Planning out a social media strategy involves various steps and finding the right people for each step is critical for your brand. One step which involves in this is finding influencers for a successful influencer marketing strategy. Influencer marketing is growing and important marketing strategy so we thought to go ahead and share with you some tips on how to go about with this.

There are a lot of tools that help you with this by using some sort of algorithm which can track down an influential person or set of people or maybe even an influential site for you. Let’s first look at some of the tools that are available for finding social influencers.

• Klout
• Postrank
• Twylah
• Sysomos
• Brandwatch
• PageRank

While these are some of the tools available in the market I am sure you would like to know what the characteristics that define a Social Influencer are. Here we list down a few things which we consider important for an Influencer.

1. An influencer is someone who should have good connections across all social networks, because at the end of the day volume does matter in this scenario.
2. An influencer should be able to convince people for taking the required action that you want him to do; in short he/she should be a jack in all trades so that people can start acting the way he wants them to do.
3. In order for influencer to convince people they should be game setters or game changers in their domain. This can be useful for your brand as it would build excitement around your product.

Having looked at what are the characteristics of an influencer lets try to see what the different ways by which an influencer is identified by the above tools. Each of the tools have a different algorithm of tracking for example Klout uses a scoring system of rating the influencers between the score of 1-100 from social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and some others based on the followers that you have, the number of posts and the reach of your connections. Twylah automatically organizes a brand’s tweets by topic and shows the topics which brands are most influential about.

All these tools are good and have their own ways to help you out but we would tell you to test out them before you decide to use them because at the end of the day it’s your money and you should know where your money is going before you decide to invest it.