[00:00] You are about to learn three things that you could do today to make it more likely for brands to find you and land brand collaborations on Instagram, whether you have 1,000 followers or 100,000 followers. What's up, everyone? It's Millie. Welcome back to my channel, where I post videos every Wednesday teaching you the latest strategies and trends on social media to help you grow your business.
[00:17] So give a little love tap on that subscribe button to stay up to date on all the latest tips and tricks I have for you. First, I want to say a huge thank you to this video's shoutouts. I literally wouldn't be able to do all this if it wasn't for each and every one of your support. So if you want a shout out in one of my future videos, make sure you screenshot yourself watching this video and tag me on Instagram stories or leave a comment below and subscribe to my channel.
[00:35] As always, time stamps will be in the comments down below because I value your time and you already know why you're here. So let's get into it. Now, if you're specifically looking for a video talking about how to land brand collaborations and all the different third party platforms that you should be on,
[00:49] then watch this video after this because in this video, I'm going to teach you the changes that you should apply to your Instagram account to make it easier for brands to find you. Let me start with the biggest question that I always get every time I bring up brand collaborations,
[01:03] and that is how many followers do you need to have in order to land a paid collaboration? There is no magic number. Everyone has this like preconceived notion in their head that they need to have 10,000 followers before they deserve to get paid brand collaborations,
[01:17] when in reality, your worth and your value is defined by you, not an Instagram vanity metric. So tell me, why are you waiting for a number to change before you start seeing how valuable you truly are?
[01:31] So I've helped a student with under 800 followers land a paid collaboration with a skincare line. And yes, while it may have only been $50 for a post, that's still probably $50 more than what you would charge at 800 followers.
[01:44] So if your follower number doesn't matter, then really what does? If you've been following me for some time, you will know that when brands are picking influencers to partner with, they are mainly looking at two aspects, your influence and your parallels.
[01:59] Now by influence, I mean, can you move your audience? Have you created a community of people who will actually listen to you? How is your engagement on Instagram? Brands pay influencers because they want access to your audience.
[02:14] So no matter how big or how small your tribe is, they're going to pay people who can connect with their tribe. And that's that. Your influence can be measured in many, many ways. And the most common way right now that brands use to measure your influence is your engagement rate.
[02:29] So your engagement rate is normally calculated by the total number of likes and comments that you have per post divided by the number of followers you have. On average, brands look for a 3-4% engagement rate on Instagram specifically.
[02:42] So if we're going to break this video down into like tips or action items, the first thing you want to make sure you have on your profile is an engagement of 3-4% or higher. There are many ways that you can calculate your engagement rate and there's websites that can do this for you.
[02:57] So the website that I typically go to to see how my engagement rate is doing is notjustanalytics Now if you sitting here and you like well shoot Millie my engagement sucks I have this video here
[03:09] for how you can increase your engagement rate, so make sure you watch that at the end of this video. Your parallels are basically what you, as a personal brand, and the brand have in common. So are you the right vessel
[03:21] to be talking about their product? Do you both have similar niche types, values, audience type, all the things. So these are all questions that should be running through your mind as well when you're picking which brands you should partner with. Like, will partnering with
[03:35] them be a natural fit or will your audience be like, hey, what the heck, this is weird. This is random. Like if I'm an Instagram coach and that's what I post on my Instagram, maybe talking about Clorox or Windex wouldn't make any sense, right? Now going back to our parallels, there are multiple
[03:52] ways that you can communicate these parallels clearly on your Instagram that will help you become more discoverable on the platform. Now, how can you do that, you may be wondering? Well, the best place to do that is in your bio. Gone are the days of putting inspirational quotes in
[04:08] your bio, and I mean like gone, gone, gone, gone, gone. They are, they're out of here, okay? Your bio should be filled with juicy keywords or searchable terms that communicate who you are,
[04:22] what you do, and who you do it for. To show you why this is actually important, I am going to take you behind the scenes so that you can see exactly what brands can see when they're looking for influencers. So as I'm lucky enough to get a behind the scenes look for you guys on an
[04:39] influencer marketing solution that helps discover, contact, monitor, audit influencers on a unified platform called Favicon, who is also the sponsor of today's video. Favicon was generous enough to give me access to what their brands get access to and see on their end so that I could share with
[04:56] you all this top secret information. Let's dive into a screen share so I can show you all the searching abilities. This is a behind-the-scenes look at Favicon. Right now, I'm just taking a look at the influencer search using advanced search section to allow brands to find the
[05:11] most relevant influencers using specific keywords. So as you can see up here, I can search by hashtags or keywords. I can search for these keywords within their bio. So if I'm an influencer and
[05:23] I'm looking for somebody that's a fashion blogger, right, I can type fashion blogger in the bio. And another thing that is really helpful is you can search by city. So if they have San Diego in their bio and I need a San Diego influencer, I can type in San Diego for the city or even San
[05:39] Diego in the bios. Let's test this out right now. So I want to search hashtag lifestyle blogger. So anybody who's used the hashtag lifestyle blogger and in their bio, I want them to be in
[05:53] California. No, obviously 18 or older. I want accounts with an email address so I can contact them Influencer tier you have nano micro let do micro influencers You could do from zero to 50 So that like nano and micro influencers Engagement rate average 3 Let search Cool So I do have like just a
[06:15] limited account so that I could see the general use of all the functionalities. So as you can see, the search result is pulling up a list of profiles that matched everything that I put in on the left hand side over here. And then we have these individual accounts, which are all based on
[06:30] a one to five system ranking that favicon has and there's over 50 criteria for this specific ranking so what we're going to do we're going to go into the influencer audit section so when we're
[06:44] doing this influencer audit this is going to analyze one specific influencer's account using that one to five scale which has over 50 different criteria this criteria covers everything so your audience analysis, engagement rate, potential partnerships, brand mentions or mentions that
[07:00] they've made in the past, advertising performance, and so, so, so much more. So let's dive into an audit and see what that looks like. Let's audit my Instagram. Yay! Fun match. Ayo. Okay, so here
[07:13] is my Instagram. Now, I've already clicked analyze. So these are the results. This is the 4.9 out of Five, low risk, high reward influencer.
[07:25] Okay, I'll take that. I think the biggest thing that's hurting my engagement right now or my ranking, it says watch out, this influencer hasn't been active at all lately, so no one wants to work with a dead account. If you follow me on Instagram, you know why I'm taking my Instagram breaks so I can focus
[07:40] on my course. But it is interesting that that is something that they look for. They do look to see what accounts are active, who is actively showing up on Instagram. So that's interesting to know. What else is interesting here? That's funny. A true love story between Millie, Online Educator, and Reset. Love that for us.
[07:56] A good run for your money, a regular campaign, one post, and three stories with Millie will cost you around $1,700. Based off of my current rates, that's not a bad estimate.
[08:08] This is probably the closest estimate than any other platform. So I think earlier I mentioned not just analytics. I think they give you suggestions on how much an influencer charges and it's way too low. do not base your rates on that, okay? So this is probably the most accurate for how much
[08:25] influencers could charge. Potential partnerships, people I could have partnered with in the past, geotagged posts, top cities, my potential pricing, very, very cool, and then other profiles that
[08:37] they might be interested in based off of my profile analysis, maybe people I follow, people who are within my niche who maybe have the same title, same keywords within their bios, right and this audit is a great way for brands to see our parallels as you can see on the left
[08:51] hand side it talks about what countries am I most dominant in or do I show up the most in what cities do I show up in the highest performing city which is interesting that it's London hey London the gender split so 88 of my audience are female and then we have a 11 for male 88 speak English as their first language we have 41 are within the ages 18 to 24 and then 31 are between the ages of 25 and 34
[09:19] So if I'm a brand and I'm trying to target women between the ages of 18 and 30, this might be a wonderful partnership opportunity for me. As you can see, this is a really, really easy tool for brands to use and their ultimate
[09:31] goal with Saveacon is to make influencer marketing easy. for any brand to do, not just the big dogs, which I, as an influencer, really appreciate. We love seeing brands value influencer marketing, right?
[09:44] Now, there are other features that brands have on Favicon, like being able to create lists of other influencers and export their contact information to a sheet. There's also influencer tracking to monitor selected influencers, follow their partnerships,
[09:59] all of that. And if it isn't apparent enough, it's obvious. Brands aren't just sitting on their phones scrolling through hashtags trying to find the best influencer. Like, no, they have tools where they're being strategic, trying to specifically find specific type of people.
[10:16] There are a lot of tools out there like this that brands are using to be super specific for their influencers. So I want to say a huge thank you to Favicon for partnering with me on this video so I could show you guys from the behind-the-scenes perspective of what brands see when taking influencers to partner with.
[10:32] If you're interested to see more about Favicon, I'll absolutely link them below for you. Now, the third change that you can make today to make brands find you a little bit easier is using hashtags. In my recent hashtag video, which I'll link up here, I talk about how hashtags are a great
[10:47] tool for two main reasons. One is discoverability slash potential increase in reach, and two is to categorize yourself and your content. As you saw on Favicon, brands can even search under specific hashtags.
[11:00] So what sort of hashtags can you start using that brands might be looking up? Like hashtag San Diego blogger, hashtag lifestyle blogger. Or even something to think about is does the brand have a specific hashtag that you can start using to get in some of their eyes?
[11:16] So I think Forever 21 has a hashtag like hashtag F21 me. So if I want to partner with Forever 21 and I'm wearing their clothes in a lot of my posts, I'm going to use that hashtag every time it's relevant on my post. So those little tweaks can make a world of a difference when you want to become more
[11:31] discoverable on Instagram. I have a kind of part two, which I mentioned earlier, that goes more in depth for how you can actually land paid brand collaborations, so I'll be sure to link that above and down below in the description.
[11:43] If you do want to hear a part three in this brand collaboration series, comment below what sort of topics you want me to cover next. If you've made it this far and you're not already subscribed to my channel, make sure you tap that subscribe button and turn on the bell notifications so you don't miss when
[11:56] post my videos thank you so much for watching and i'll see you in the next one follow your joy bye