Think Before You Engage: 100 Questions to Ask Before Starting a Social Media Marketing Campaign

97. How Can I Build Influence?

After you establish your social media strategy and identify your goals, you can begin your quest to build influence.

When trying to build influence, it's important to remember that numbers don't necessarily matter. A high number of followers for an account doesn't mean that those followers are high quality. Metrics for influence consider the quality of engagement from your followers instead.

So how do you engage your followers? Using monitoring tools like Klout (see Figure 15-1), as referenced in Chapter 11, you can gauge what your followers want to hear from you. When you use different types of content, you should use the monitoring tools to review the reactions to see how you can make improvements.

FIGURE 15-1: Services such as Klout can help you make sure you're on the right track to growing your influence.

Remember that the best content is content that includes some reason for others to respond. Whether the content is a question, an amazing photo, or some other call to action, each of these should reach out to the audience and have an appeal for a response based on a personal connection.

Regardless of whether your brand's purpose in developing a social media campaign has to do with wanting to become a thought leader in your industry, providing great ...