How to Become a Social Media Influencer During Lockdown?

• 28 October 2020

Last Updated on February 21, 2024

If you’re looking to boost your income or if you just want to become famous on social media – you’ve come to the right place. We have decided to provide you with a useful in-depth guide on how to become a social media personality or an influencer in any sphere during the Coronavirus lockdown. So, prepare your face masks, hand sanitizer, sanitary gloves and without any further ado – let’s get started.

Step one – try to find your best niche

Influencing isn’t talent, it’s more about selling yourself and being persistent.

BuySocialMediaMarketing

If you’re thinking that everyone can become an influencer on Instagram, you’re… Absolutely right. With the right mindset, the correct tools and a sufficiently effective approach, you can amass thousands of followers, likes, shares, retweets, reposts, etc.

To begin with, try to understand what content you’re willing to create and whether you want to show your face or not. Generally speaking, an influencer is a personality which means that they’re almost always associated with a face (e.g. Kylie Jenner, Jeffree Starr, etc.). It’s not that these people are exceptional athletes or super-creative screenwriters. Still, they are at least a tad bit charismatic and have great marketing and advisory staff to help them better present themselves. Influencing isn’t talent, it’s more about selling yourself and being persistent.

https://www.instagram.com/p/B_uhw3tjARH/
Anyone. Literally anyone can snap a pic and create a post like this. Just keep on posting, no matter what!

Your goal should be figuring out how the routines of your potential audience have changed. Try to figure out your best niche, whether you want to be in the beauty niche, tech, sports or whatever else. Try to find a sphere which you are passionate about.

Think about how your audiences’ routines have changed

During lockdown and quarantine, it is not a smart choice to take on anything related to travelling and hotels as these industries are hardest hit by the pandemic, and the interest is below abysmal. Of course, if you believe that’s your real passion – you can definitely try, but expect to have 90-95% smaller engagement rates than before the lockdown. Even when countries and some areas begin moderate reopening, it’s still years until people will feel safe when travelling.

If you’re not convinced about the hit that the travel industry took, maybe one of the world’s best investors – Warren Buffett can change your mind.

Once you’ve settled on a niche, overlook the general characteristics for your audience. You can use your own marketing genius or look at your direct competitors. Let’s say you’ve exquisite taste in clothing and makeup or understand the market intricacies of sneakers. For the sake of giving a useful example, let’s say you’re into sneakers, primarily Male sneakers.

  • Your audience is likely to:
    • Be male (74-80%)
    • Be between 15 and 29 (88-92%)
    • Be interested in sports (56-74%)
    • Be interested in sneaker fashion, in general (44-60%)
    • Wear US shoe sizes 8.5-12 (75-87%)
    • Favour Jordan Brand, Nike, Adidas brands (78% total audience owns at least one pair of these sneaker brands
https://www.instagram.com/p/CADIE6jBYNz/
Most sneakerheads do follow pages like @nicekicks to get the latest on sneaker news. You could easily do what they do.

Using Google Trends or by looking at your direct competitors and possibly similar influencers, you can make out the audience that will have interest in your brand. According to such research, any influencer can tailor his and her content to suit the needs of their audience. So, according to our study, this potential influencer should focus on male sneakers, possibly putting emphasis on athletics and marketing through a sport’s perspective, create a brand language and theme which appeals to the youth and review major brand sneakers. They could also open a shop where most of their stock should be comprised of sizes  8 through 12 US.

TikTok videos on Instagram

The newest trend right now is TikTok, and whether you love it or hate it, seems like it’s going to stick around for a while. Especially if you’re trying to create humour like content, something related to pets, fashion or DIY – TikTok seems like a great area to create fun content on. Of course, Instagram still has a significantly larger audience, so when you create Tik Toks, always share your best ones on Instagram. Even so, you can purchase TikTok followers, video views and likes from BuySocialMediaMarketing to improve your status and credibility as an up-and-coming influencer!

According to various stats sources, social media usage is up ~40% during quarantine, which means that a youthful audience is looking for new, engaging content now, more than ever before.

If you’re finding a hard time on figuring out how to exactly curb TikTok for your business and professional needs, here is a guide from Entrepreneur.com on doing just that. TikTok is about being silly and dancing. This will help you practice getting loose before a camera and knowing what looks good and what doesn’t. Just don’t rush things.

Do a giveaway

Anyone who’s looking for “cheap” engagement should look into doing a giveaway. It’s a relatively affordable way of gaining short-term engagement and interest from new people. It isn’t difficult to start a giveaway, but there are some tips and guidelines that could help you out. Giveaways should be held for a reason:

  • Your personal or company’s birthday
  • Opening of your first store or expansion
  • Significant events in personal life (e.g. getting a new job, moving)
  • Instagram milestones (e.g. 100 thousand followers)
  • Some major occasions or celebrations in the world (e.g. Breast Cancer Awareness Day, Black History Month, your country’s Independence Day, etc.)

If you want some meaty and useful advice, check this blog post with a few awesome and easily replicable examples of giveaways on Instagram. These can surely help you gather inspiration for your growth as a newly minted influencer. Since lockdown and quarantine force us all to stay inside, people will have more time and desire to participate.

Start a hashtag trend

Usually, hashtags are related to global or local trends. However, you can inspire a new trend with the right approach. Creating a hashtag is a really cheap and effective way of boosting your audience’s engagement and improving the way they respond to your content. If you were into fitness, you could start something like #5percentclub or #300liftsquad and things like that. Depending on what your niche is and what you’re trying to achieve, a hashtag trend is an optimal and straightforward way to gain popularity for even the smallest of influencers.

People will instantly associate particular words and phrases with your brand, which is the best result any marketing campaign can achieve. Make sure to associate merchandise (clothing, phone cases, posters, etc.) with your hashtag trend and see how your follower numbers rise.

During the lockdown, people are struggling to find the motivation to move forward, which is what a hashtag trend can help them do!

Initiate a campaign

Apart from hashtags and giveaways, there’s also one more thing you can do to appeal to more massive crowds of mostly younger audiences. Nevertheless, this quarantine lockdown presents an excellent opportunity to appeal to everyone’s empathy and start a fundraiser for medics that are working in COVID-19 relief. You could encourage people to donate by asking influencers and famous celebrities to share your cause. Some of them will do it because it’s a socially responsible and right thing to do.

An example of how effective campaigns are. This gofundme raised almost half a million dollars in a month. Check it out to see how to make an awesome campaign! https://www.gofundme.com/f/aeany-keep-city-lights-books-alive

A campaign should be non-profit, or it can be a crowdfunding campaign for a project or invention that helps people during the quarantine. For example, you could promote a new, revolutionary pillow which helps you sleep 50% sweeter, or a mask that improves air circulation without allowing viral particles to get in or out.

Your campaign should focus on society and people overall. Try to portray an image of care, empathy and the desire to make things better. Even though there are numerous campaigns for various things like tree planting, plastic removal from the ocean, endangered wildlife – the best niche to focus your attention on, right now is definitely medical and/or home comfort.

Do more IGTV videos

IGTV is Instagram’s newest and very precious baby. They are doing a lot to promote it for a broader audience and to push Instagram into contention with YouTube. Even though this platform isn’t nearly as popular as its direct competitor yet, there is a huge vacuum for unique content that you can fill. IGTV videos will definitely generate decent views if you manage to keep them at least moderately interesting and unique.

People spend around 33% more time on Instagram during lockdown, which is a great motivational figure for upstarting a career in influencing on Instagram.

Buy promotions

One of the best ways of achieving organic growth is buying promotions. You can read this quite extensive, but amazingly detailed guide on setting up the best Instagram ads, but you can also purchase paid promotions from various pages and influencers in your niche or opt in for guaranteed engagement services from BuySocialMediaMarketing. This is a simple way of attracting people that are similar to your target audience in an effortless way. Of course, you are going to need some money to afford promotions and ads, but you will definitely make your money back.

As mentioned in many previous paragraphs, people spend a lot more time on Instagram and other social media during this period. By focusing on being seen by a broad audience, you can definitely benefit in the long-run.

Our advice would be to focus on local or at least domestic audiences first. Being a UK-based influencer with Turkish, Chinese or Brazilian-majority audience is exceptionally challenging and difficult to benefit from. Try to start local and expand only after you’ve seen that your influencing career is ready to cross borders.

Take care of personal branding

An influencer shouldn’t limit himself or herself to Instagram-only. It’s important to be seen across social media because you never know what benefits could arise from being active on other platforms as well. Despite that, you should look into branding and creating an identity for your personal profile and/or page. Make sure you have a distinctive logo and post templates as well as watermarks.

To get a general understanding about personal, take your time to watch this YouTube video by Sunny Lenarduzzi

A helpful guide on improving your Instagram account. Really great for anyone who’s looking to become an influencer.

It puts everything plainly and helps everyone understand the simplest and most straightforward ways of creating and more importantly – developing your personal brand.

Volunteer

Okay, this is kind of a cheap trick, but you’ll have to trust us. Look at this picture – isn’t it adorable?

https://www.instagram.com/p/CAA15JPBhVa/
Pics with animals are a really great way of getting likes and engagement.

Of course it is. Most people love pets – cats or dogs, it really doesn’t matter which pet you decide to show as even pigs are adorable, but by volunteering with animal shelters or animal care centres, you are doing a good job for the community as well as earning karma points. At the same time, you’ll also be able to create awesome, relatable and very clickable content for Instagram. You really want to set an example, especially during quarantine, that volunteering (not only with pets but in general) is super important to every one of us.

You can also share your volunteering experiences from hospitals and/or nursing homes. You’ll shoot two birds with one stone, since as we mentioned before – you can snap pictures which will catch the eye, listen and get stories that can make even the toughest dudes tear up and also do a good job for your community.

Appeal to the needs and urges of your followers

It’s good to tune into CNN or BBC every once in a while. However, it’s also important to keep tabs on the news outlets and trends that your audience does catch up. Remember, it’s all about being in the spotlight for as much as possible, so let’s return to our example of sneaker-oriented influencing, okay?

We mentioned that a significant part of your audience fancies sports and sine Jordan, Nike and Adidas are amongst their preferred brands, basketball is undoubtedly high on their lists. So, what should you do when you see that this GIF picked up 100 thousand + upvotes on Reddit in 36 hours?

SHARE IT IMMEDIATELY! Your content shouldn’t be solely focused on sharing dope sneaker pics, try to expand and incorporate other interests of your audiences. As the quarantine has been around for a few months, people are desperate for some athletics-related entertainment which means that this basketball board which won’t let you miss is a perfect post to share on your page if you have an audience that is somewhat hooked on tech or sports. It’s a neat invention anyway, as even people who are not super into basketball can appreciate the inventiveness and creativity that went into making this object.

Sell useful or branded products

If you’re not familiar with dropshipping yet, make sure to watch this video. It’s only under 7 minutes long, and it will help you become familiar with one of the most successful business models of the 21st century.

As an Instagram influencer, you have fierce competition in every niche and sphere. Whether you specialize in hair care products, clothing or comedy vids, there are a lot of people who are in a similar category. This makes it extremely difficult to get promotion deals and get income from a profession and “job” that is very time-consuming.

You need to find ways that can attract people to your profile and watch your content and monetize your content or find other ways to get income. By far the best way to do so is to open a dropshipping store for your branded merchandise or find a product (related to your field), then brand it and then sell it on your dropshipping store.

Use Teespring or Printly to make customized phone cases, t-shirts, hoodies, etc. and discover some products on Aliexpress, eBay or wherever else that you’d find useful in your daily life. Let’s run back to our sneaker-focused influencer one more time. For example, you saw a special cleaning agent that is great for cleaning laces and a similar cleaning agent for soles. Well, don’t wait any longer – get in touch with the manufacturer, tell them about your business and offer a partnership.

  1. You design the packaging and brand names, as well as create a unique store for this product (or add it to an existing one), and they handle the shipping as well as get a cut of the profits
  2. You advertise their product from their store and get a percentage of their sales

Option A is much better for business in the long-run. If you’re confident in that product (which you should test out before selling by the way), do everything in your power to get exclusive rights to. If you can make it seem that this is your product, it does wonder for your brand in the future!

Interact with your followers

Answer comments. That would be our first piece of advice. Tell me, if you’re a fan of football, and you’d left a comment on CR7’s post saying this is awesome and he’d like your comment or reply – wouldn’t that make your day a lot better? Being acknowledged by people, we consider famous is very rewarding. This is why a lot of people bother with comments at all – they want to get a response from someone they look up to or someone they enjoy seeing in their feed.

During quarantine, you have more than enough time to respond to your fans or followers as well as encourage small talk via DM’s. If you’re just getting started, you can buy Instagram comments from BSMM to make your posts seem more legit to new followers!

Do live streams

Live streaming could be counted as a way of interacting with your followers. Nonetheless, it is more than that, thus deserving a separate paragraph.

Live streaming is one of the most engaging and most direct ways of getting in touch with your audience. And it really doesn’t matter whether 20 or 2000 people tune in, it’s crucial that you know that a loyal audience exists and you can build around it. Try to ask your audience questions and involve them in what you’re doing. During quarantine, this is essential as despite being more with their families, people tend to feel much lonelier than before this whole lockdown situation.

Live streams are also almost always pure comedy gold because nothing goes according to plan. If you want to entertain people, just do Live videos once a day or at least a few times per week.

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