How I Made $10k in sales with influencer marketing with this one tool — SocialRank Tutorial & Review

This review and article was submitted by Trufan customer Samer Brax.

Please note that this blog post is unsolicited, we are not paying or compensating Samer in any way for providing us with this blog post. We love it when customers share how they are using Trufan and when Samer offered his blog to us to use on our website we happily accepted!

The digital marketplace is always changing but one thing will always stay the same: fans will always trust their influencer. And if their influencer promotes a product that they’re passionate about, their followers will follow suit.

But as an ecommerce seller, where do you get started with influencer marketing?

I went over this in my last blog post and YouTube video called “5 Steps To Find Influencers for your Amazon FBA & Shopify Brand”

To give you the quick and dirty, influencer marketing is summed up in 5 steps:

1. Identify your target audience
2. Define your influencer criteria
3. Gather your influencer master list
4. Reach out to your influencers
5. Build a relationship and keep them coming back

And if you’ve done some influencer marketing yourself, you know that these steps can get tedious.

You could spend hours digging for influencers only to find out that they just aren’t relevant to your brand.

But what if I told you there’s a tool that automated steps 1–3 and did all of the legwork for you?

A tool that dialed in on the right influencers for your Amazon and Shopify brand.

A tool that has helped me generate over $10,000 in sales through influencer marketing.

Have your attention?‍

Introducing SocialRank by Trufan.

It has over 1 billion profiles that you can sort and filter through in just a few clicks.

**DISCLAIMER: This blog post is NOT sponsored or affiliated with Trufan. Trufan has not contacted me nor will I be receiving any financial benefit from reviewing this tool. I’m simply sharing this info because it is an efficient and affordable way of finding high quality influencers.

So with that in mind, I use SocialRank 2 ways:

1. Instagram Cerebro

2. Analyzing Competitor Followers‍

Method 1: Instagram Cerebro

For my savvy Amazon sellers, Instagram Cerebro is very similar to Helium 10’s Cerebro.

You can search SocialRank’s database through the following filters:

Instagram Cerebro’s Search Filters:

• Bio Keywords
• Words, Hashtags, Emojis (used across all posts)
• Location
• Account Privacy (Public vs Private Profiles)
• Activity (Posting Frequency)
• Number of Followers
• Number of Following
• Followers / Following Ratio
• Profanity
• Language
• Default Avatar

That’s a lot of filters… and you can easily get lost so let’s take it step by step.

Let’s start by searching for yoga influencers. First I’d click the bio keyword drop down and type in “yoga”.

If I were to run these results without any other filters, SocialRank will search all profiles across Instagram for the word “yoga” in their bio. Depending on the keyword, this will either show a lot of profiles or too little.

In this example, it showed us a lot. 440,000+ profiles in fact.

No surprise there, over 300 million people practice yoga all over the world according to the International Yoga Foundation.

To refine my search results, I will add an additional keyword like “instructor” then toggle “search for all words” under the search options.

This will search Instagram profiles with “yoga” AND “instructor”. You could toggle “search any of these words” (an or function) but since there are instructors for 1000s of different disciplines and subjects, we’ll want to toggle all words.

After running the report you can see that just adding an additional word and toggling 1 search option, it drastically decreased our profiles from 440,000+ to 21,000+.

You can play around with these filters to find your sweet spot.

Now that you have a feel for what Instagram Cerebro can do, I’d like to go through all of the other filters, describe their function, and give actionable use cases.

Bio Keywords:

Function: Search for keywords in bio

Use Case: Search for profiles by niche

Example: Your main product keyword is electrolyte but your target audience is the ketogenic diet. Most likely, keto influencers won’t have electrolyte in their bio so it’d be helpful to use a broader keyword that identifies your niche.

Words, Hashtags, Emojis:

Function: Search for words, hashtags, and emojis in profile posts.

Use Case: Search for profiles by main product keyword.

Example: Your main product keyword is electrolyte. You can search every Instagram profile on the platform for any mention of electrolyte.

Location:

Function: Search profiles by location

Use Case: Dial in on specific parts of the world if you ship internationally. If you only sell in Amazon US, I recommend filtering by the United States.

Account Privacy:

Function: Filter profiles by private or public accounts

Use case: ALWAYS select public accounts. If their profile is private, SocialRank cannot pull any information about them.

Activity:

Function: Filter by posting frequency

Use case: Filter out any inactive profiles. You can even set a custom date range.

Number of Followers:

Function: Set a follower minimum and maximum range

Use case: Set your influencer criteria. Mine is 2k-100k followers

Number of Following:

Function: Set a following minimum and maximum range

Use case: I don’t typically use this one but one could set a low max following to filter out spam accounts.

Followers / Following Ratio:

Function: Set a minimum and maximum range for Follow/Following ratio

Use case: I haven’t found a use case for this one so if anyone uses this please leave a comment below and share your reasoning.

Profanity:

Function: Search profiles who use profanity or those who don’t

Use case: Personally, I don’t have a use case for this in my niche but I suppose if you sold religious products or children’s toys you could filter for family-friendly profiles.

Language:

Function: Search for profiles in specific languages

Use case: I always leave this blank since I sell in the US and many people speak different languages.

Default Avatar:

Function: Search for profiles with or without a default avatar

Use case: I can’t think of one so I never use this. If anyone finds an awesome influencer that 10x’s their amazon sales through a default avatar then I’ll buy you a drink.

Once you define and choose your filters, click apply filters and SocialRank will run the report.

Viewing Your Report:

Now there are 2 ways to view the results. The first way is to view profiles one-by-one in the current interface by clicking each profile.

On the right, they have highlighted our bio keyword and gave a breakdown of their engagement rate.

The second way is called grid view. You can toggle it here:

This is a much faster way of viewing their profile metrics.

After you find profiles that meet your criteria, click on their profile from SocialRank and validate it on Instagram. Sometimes SocialRank’s data isn’t 100% up to date so it’s important to not skip out on this step.

If they don’t measure up for any reason, then it might be worth your time going through the manual methods to see if there are any active profiles that are algorithmically similar.

I talk about all of these methods in depth in my first blog post:

1. Suggestion Arrow
2. Competitor Tags
3. Competitor Comments
4. Hashtags

If they do measure up, then you can add the influencer to a custom list. I usually name them by whatever search query I used. In this case, I’ll save this influencer to my “Bio Keyword: Yoga Demo” list.

Method 2: Analyzing Competitor Followers

The other way I use SocialRank to find influencers is through competitor followers.

To get started, search your competitor in the search bar at the top.

In this example, I’ll type in the Instagram handle of Onnit then click run report.

Note: to generate new reports, you’ll need a paid account. Luckily the tool is very affordable. I’ll cover pricing in a moment but if you’d like to hold off on paying, I recommend searching for a well known Instagram page in your niche because odds are, someone has generated a report before.

After running the report, you can see a list of all of their followers and view their stats individually.

Then you can filter their followers by the same exact criteria we used before in method 1 in Instagram Cerebro.

SocialRank Pricing:

As for the pricing of the tool the lowest paid plan clocks in at $9.99 a month. I’m not sure how Trufan has made it so cheap but it’s awesome and affordable to almost anyone.

In fact, it’s so affordable that other audience segmentation tools can’t compete.

Summary:

SocialRank by Trufan is perhaps the most affordable and robust audience segmentation tool. It’s the easiest way to identify, organize, and manage your audience on social media. You can plug in your own data, generate your own influencer reports, or run prior reports.

I highly recommend this tool and if you guys have any other tools you use to find influencers leave a comment below and share your experience.