Why you Should Hire Content Creators to Boost your Brand’s Instagram and TikTok Following

Growing on social media can be tough — especially as a new brand. Thousands of new accounts are popping up daily and the competition is stronger than ever.

There’s a reason social media positions are full time roles in a lot of companies. Creating strategy, planning, creating content, posting, keeping up to date with the algorithm and changing trends, and reviewing and analysing what you’ve done is time consuming. Not to mention it takes multiple skills and levels of experience to get right.

For a lot of brands and businesses, the production — or creation — of content can be one of the most time consuming element of running social media accounts. You want fresh, consistent content to keep your accounts relevant and active — and, ultimately, to help them grow.

Small brands, especially, don’t always have the budgets, the time or the skill sets needed to create everything they want to create but the good thing is, there are loads of people out there who do. They’re called content creators, and influencers.

Working with influencers

If your focus is content for social media, working with influencers can be a smart way to have new content created that you can use, and tapping into an already-established audience. Find influencers within your niche who have a good following and solid engagement (i.e. the amount of likes and comments in relation to their following. An account with 10,000 followers that’s averaging 2,000 likes and 25 genuine comments per post is much more likely to have an authentic, engaged audience than an account with 70,000 followers that’s averaging 1,000 likes and 5 comments per post.).

This can take a bit of leg work in the beginning. You can find influencers by searching hashtags that are relevant to your brand or product offering, or going onto competitor brands’ accounts and see who they’re featuring — or look in their tagged images to see who’s featuring them. If you’re looking for location-specific influencers, you can search that location too, and see who pops up.

One thing I’d recommend when it comes to working with influencers, is not to work with only one ‘type’ that checks the same boxes. Keep it on brand, yes, but make sure you’re diversifying enough so you’re reaching different audiences. Work with different age groups, different countries (if your product is available in more than one), different genders and different account focuses.

A brand selling glass and dinnerware, for example, could work with an influencer that creates recipes and shares them on their account, an influencer that focuses on interior styling, and a fashion influencer that’s just about to move into a new home. They all make sense to team up with your brand but they’re different enough that you’ll be able to tap into different audiences.

You can then send those influencers your product in exchange for a post on their account and the rights for you to use their image/video. Some influencers will ask for payment, while some will be happy with just the product. You could also offer them a discount code and commission for any sales attributed to their post, as part of your negotiations.

Working with content creators

Content creators, for me, are almost a mix of freelancers and influencers. They tend to be amateur photographers or videographers who create really beautiful content and post it to their social media channels. They may not have loads of followers (like influencers do) but I’ve had a lot of success working with content creators for social media specifically, and it tends to be a very cost effective way of getting a bank of images or video that you can use again and again. They know how the platforms work, so they know how to create content that will suit.

You might come across an Instagram account with 4,000 followers (low in influencer standards) but their photography is incredible. You won’t get much from them if working with them on an influencer basis (i.e. they don’t have a large audience you can tap into) but you could engage them to take a series of photographs of your product that you can then use.

They’ll need payment as you’ll be buying the rights for their content to be used across your marketing channels, which can all be ironed out in the negotiation process. Like finding influencers, this can take a bit of trawling through the social platforms you want to create content for, but once you have your list of go-to creators, you can continue to work with them on a regular basis.

When you outsource your content in this way, it’s best to get a brief in place so the influencers and content creators you work with have an understanding of what you need, or what you’d like to achieve. If you’re new to the briefing process, read my guide to writing creative briefs before you start.

Parts of this article are taken from my book, ‘Making Content Work: Tips, tools and templates for your brand or business’. Available now on Amazon, in paperback or Kindle.