How to use Influencer marketing in open-source

I have never understood influencer marketing before - especially not for tech.

Why in the world a developer be influenced by anything to buy something? (emotional purchase).

Well, the answer is - it’s complicated.

I will mostly talk about Twitter, but you can reflect on it on social media.

There is a bunch of influencers for tech that address different kinds of audiences.

But for me, I see mainly two types (that you can use):

• Sophisticated personas - will attract both juniors and seniors

• Scale personas - will attract mostly children.

The Sophisticated personas

When they tweet about you - you will get many users driving to your website. Furthermore, you will attract big companies - credibility is the key here.

The main problem here is that you can’t pay them - probably will not even be able to reach them (trust me, I have tried.)

But I have realized they will tweet about your website if you use their technology and promote their agendas.

Guillermo Rauch - Vercel CEO, and Steven Tey tweet a lot about projects made with Next.JS / hosted on Vercel.

You don’t have to build your website with NextJS. You can make a side project with Next.JS that is a “by-product” of your website.

For example:

• https://www.hacksquad.dev

• https://notifications.directory

They even like to promote that kind of project better than a company website (make sure you leave the “Vercel” in the domain)

Let’s move on to something you can control

The Scale personas

I have been working with many scale personas.

Those are personas that have grown their account with tricks such as “Twitter Thread,” “Listicles” - and a lot of ChatGPT lately 😅

Usually, those kinds of personas have a very high engagement - they have learned the Twitter algorithm and constantly adapt to it.

They tend to attract many juniors and non-code accounts.

THEY RARELY CONVERT ANY USER IN DIRECT MARKETING

But they are still instrumental. Here is how we have used them for Novu.

• We promoted Hackathons when the main goal was to get Demos.

• We asked them for a star on GitHub to become trending - we got thousands of stars from one tweet.

• We sent their audience to our “Growth” articles for more views and engagement.

A typical Novu week

Let me describe a typical week of becoming trending on GitHub.

• We released an article on DEV.to with a call to action to give us a star

• We sent traffic from Reddit to DEV.to to make the article trending on the platform.

• We waited two days to become trending.

• We used an influencer to write about Novu and get stars.

• Now we have stars from at least two traffic sources.

• We become trending on GitHub.

I recommend using an influencer between 1-2 times as you will see fewer stars each time (since most of their audience) will be exposed to it.

Their price vary (and are highly negotiable) between $100 to £500

Do you want to be connected with some of those influencers? Just reply to this email.

Are you an influencer that wants to get customers? I have a high demand from various companies. Just reply to this email.

Until Next time!n