How to find the right social media influencers for your charity

In this 5 minute video, we talk to Genson Glier a serial startup growth marketing guru who has worked with numerous early-stage businesses to help them kick-start their customer acquisition. Here Genson draws on his most recent experience of working on TogetherAI, an app designed to help families and their children navigate the growing up journey together (AKA the compass for growing up).

This conversation focuses on Genson’s experiences in working with influences to establish and grow product reputation and how to recycle content that influencers produce within your owned media channels to further amplify the value and drive customer acquisition.

He also talks about how focusing on mico-influencers (those that focus on a more specific niche) can be a more effective strategy when looking to engage with a specific target audience and drive results, this is as opposed to maco-influencer-focused approaches where a larger, more diverse audience might be reached. One area we were glad to hear Genson talk about is the fact that social media video often doesn’t need to be a highly polished production with lots of investment, it can be a quick piece to camera – this reinforces our experience here at Digital Ninjas where we often see these types of content outperform by a long way.

@togetherai Our conversational support enables you and your kids to connect and build resilience together.#mentalhealth #family #app #childpsychology #anxiety #depression #depressionhelp #together #ai ♬ original sound – TogetherAI
@togetherai We analyze hundreds of data points to help kids understand what they’re thinking, feeling and experiencing.#mentalhealth #family #app #childpsychology #parents #parenting #anxiety #depression #depressionhelp ♬ original sound – TogetherAI

Here’s the transcript from our conversation about how to get the most from social influencers (see top of page for the video recording):

Genson (00:01):

TogetherAI is a digital companion for families to help them navigate the growing-up journey. It works by giving the child a digital friend that teaches them about emotional intelligence how to develop resilience and understanding their, day to day, general stresses. 

It facilitates a conversation between the parent and the child with tools and techniques from leading healthcare professionals. 

When it comes to the digital acquisition of users we started by looking at who our target audience actually is. For us, we target parents and the parent then onboards the child who’s the end user. So it’s a little different to more of a traditional B2C approach. 

Instead of traditional stuff, which is what most startups do – they try and educate the market on what their brand is. Their product is their solution, whatnot. 

We went straight to content creators that looked like our users and approached them to create content for us and then repurposed said content into our advertising channel to give us an overall low cost per sign-up across all platforms. 

With everything moving towards short-form video-based content, we focused more on that realm rather than say your traditional areas of like blogs or just general podcasts and bits and pieces.

Brendan (01:30):

There’s a lot of chatter about micro influence influences versus macro influences. How, how did you find these guys to create the content?

Genson (01:38):

Yeah, so really just getting your hands dirty. 

Looking for influences on TikTok around different hashtags looking for influences on YouTube. 

Macro influencers can be great, but when you’re a small startup, micro’s the best as you can create that instant relationship. 

You generate a long-term rapport, so you can actually generate consistent low-cost content to use across multiple social platforms. It’s about building those strong connections and then re-educating other networks with those connections. And what I mean by that is basically if you can find individuals that look like your user, they’ll generally have an audience that you’d want to target as well. So, if you’re getting a to mom creator, content creator, or user-generated content they’ll often have additional communities of similar individuals and similar peer peers in their community.

I’d focus on more of a long tail connection rather than anything else you don’t want to, you can go for quick hacks and growth tactics like, scraping competitors, followers and creating artificial social media engagement. But it’s really about ensuring that you have that connection with those users for your early stage. We got 20,000 users within a couple of months for nothing for our waitlist, which is great. 

It took us about a year to transition into releasing the app with back and forth user feedback, user interviews. Having this pre-registered base then made getting the acquisition of 20 K installs much more straightforward because we had built up these relationships with these micro influences, micro creators.

Brendan (03:43):

Wow. So the, the main distribution channel was TikTok, and then you used that content, the best performing I presume on the other platforms.

Genson (03:52):

When it comes to repurposing content, obviously you need to, you know, do make simple changes like removing watermarks and so forth. But every other major social media channel is following short-form video content. Now it doesn’t really matter about the production value because people prefer a more authentic connection. And especially when dealing with sort of micro performances, you get that.

Brendan (04:19):

What about all the money I spent today on this production?

Genson (04:21):

<Laugh> sorry, brother. Polished is great. It just depends on really your user and what they’re used to interacting with. Our users were, you know, moms and dads struggling to connect with their children and they would often be, watching TikTok with their kids or they might be on Snapchat or they might be looking at Instagram reels or they might be looking at Facebook reels. So that type of content doesn’t need to be polished. However, if we’re looking at something that has more of a B2B aspect, you might do a short-form video that’s a little bit more polished, but you’ll throw that onto LinkedIn or you’ll repurpose that into Twitter. You just have to look at where your audience lives online?