Outreach marketing is a widely circulated term these days and has become a cornerstone around which modern content marketing strategies are formulated. High quality content is associated with influential bloggers, which in turn are associated with brand advocacy. Getting industry experts to talk about your brand or sharing your content can open new doors for your internet marketing initiatives and campaigns. Social media and blogger outreach go hand in hand, and through this article we will talk about few tools that can be used to expedite this process.

Blogger outreach requires a fair bit of experience with public relations, since you are not just required to contact influential bloggers and subject matter experts, but also build mutual trust with them. This is how the term “outreach marketing” was coined, and so was sponsored a different aspect of contemporary digital marketing practices. The reason some public relation experience helps in blogger outreach is simple – smooth initial ice breaking session when one approached a powerful community member.

Social media has evolved into the most powerful medium to expedite influential blogger outreach. For starters, it smoothens crowd engagements and helps you in getting within the radar of your niche industry experts. Initial engagement easy, and it is the follow-up that is both tricky and difficult. Let’s see a few tools that are most valuable for outreach marketing.

#1 Commun.it

Commun.it is an extremely versatile social media tool for for managing Twitter relationships and finding niche service bloggers within your industry. Ideal for online Twitter relationship management, Commun.it gives a smart peak into many interesting Twitter aspects via its separate ‘Consider to follow’, ‘Consider to unfollow’, ‘Share top tweets’, and ‘Thank new followers’ results in the free version.

#2 Followerwonk

If finding influential bloggers and industry experts your biggest hurdle in outreach then you will find Followerwonkto be a blessing in that regard. Developed by Moz, Followerwonk lets one compare different Twitter users in terms of their overall influence, engagement and reputation in the blogging community through its ‘Social Authority’ metric. Further, once can also shortlist highly influential Twitter folks based on their bio and location – it lets one search for key terms in the bio section of their Twitter profiles. Quite handy, isn’t it?

#3 Klout

Even though Klout is just a humble content curator application, it works extraordinarily in finding people who have established some great reputation across different social media channels, be it Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Instagram, Foursquare, Flickr or Yammer. The trick is the Klout score – the higher the better. Klout score (0 to 100) is judged after taking into account the overall social media participation associated with a certain individual, where higher score means more influence and social media authority. Top influential bloggers with high degree of social engagement usually over 80, while 40 is considered an average score.

#4 BuzzStream

BuzzStream lets you manage two most important things – developing relationships and link building. The core focus is on “word-of-mouth marketing campaigns that create buzz, build links, and increase traffic to your website by helping you “be found” via inbound marketing channels.” Managing relationships couldn’t have been easier with BuzzStream, whose dashboard is replete with an email client and a platform to get a complete history of previous conversations. This feature alone is immensely helpful in engaging bloggers and developing a mutually fruitful bond with them.

It must be noted that social media tools alone can’t assure a successful blogger outreach, which is why one must devise a comprehensively planned strategy to engage and convert. Influential bloggers are being bombarded with both solicited and unsolicited guest pitches every day, and in order to get their attention one needs to stand out with the right approach.

Author Bio:

Shara Roy is Internet marketing strategist, working at Crocuss. She loves to share her ideas on new technologies related to internet marketing and web development.