trying to get their attention.
This time I’d like to go a step further and get rid of this hierarchy altogether. Dump the influence metrics!
Do not solely focus on the already controversial influence metrics like
- follower numbers
- “domain authority”
- “traffic” or “views!
Instead of trying to use other people to get what you want try not to treat them as solely a means to an end.
Socialize with other people who actively socialize with you. I call them engagers.
In fact in 2015 I radically changed my social media approach. Why?
I realized that neither high profile influencers nor low key lurkers will help me.
Both influencers with huge audiences and passive lurkers won’t even respond most of the time when I talk to them.
The only people that matter are those who listen and respond. All others are basically not even there.
Ever since I try to reorganize my whole social media experience. How that?
I focus on looking up first and foremost what my engagers say and share.
Also I converse with real people like you and me.
In contrast I stopped trying to follow larger than life experts.
Additionally I stopped wasting time on trying to make lurkers respond to me.
How does that look actually?
I follow and engage with just a bunch of people regularly.
When I notice that people do not respond to my comments and suggestions I stop talking to them.
I may unfollow them or read passively. Or I seek out other sources.
One-sided conversations are a burden. When people engage it’s enjoyable to actually converse!
The agony of organic reach
For many years it was enough to garner a large following on social media.
You could depend on at least some of these people to see your updates and to spread the word about them.
In recent years however fewer and fewer people will even see what you say or share.
Social Media sites have implemented algorithms that prefer already popular people and content.
Since 2015 I focused on engagers because most social media sites have throttled organic reach in an algorithmic way.
You may have thousands of followers who won’t even see or notice your updates!
Or they will ignore them because they get inundated with so many others.
People can’t focus on each update and every one they follow.
They will rather check out their close friends’ messages or those by superstars than yours then.
I always preferred online friends who share the same interests and ideals with me.
Just because I have met someone in school does not mean I have the same favorites. Also I prefer to meet real life friends in person.
In the worst case you ostracize someone by sharing the wrong political opinion or some thing else deemed controversial by them.
Engagers listen and react
I haven’t really made up the word engager myself. It existed on the Web already.
Yet the way I use the term might differ from the general population’s understanding of it.
Let’s recapitulate then: engagers are those people who are
- attentive
- responsive
- approachable.
They listen to what you say and look up what you share.
Then they like you based on the content you create or curate. You might have the wrong
- place of birth
- skin color
- political affiliations
or whatever but they agree with you on what shareable content is.
You may think such people do not even exist in real life let alone on the Web!
Here are some examples of engagers (and their blogs) who have engaged with me and supported me over the years:
Feel free to contact them! They are
- approachable
- engaging
- friendly
- helpful
- supportive!
I had no choice when I decided to write for a global audience.
Living and working in Germany made me a bit of an outcast.
I couldn’t just socialize with German people I know first hand.
Also why would I limit myself to the German speaking population? I’m not even German.
I have been born in Poland and I still can’t even take part in elections here after 40 years.
Virtual travel
Ever since I fled the former dictatorship in Poland as a kid I haven’t been fond of traveling.
This is one of the reasons why I have been only once to the UK and the US.
The only way to socialize with native speakers is online.
Thus I seek out like-minded individuals sharing the same values and interests.
True, I do not travel to conferences. Yet I do socialize actively on the Web without significant automation.
When I share I do it manually and respond to feedback or am thankful for actual engagement.
I may appear like the last of the Mohicans using this approach but not all users are influencers, lurkers or bots either.
They do not always have huge or even substantial follower numbers but they are there, they listen and they respond.
In short engagers are supportive.
Why would I bother influencers who everybody else is already bugging them?
I prefer to communicate with like-minded individuals on eye-level. Engagers to the rescue!
Are you an engager?
Reach out to me or on social media! I’m @onreact everywhere.
Let’s
- connect
- engage
- support each other!
I’m looking forward to meeting you people!
Woohoo! Forget influencers now!
Influenza who? Contact engagers instead!
* (CC BY 2.0) Creative Commons image by John McSporran