In episode 157 of our podcast, I chat with Tessa Kriesel from Devocate. Tessa has taken her experience of development and passion for connecting people to her new business. 

Developer Influencers

We chat about:

• What makes a developer influencer
• Campaigns and what they might look like
• How to grow as a developer influencer
• What social platform is best for developers
• The importance of authenticity

The term influencer brings to mind many things. There is always a lot of talk around it. But I ask Tessa what make a developer influencer different.

Tess shares this unique approach and gives us some great examples of campaigns and that makes it easier to understand. She also shares tips on what a developer can do now to make themselves a potential influencer. 

We look at the mistakes companies make when starting to bring in influenceRs and how they can avoid them. Tessa gives us what she has found to be the better social platform for developers as well.

This just touches the tip of the iceberg as Tessa dives into this much deeper and we go off in several different directions to encapsulate exactly what a developer influencer means to potential companies out there. It’s far from the celebrity influencers we have become so tired of.

If you are a developer looking at expanding your brand and authority, this is a must-listen to show.

Tips and Insights from Tessa

The developer influencer

Developers are not the ones who want to have those conversations with sales reps. It’s going to be a higher level executive at that company. It’s going to be the director of technology or the CTO. But they have opinions. They have ideas, they’ve got things they care about, they’ve got tools they want to use. They also have products they prefer. So the developer influencer angle is really more about that authentic relationship.

I think most developers will kind of cringe and think I’m not an influencer, nor do I want to be an influencer. It’s not necessarily that they’re the influencers that we all envision on Instagram. Those people who have thousands and thousands of followers and they’re making really inauthentic posts. You have thousands of followers, you’re getting paid to do this. It’s more about taking the influencers that really love a specific product.

Campaigns

I think one campaign could be as simple as a company is releasing a new feature and they’re really excited about it. They want word- of-mouth to spread. They want people to test out this new feature. Maybe it’s a new add-on revenue stream for them. It could just be something as simple as, will you retweet this for us, we are announcing our new feature. We’d love for you to get this to your audience as well.

Maybe a case study. They’ve already used it on a project and can talk about that case study, share details about that.

Each different campaign could also have its own correlating reward. If you’re asking someone to retweet something, it could be something as simple as a few points for this task and then eventually you can incur points to purchase or redeem for some really cool items.

Customer engagement

It’s truly about getting to know your customers. I think the big angle is that there are so many product companies that are wildly successful and that’s awesome. But just think about that success and how they could possibly double or triple that if they started to just engage with their customers. Because not only are you going to get to know them on a more personal level, it’s going to have them invest even deeper in your product.

Getting to know your customers is really going to drive those campaigns and drive what that reward system looks like, but also it’s going to help you make your product a hundred times better.

Becoming a developer influencer

Your influence about customer advocacy needs to be authentic. It needs to be you saying exactly how you feel and exactly the things that you stand behind. So stay authentic no matter what.

I don’t care if you have a hundred followers or you have 100,000 followers. It’s more about that score. People call it a variety of different things, but when you post something, do your followers listen to you? I don’t have tons of followers, but when I do post, the people who are my followers engage with my posts most of the time. So that is a much better following than if you have thousands of followers who don’t engage with you. You want those followers who actually care about who you are, about what you do. So if you’re a developer with other developer followers, that’s going to be more successful than just having those high numbers.

Mistakes companies make with influencers

They’re thinking numbers. I think most of the time when I have these conversations, they want to find someone who has thousands and thousands of followers, or billions of followers. Those aren’t your people. The people that really truly matter are the ones who are your happiest customers.

How can I get those passive customers to be our promoters? Those promoters are the ones who are going to stick out to you. They are the ones who love your product. They want to tell people about your product. I say focus on those people. Focus on the people that already love your product.

Where developers hang out on social

I would say by far, Twitter. So when I’m talking to my clients, I tell them to put most of their eggs in the Twitter basket because that’s going to be where most of the developers are spending their time. But this is also product- and company-specific and customer-specific. Right? So when you think about who are your influencers, what are they doing? Where are they spending their time?

Two final tips

Speaker 2: (30:21)
The first one is to start collecting net promoter scores. The second one is start engaging with 10 new customers a month. That’s pretty easy to do. That’s two to three customers a week. All you have to do is spend a half an hour with them and find out what made them make that decision. Why did they buy your product? What problem are they solving? What problem is your product helping them accomplish or getting them to that goal.

Where to find Tessa

• Devocate
• On Twitter @Devocate_
• Tessa on Twitter @tessak22

Resources

• What is a Net Promoter Score?

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