Today, influencer marketing is an integral part of digital marketing to get your message to your audience. Many customers, especially in the tech sector, want testimonials from people they trust before purchasing a product.
But how does an organization’s marketing department know which influencers are fantastic thought leaders? Of course, companies like Onalytica can provide such services. But what if you want to save money and develop your expertise in-house? A content research company Social Animal is providing a way to do that with its APIs – and I created a video on how to make the best of its Influencer Search API via the Bubble no-code tool.
Search for Influencers with Social Media and Bubble
To help you find Twitter influencers with just two simple tools, I created a tutorial. Here’s my video on how to find top influencers for your product with the help of Social Animal and Bubble, with a minimum of 10,000 Twitter followers.
Initially, I ran the workflow in Postman, but if you’re comfortable running it in Bubble immediately, read the instructions below.
Finding Influencers
- Create a new app in Bubble and install the API Connector plug-in.
- Get API credentials for Social Animal’s Influencer Search API. You get a 14-day free trial; after which, you’ll have to purchase a subscription.
- Add a new API, give it a name and set authentication as “None or self-handled”. Then add your credentials to the Shared Headers for all calls.
4. Add a new API call, give it a name (e.g. Influencers), and set use as “Action”.
5. Enter “https://api.socialanimal.com/api/v1/influencer/search” as the endpoint into the input field and set it to “POST”.
Then add a header in the call with the key “Content-Type” and value “application/json”.
6. Enter the following JSON data into the “Body” input field:
The “<” and “>” signify the dynamic parameters that we’ll later set in the Bubble workflow. You can enter any value for them in the “Body Parameters” field, as long as you uncheck “Private” opposite each one. You can check “Allow blank” opposite “min_followers” if you don’t want to limit your search to influencers with a minimum number of followers.
7. Click “Initialize Call”. If your call is successful, you’ll see the API call return values. Click “Save”.
8. Return to the “Design” tab in your Bubble application, and create a “Repeating Group” on the page”.
9. Set the data type of the Repeating Group to “Influencers data”
10. Add some text, images, and link elements to the repeating group that showcases the content contained within the “Influencers data” type.
For example, I included the influencer’s “Screen Name”, “Profile Image” via a URL, “Follower’s Count”, “Website”, “Location”, and whether their Twitter profile was verified (“Verified”). You can include others depending on your organization’s needs such as the date when the account was created, time zone, and more.
11. Create two input fields on the page and a button above the repeating group. For this particular example, I named them “Keywords” and “Min Followers”. The content format will be “Text” and “Integer” respectively. I named the button “Search Influencers”.
12. Go to the Workflow tab and create a new workflow for the Search Influencers button. The workflow will include two steps:
- API Action (Social Animal – Influencers)
- Display Data in Repeating Group
For the first step, choose “Social Animal – Influencers” in “Actions” and set up the dynamic values we’ve outlined in the API call like in the screenshot (for min_followers, set the value entered into the Min Followers Input, and for the keyword, set the value entered into the Keywords Input).
For the second step, choose “Display Data in Repeating Group” and enter the data source resulting from Step 1’s data. You can also sort the results shown in the group. I chose to sort by the number of followers, but you can set your parameters.
13. Go back to the design tab and click “Preview” to test your workflow. Enter your keywords and desired minimum number of followers and click “Search Influencers”. I’ve chosen “Electric Vehicles” as my keywords, with 10000 minimum followers, as my example.
14. If you configured the workflow correctly, you should see your influencers, sorted by the number of followers in the repeating group. These are my results:
As you can see, I have a list of top influencers with “Electric Vehicles” in their Twitter bios. You can verify your results by typing a handle name from the list in the far-left column into Twitter. I’m happy to say mine came back as expected.
Conclusion
Social Animal is a simple but powerful tool to have in your hands. With Bubble as a no-code tool, these two apps can help you find influencers for your topic and save time and costs.
Photo credit: The feature image has been taken by Gerd Altmann. The Bubble editor photo has been provided by Bubble for press use. The screenshots have been taken by the author for TechAcute.
