7 Social Media Collaboration Ideas: Influencer Partnerships

Partnering with influencers is a great way to raise brand awareness and drive sales for your product. It helps you to run effective marketing campaigns on social media platforms, increase brand exposure and get good results. This is why, in the past few years, more and more brands are harnessing the power of influencer marketing to promote their brands.

Here are 7 social media collaboration ideas that can help you organize your campaign and build long-term partnerships with influencers.

Paid Posts

The first thing that comes to my mind when thinking about influencer marketing is paid influencer partnership. Taking into account that influencers have a great impact on the decision-making process of their followers, paid influencer partnership can be a fast and effective way to drive more sales and increase brand awareness.

But before jumping into Paid Posts’ Partnerships with influencers, there are a couple of things you need to know:

1. 1. Have a PayPal account: most of the influencers use PayPal to safely transfer or receive payments.

1. 1. Opt for the RIGHT influencer, and an effective partnering strategy. In order not to throw your money down the drain, make sure you pick influencers carefully. Consider their audience quality, the correspondence of the audience with the products they promote, and their engagement rates. You can calculate the influencer’s engagement rate here.

1. 1. Note that one-off influencer partnerships prove to be less effective than long-term partnerships.

Additionally, if you offer influencers more than they demand you can get better discounts and conditions. For example, if an influencer wants $100 for a feed post with a call to action link, offer them to give you discounts for buying additional stories. 

People are also keener to purchase a product when they see it a couple of times via retargeting options. If you are looking to drive sales through influencer marketing, then one-off influencer partnerships have less chance of providing you with your desired results (ROIs of 3x or above).

Since the influencer will make one post, only a small percentage of his or her audience will become aware of your product. So, the possibility is low that the audience who sees your product only once, will convert. I am not totally excluding the possibility that one post can generate enough sales to provide 3x ROI, but as a rule of thumb, most cases show the opposite.

First and foremost, you need to learn some tricks on getting discounts and incentivizing an influencer to agree on going that extra mile with you. An affiliate percentage on top of the upfront payment is a great way to motivate influencers to get into long-term influencer partnerships with you.

In return you can expect the following:  

• • Pin your post at the top of the page

• • Additional stories every now and then

• • Reshare of your post

And more importantly, do not forget to periodically check if the influencer is keeping his audience active and engages with them. 

Samples and Reviews

Many people associate influencer marketing with samples and reviews. If you are looking for social media marketing collaboration ideas, influencer partnerships around samples are the best solution.
There is a big difference between reviewing and sharing 3rd party content. Seeing an influencer using your product, increases the credibility of the product and encourages fans to follow the example of the influencer and use it in their lives.

Here is a good example of how we sent a sample to a cat influencer.

As you can guess from the number of likes and comments, the audience reacted quite positively and they wanted to have this product too.

The opposite is also true. When people see an influencer sharing 3rd party content without being part of it, they start ranting which, in return, harms the product’s credibility.                 

Affiliate Partnerships

A couple of words about affiliate influencer partnerships. 

First of all, affiliate partnerships will help you to get discounts from influencers. Here is a practical way to do that. While negotiating with an influencer, ask them about their price list. You can use Instagram Money Calculator to boost your confidence when negotiating a price. As a result, you’ll be able to determine whether the price offered by an influencer is reasonable.
Then, offer them a 10-15 percent share of each sale. Be sure that after this they will make beneficial changes to the price list or add more value to your partnership. 

Besides, the influencers who run blogs or websites usually insert affiliate links about products in their articles. Take advantage and offer them a higher percentage to add your product’s affiliate links.

Additionally, the good performance of your product’s video on social media is a perfect indicator that influencers will agree to post about your product. Influencers can easily identify the best times to share on their social media accounts.
Depending on the kind of business and lifestyle of their followers, different times may provide for different interactions.
Recurpost is a social media scheduling tool that can help to find out the best times to post based on the engagement levels of their account.
So, extract the list of pages and individual influencers, then outreach them with your exceptional affiliate marketing offer.

Advertising Access 

This is a special strategy that probably you have not heard of so far. The key is getting advertising access on the influencer`s page. 

Do you think I am trying to engage you in an illegal activity? Absolutely not! 

If your post has good performance and the audience is perfectly chosen,  it means you have found a gold mine and you don’t have the right to lose it.

You can ask for a temporary advertiser’s role access to an influencer page by offering them a percentage off sales. Then you can create ads and target specific people with your best working interests. 

All they need to do is go to their Facebook settings > Page Roles, and add your Facebook ads manager email by choosing “Advertiser” and clicking “Add”.
After you receive the notification that you had been added as an advertiser, you have the right to run ads on the influencer’s audience or boost your post.

Branded Content

I am sure you have heard about Branded Content and probably have seen the “Paid Partnership” label on Facebook posts a lot. You may also know that Branded Content is included in Facebook’s policy relating to paid partnerships. So you must make sure that the influencer follows those rules while working with your brand.

Branded Content allows people to see your official social media account in influencers’ publications and enables you to boost the post on your end. What’s the benefit of it? Once the post goes viral, getting a lot of comments and shares, it is your perfect chance to use it as social proof and boost that post reaching wider audiences. It really pays off, you should definitely go for it and make your influencer partnership marketing more effective. 

Giveaways

A giveaway is a real chance to create a buzz around your product. Reach out to a relevant influencer and encourage them to run a giveaway post for their audience. A lot of people are going to see your product and participate in the contest. It is an effective way to gain new followers for your social media page and raise brand awareness.
Furthermore, after the giveaway ends, you can offer additional discounts to the participants who didn’t win and in this way also drive more sales.

Networking

Influencer marketing works best when a brand builds lasting relationships with influencers in their niche and brings the strategy in-house. The good news is that every brand is capable of creating a network of influencers. 

It can be as simple as asking them if you can send them your product. Try to build meaningful and close relationships with them as they are going to talk a lot about your product. Once you succeed in building a meaningful relationship with the influencer, ask him or her to present you to their influencer friends. 

Remember they have a lot of friends who are influential just like them. The bigger your network is,  the higher your chances to achieve better results and be spotted by a larger audience. That’s why it pays to incentivize your partner influencer to bring you closer to guys like them.

Here are some ways to build warmer relationships with influencers:

• • Send them an email gift card

• • Send them surprise gifts

• • Share their content on your social media platform

• • Personally reach out and ask their opinions concerning your brand

Summing Up

Too often, brands ignore the fact that social media influencers are successful because they are extremely adept at engaging with audiences and creating authentic content in their unique voice. To that end, if an influencer says that something will or will not work for their particular audience, they are probably right. 

The best way for brands to develop a positive working relationship and establish a long-term and effective partnership with social media influencers is simply by listening to them and trusting them—for they know what’s best for their content, audience, and channel.