One key step in effective influencer engagement: A good system for seeing opportunities

When it comes to cultivating long-term relevance and quality relationships with industry thought leaders, showing up is key.  Here’s my advice on how to make that easier to do.

I’ve been engaging with influential people online, building relationships, learning from them, and collaborating when it makes sense, for more than a decade. The number one tactic I always recommend is this: set up a really easy way for you to see the updates that your people of interest are publishing throughout the course of your day.  Not all of them, just some of them, regularly.

This should be something you can’t help but trip on as you’re looking at your email inbox, or you’re visiting Twitter, or when you’re opening a new tab in your browser. I have a VIP Twitter list I’ve organized and I’ve dragged the link to that list’s tweets down to my browser toolbar. Whenever I want to visit Twitter, that’s where I start. That’s pretty casual, for my heavyweight business needs I use enterprise software from Sprinklr of course, and it is the best interface for influencer monitoring I’ve ever seen. But the point is, you’ve got to have the opportunity to engage right in front of you.

Now once you’ve walked past your email folder full of influencer newsletters, or your Facebook Group you use as your Facebook landing page, or your awesome social media listening dashboard, don’t just rush past that point to get to where you intended to go. Linger a little. Make a habit of slowing down to look at a few recent updates from the influential people you’re monitoring. You don’t have to read everything, but you won’t engage with anything you don’t read. There are probably 1 or 2 opportunities to reply, reshare, or otherwise engage with something in the first 3 to 5 items you’ll scan over at the top of your list.

Wash, rinse, and repeat. Regular engagement with influencer content isn’t sufficient to build a relationship, but I’d argue that it is one essential part if you’re really focused on building long-term relationships and learning from these top thinkers in your industry.

A fun advanced tactic: sometimes I like to pretend I’m at a party offline and someone walked up to me and said the first thing I see on a list of tweets, right to me personally. What would I say if they said that to me? I think about that a little, and then I say it on Twitter.