The term influencer has become a daily part of our normal vocabulary over the years since companies around the world have been partnering with content creators to tap into their audiences to raise awareness about a product, service or event and use their connection to their audience to get them to take a specific action with their brand.

Now, influencers have been around since the dawn of time, long before social media. Think about all of the athletes with sports shoes, Nike had some of the best commercials and everybody wanted to go out and purchase some after watching the funniest commercials from the likes of Penny Hardaway and Michael Jordan, to name a few.

According to the Oxford Dictionary, an influencer is simply a person or thing that influences another. Now when you look in Oxford, you will have noticed they added an updated definition for influencer with the marketing tag. For marketing, an influencer is “a person with the ability to influence potential buyers of a product or service by promoting or recommending the items on social media.”

We are all influenced by various people to purchase products or sign up for services. Think about all the purchases you make and then think about what you do before making the purchase. Reading reviews online, reading an article about the product, watching videos on YouTube or heading to social media and seeing what your favourite social media personality has to say about the product.

Folks have often asked the question, “How do you become an influencer?”

Well, I decided to ask someone who has been creating content since they were 14 years old and has blossomed into one of the top content creators at 21, her name is Nakiah Castang aka @iamnakiah on social media.

Here are Nakiah’s five tips on becoming an influencer:

1) Know Your Niche — Pick a niche that you would like to get into and make sure that it is something that you are comfortable doing and it’s not something you want to do because of the hype. If you cannot cook, do not go into cooking content because you see some other cooking influencer doing cooking content and it goes viral, that is their niche. If you love animals and you are knowledgeable about them, create animal content. The point is to create content that you can be consistent with, that is authentic and natural to you.

2) Inspiration vs Copying — There is a difference between searching for inspiration and being a copycat. There will be times when you do not know what content to create and you can scroll through to see what people are doing but do not copy and paste what somebody else is doing. Put your spin on certain trends. Show who you are in every trend that there is. That is what will attract people. Your followers can tell when you are not being yourself and when you are not being authentic in your videos.

3) Accept Feedback — Do not neglect your followers and their feedback. Remember, these are the people that are going to help you make it where you want to be. So when you put out content, pay attention to the ones that do well and study it. Think about what my followers love to see and continue pushing that out more. Your audience will let you know when they are not feeling your content and if they don’t tell you, it will show up in your analytics by the number of likes, comments, saves and shares you get. When you build a community around your content, people will want more and let you know more of what they want to see, those who don’t like your content will unfollow and that’s okay. The genuine supporters will stick around to support you.

4) Be Relatable — Create relatable content, not for just one group of people, but something that a wide variety of people can relate to. So let’s say you’re doing animal content. There might be some people who are just not animal lovers, but they might be dance lovers. They might love music or love to dance. You don’t have to tarnish your animal content but you can find ways to blend animals, music and dance together to tap into a new audience. Some folks may not be animal lovers but check your content out for the music or dance elements of the video.

5) Research — Do your research. If you want your content to go viral, research viral content. Dig deep into what is making the content go viral. Study if it’s the person’s natural personality if it’s a topic that they’re speaking about, or if it’s a trending song or a trending hashtag. When you see a trending hashtag or song, hop on sooner rather than later because trends die within a week. Research is crucial. Stay up to date and produce content in a timely manner.

Go check out Nakiah on Instagram or TikTok @iamnakiah.

I hope you enjoyed these tips and find ways to incorporate them into your content.

Keron Rose is a Digital Strategist that works with Caribbean Entrepreneurs to build their digital presence. Learn more at KeronRose.com or listen to the Digipreneur FM podcast on Apple Podcast, Spotify or Google Podcast.