If you follow accounts on social media that have a lot of followers, you may find that most of them have one thing in common:
They’re curating content (cough – they’re making ads!) for brands and posting them on their social media accounts. If you’ve been hoping this trend is put out to pasture and dies real soon, you’re going to be disappointed because as long as these people are getting paid, it’s not going to go away any time soon. (Yes, they’re really getting paid.)
“Wait a second, could I get paid?”
The one thing about collaborating with brands as a social media influencer is that literally anyone could do it. I could do it, you could do it, the neighbor down the street that we don’t like could do it – as long as you’re willing to put the time and effort into it. And the best part is that as a military spouse, influencing is completely portable once you decide to start monetizing your social networks. Unlike multi-level marketing, it’s also less annoying for your friends, because you’re not required to sell them anything – instead, you’re simply posting about your experience regarding a product.
In May 2019, I created my Instagram handle, @thebosiersareblended, with the intention to collaborate with brands in the future as well as allow our families that live far away to stay in touch with us by putting our favorite family photos all in one place on the web. With the birth of our new baby, we easily gained a couple hundred followers and had extremely high engagement, which made me an easy target for nursing bra companies to ask for collaborations – half of my current bra stash was sent to me in exchange for writing blogs or posting on social media about it!
What do I need to get started?
Getting started is as easy as reaching out to companies. Kristal Leon, a military influencer at A Sailor’s Wife Blog says, “Be confident in the service you are trying to sell to brands. If you are not confident enough to reach out to brands, then you will not be very successful. Each opportunity that you have to reach out to brands gives you a chance to learn something new about how to become a successful influencer.”
To get started you’ll need confidence, at least a small following with high overall engagement (you can see what your Instagram engagement looks like using tools like these), the ability to take great photos and write captions and/or blogs, and an internet connection.
Where do I find companies willing to collaborate with people like me?
The easiest way to find companies that are willing to collaborate with people is to make a short list of companies that you’d love to work with and then start reaching out to them. “Many times individuals are scared to reach out to businesses for fear of rejection, but if you don’t try you won’t get better at selling your service as an influencer, and you won’t know whether there is an opportunity for you to work with them,” Leon explains.
Deploy Joy Co., the creators of the Joy Box, which has the purpose of helping children thrive through their parent’s deployment, is a company that has worked with influencers in the past when they first launched their product.
“We sent a couple of free test boxes out to two women to review and asked them to share the unboxing on their Instagram stories and to give their honest opinions. We asked women with a higher following than our own, but didn’t have a specific follower threshold in mind – we just wanted people more well-established in the Instagram community than we were at the time that also had kids that would enjoy our product.”
Aside from reaching out directly to companies, you can also join Influencer-networks that allow you to easily apply for campaigns that have already been planned by the companies looking to collaborate with Influencers. Each network has its own requirements, but a few popular ones are Social Native, Fohr, and Cohley.
What predatory practices should I watch out for?
Like any emerging industry, there are plenty of people out there looking to take advantage of naive individuals that are looking to make a quick buck.
One of the biggest predatory practices are small companies that ask to send you money to purchase a product on Amazon instead of just sending you the product. Now, this may seem scammy, but you’ll indeed get the money – they send it to you because they specifically want that Amazon review. However, the issue is that this is technically against Amazon’s Terms of Service, so if you are caught (even if it is unlikely), your account will be suspended.
Another predatory practice is when companies ask you to promote their products in exchange for a discount on the product. While this may be great for some companies or products that would make something you’d want to purchase anyway and already have the money for in your budget, this may become problematic if you constantly have companies reaching out and enticing you with discounts.
Once you build a solid media kit, you may even find that companies want to collaborate with you, but they don’t want to pay a fair rate. This is where the engagement tools also come in handy – some give you an estimate of what you can expect to receive per post as an influencer with your current following. You’ll need to read contracts carefully as well, as some campaigns will require linkage to their website from your social media profile for a specified amount of time and others may require you to turn down offers from similar companies or products for a specified amount of time.
Is this even considered working?
There are plenty of people that roll their eyes at the entire “influencing world” out there, but the bottomline is that this is work. They’re not just sending you free products for you to tell your friends how much you love them – you’re required to take photos (and they have to be good!), write witty marketing blogs and/or captions, and schedule posts in accordance with your contracts.