Monday we discussed the online-offline balance of influencer identification. One theme there was that an influencer tool for small business only gives you a look at half of the equation. It counts online metrics to deliver a set of recommendations for who might be your influencers. You still need to connect the online recommendations to offline considerations to truly know who influences your audience.
Not coincidentally, I’ve been reviewing an influencer tool for small business called Scrunch. This platform’s fully paid version is just $99 per month. Depending on your need for identifying influencers for your social media or public relations outreach, that is a very reasonable price. While suitable for any sized business or even agencies, Scrunch’s price point makes it appealing for the small business as well.
And Scrunch also offers a very reasonable platform. Broad categories are presented to you upon login. Click on one — I chose business and finance — and you have a full list of all the influencers that fall into that category. Choose “Filter” across the top and set your geographic focus, a range of follower sizes, what networks you wish to limit your search to (currently just blogs, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram) and even a date range and the list becomes more reasonable.
I drilled down to business and finance influencers in Kentucky, asked it to include media members as well as individuals, excluded profiles that included political terms and included ones that had “mortgage” “banking” and “real estate.” The list looked pretty solid to me, but that was just the automatic collection. The tool goes deeper.
You can then manually review each entry’s content and metrics to decide if they really do fit your definition of an influencer. If so, you can bookmark them into a custom list to organize and track them for your work. You can add notes by influencer and even run campaigns leveraging the tool which provides easy links to reach out to the influencer in question with all their available contact links.
Now, Scrunch is not unique as influencer tool for small business in a few ways. The influencers chosen are automatically identified through an algorithm, data is scraped from public channels and the categories are broad. But the filtering does enable you to drill down to more specific qualifiers and make the list of influencers more manageable.
There are several softwares out there that serve as an influencer tool for small business. There are influencer tools built within social media analytics and listening tools that serve the purpose, too. But Scrunch has a unique combination of ease-of-use, depth of management and price that make it an excellent choice as an influencer tool for small business.
If you sign up to use Scrunch, follow the links here to begin. They are affiliate links so you’ll buy me a soda pop if you do. (My thirst thanks you!)