ET BureauAHMEDABAD: With the explosion of startups, work assignments of Twitter and blog influencers have surged in recent times. Young Twitter influencers like Amit Panchal and Swati Kungwani and India’s top bloggers -- Harsh Agrawal and Arvind Passey -- have their hands full, trying to get a sense of the needs of startups.
“A large chunk of startups are engaging influencers since they are relatively low cost and bring in higher engagements and can be target oriented,” said Irfan Khan, promoter of Blogmint.com, India’s first automated influencer platform that connects brands with influencers. Blogmint, which was launched in January this year, already has 10,000 influencers and 400 brands registered with it, many of which are startups.
Typically, startups start out small. “Initially they would go for 25-50 blogs or twitter influencers, but once there’s traction, they scale up,” said Khan, adding that the bigger ones are talking about 500 blogs a month, or 1000s of tweets per month, and so on. According to him, once startups become certain, they start asking the influencers for blocking dates for 500 blogs per month for the next whole year, as they are into scalable business.
“Twitter is used for creating a buzz in the market, while blogging is for long-term brand building,” said Agrawal. His blog site -- shoutmeloud.com -- has a traffic of 6 million page views a year and his earnings were Rs 50 lakh last year, which have shot up to about Rs 9 lakh a month this year.
“Blogging has become vital for every start-up for marketing themselves as a brand,” said Agrawal, who has worked for several startups.
“Since startups are generally the brain child of people from IIMs or IITs, even though they may not be grads, they are always thinking out of the box,” said Arvind Passey, one of the top bloggers in India with 30,000 page views every month. One of the most common practices among brands and startups are affiliated marketing. Here bloggers or tweeter influencers do not have to pitch themselves; rather, they can directly go ahead and sign up for affiliate programme right away, which are open for everybody.
“Many startups have affiliate marketing or refer-(referral)-a-friend programme,” said Agrawal, adding, “Nowadays, all of them (startups) are using it (twitter and blogger influencers).”
Explaining the way the Twitter influencers work, Nikhil Talreja of Digital Upstart, that works with several Twitter influencers, especially for brand campaigns, said, “The strategy behind is to start a tweet by a twitter influencer, and as it reaches a large network of followers, it starts trending organically.” “Basically, it’s done for either brand awareness or product launch that could translate into sales,” said Talreja.
Both Kungwani, 23, a twitterite for the past five years and an engineering professor who had turned into a twitter influencer since 18 months and has 10,000-plus followers, and Ahmedabad-based Panchal, feel that the work load has multiplied. They agree that apart from large brands, even startups are now approaching them. “There’s a significant momentum seen from startups,” they said, adding startups from Mumbai, Delhi and Bengaluru are engaging influencers.
With rise in the demand from startups, twitter and blog influencers’ rates too have increased, but are still affordable when compared with conventional promotional techniques. “There are bloggers who work for free as they are passionate about writing, but there are bloggers on my platform who have charged Rs 1 lakh per article and we have seen brands and startups paying them,” said Khan.
While in case of tweets, it’s a package deal that consists of 30-50 tweets a month, as shelf life of tweets are short. Brands and startups pay from Rs 1500 upwards, which is decent pocket money for a college kid. “But if we look at a higher level influencer, they are obviously costly. There are influencers who could charge anything between Rs 50,000 and Rs 60,000 per tweet,” said Khan.
“A large chunk of startups are engaging influencers since they are relatively low cost and bring in higher engagements and can be target oriented,” said Irfan Khan, promoter of Blogmint.com, India’s first automated influencer platform that connects brands with influencers. Blogmint, which was launched in January this year, already has 10,000 influencers and 400 brands registered with it, many of which are startups.
Typically, startups start out small. “Initially they would go for 25-50 blogs or twitter influencers, but once there’s traction, they scale up,” said Khan, adding that the bigger ones are talking about 500 blogs a month, or 1000s of tweets per month, and so on. According to him, once startups become certain, they start asking the influencers for blocking dates for 500 blogs per month for the next whole year, as they are into scalable business.
“Twitter is used for creating a buzz in the market, while blogging is for long-term brand building,” said Agrawal. His blog site -- shoutmeloud.com -- has a traffic of 6 million page views a year and his earnings were Rs 50 lakh last year, which have shot up to about Rs 9 lakh a month this year.
“Blogging has become vital for every start-up for marketing themselves as a brand,” said Agrawal, who has worked for several startups.
“Since startups are generally the brain child of people from IIMs or IITs, even though they may not be grads, they are always thinking out of the box,” said Arvind Passey, one of the top bloggers in India with 30,000 page views every month. One of the most common practices among brands and startups are affiliated marketing. Here bloggers or tweeter influencers do not have to pitch themselves; rather, they can directly go ahead and sign up for affiliate programme right away, which are open for everybody.
“Many startups have affiliate marketing or refer-(referral)-a-friend programme,” said Agrawal, adding, “Nowadays, all of them (startups) are using it (twitter and blogger influencers).”
Explaining the way the Twitter influencers work, Nikhil Talreja of Digital Upstart, that works with several Twitter influencers, especially for brand campaigns, said, “The strategy behind is to start a tweet by a twitter influencer, and as it reaches a large network of followers, it starts trending organically.” “Basically, it’s done for either brand awareness or product launch that could translate into sales,” said Talreja.
Both Kungwani, 23, a twitterite for the past five years and an engineering professor who had turned into a twitter influencer since 18 months and has 10,000-plus followers, and Ahmedabad-based Panchal, feel that the work load has multiplied. They agree that apart from large brands, even startups are now approaching them. “There’s a significant momentum seen from startups,” they said, adding startups from Mumbai, Delhi and Bengaluru are engaging influencers.
With rise in the demand from startups, twitter and blog influencers’ rates too have increased, but are still affordable when compared with conventional promotional techniques. “There are bloggers who work for free as they are passionate about writing, but there are bloggers on my platform who have charged Rs 1 lakh per article and we have seen brands and startups paying them,” said Khan.
While in case of tweets, it’s a package deal that consists of 30-50 tweets a month, as shelf life of tweets are short. Brands and startups pay from Rs 1500 upwards, which is decent pocket money for a college kid. “But if we look at a higher level influencer, they are obviously costly. There are influencers who could charge anything between Rs 50,000 and Rs 60,000 per tweet,” said Khan.
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