Influencers in the Making: Influencer Discovery Awaits

I was sitting in a coffee shop with my girlfriend, Callie, trying to write, when she looked up from her computer and said, “There’s something going on with your story.” Callie is also a writer, and she used to work in publishing, so she was much more connected to the literary Internet than I was. She seemed slightly unnerved. “It’s just Twitter,” I said, with the smug dismissiveness of a thirtysomething late millennial who had tweeted a grand total of twelve times in her life. Callie tried to explain what was happening; I failed to understand. Then I went home, fired up Twitter, and saw that I had a bunch of notifications from strangers. I was reading through them when my mom called about something unrelated. I tried to explain to her what was happening, and then she went online herself and, at some point, she said, “Oh, my God, Kristen, someone Barack Obama follows just retweeted your story.” Then she burst into tears.

I remember loving the story when I read it and immediately looking up Roupenian on Twitter that December day. I think she had somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 followers, and she didn’t tweet much. She now has 10.3K followers.
My best friend’s niece, Victoria Baamonde, is currently a weekly fixture on CBS - she’s a contestant on “Survivor: Edge of Extinction,” which was recorded last summer, and is airing now, every Wednesday night. Host Jeff Probst coined the hashtag #planetvictoria before the show even started; he was describing how Victoria marches to her own beat. In the most-recently aired episode, Victoria was instrumental in a blindside vote-out of a rival; she winked at her co-conspirators and the wink became a meme. Victoria was indifferent to Twitter, but is now active, and has gained 3,330 followers since the show's premiere. Each week, as she survives further and gets more screen time, the tally grows.

Our new Influencer Discovery tool allows you to search through our entire Influencer database. You can easily find and select Influencers based on any specific criteria… like, say, audience size, affinity, post content, and lots more.

I’m so excited to see where Victoria’s newfound media interest will take her. And if she and Kristen Roupenian will become sought-after influencers…