Building a social media street team as brand evangelists can be one of best things you do to help tell your story. The challenge is, unless you have a large marketing budget and are able to hire an Influencer Agency such as Instabrand or have invested in an Enterprise Marketing Cloud tool like Salesforce, Sprinklr or Spredfast, be prepared to build your program from the ground up. The good news is, once you get this down, you'll reap the rewards.

Here are a few of the most important items to keep in mind when pursuing an Influencer Marketing campaign for Twitter and Instagram:

1) Get Ready for Grunt Work

Finding influencers means scouring Twitter and Instagram for relevant people, checking their follower counts and engagement metrics, finding their contact information if it's not obvious, following up with them, offering a proposal, closing the deal, working out payment arrangements, developing the messaging, following up on the promotions and paying them. You can use tools like BuzzSumo, twtrland and Klout to help. If you're in sports, you can download Fanzo to find fan leaderboards for every team as well as watch the hot content busting through and see who the poster is (Disclaimer, I am a Founder of Fanzo). You'll want to build and maintain an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of everyone you come across and the potential they could bring. This is tedious work, but unfortunately, it's necessary.

I've already done loads of grunt work to know what goes into this experience and hope this helps you save time!

“Grunt work pays off.”

2) Large Followings Do Not Equal Influence

Be on the lookout for people with huge followings, but little engagement. If you onboard someone like this, expect zero results or very expensive ones. When you see these accounts, chances are they bought their followers. If you find them on Twitter, you'll want to be sure their feed doesn't look like it's all posts with links. It must include regular engagement, RT's, Replies along with a large number of Favorites. On Instagram, be sure they have thousands of likes plus comments on all of their photos.

“Beware of accounts with huge followings, but little engagement.”

3) Know the Right Medium For Your Market

You might have to figure this out the hard way, but as an example, Instagram is not the right market for sports but is the right market for food, fashion and working out. Twitter is better for sports. For social selling, you'll want LinkedIn and Twitter. Reality TV = Twitter. If you choose the wrong medium you'll waste time and money.

“The wrong medium will cost you time and money.”

4) Promos = Relevant Life Experiences and News

If the messages your influencers promote look like an ad, engagement will be low and their followers will be annoyed. Instead, offer valuable and crave-worthy tidbits. For sports, this could be breaking news or player announcements. For celebrities, it could be a hot rumor. If you want to promote almond milk, have influencers do Instagram photos of incredible smoothie recipes using it. A post about a restaurant opening should be about a gorgeous, custom dessert at the restaurant vs just that the restaurant is open.

“Offer valuable, crave-worthy tidbits.”

5) Define your Business Goals

What is it you want to achieve? Clicks to your website? To the App Store? Email registrations? Redeeming coupons? Event registrations? Whatever that goal is, map out what it is you want to achieve and create a plan with metrics on how to get there. Optimize daily if possible, weekly at most.

“Optimize daily if possible, weekly at most.”

6) Relationships are Everything

Even though you're not a talent agent, treat your influencers as if you are. The majority of influencers I have worked with want to do well and crank out successful campaigns for you. Guide them, answer their questions, be readily available, and listen to their ideas and feedback for how to make things better. Thank them for their work and maintain the relationship. Be honest with them when strategies change or if news develops they need to know about. If you treat them like team members then you can count on them for whenever you need them.

“Treat your influencers like team members because they are.”

It may take awhile to feel like you're rocking your Influencer Marketing campaigns, but if you give it time, have patience, and iterate quickly, it will be well worth the effort.

If you have questions or would like to learn more, please reach out to me on Twitter @DanaDyksterhuis for help!