Influencer Gear

If you are an influencer, you’re probably looking for a comprehensive list of essential equipment.

As an influencer, your goal is to make an impact on your audience’s life.

Having the right tools and software helps you do that effectively.

Quick list of the gear influencers need.

Here, we’ll tell you about the essential equipment influencers need.

Let’s get into it.

Best Essential Equipment Influencers Need

1. Laptop

Essential Equipment - Laptop

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You can’t be an online influencer without owning a laptop. While you shouldn’t get a cheap, ineffective one, there is no need to pay through the nose either.

Gone are the days when you had to spend $1000 to own a decent laptop.

Nowadays, a $300-laptop usually offers everything you’d need as an influencer. At least at the beginning of your influencer career.

A laptop is a crucial piece of equipment for an influencer because you’d need to connect with your audience and produce, edit, and publish content regularly.

So, which features should your laptop have?

  • RAM : An 8 GB RAM would be enough in most cases. Except, of course, if you are going to make your laptop perform information-intensive tasks like video editing and graphics designing.
  • Processor: A Core i5 would almost always be enough.
  • Hard Disk Space: This depends mainly on your requirements. If you don’t have cloud storage or want to store a lot of heavy files, you might want to go with at least a 1TB hard disk space. Even better, if it's an SSD.
  • Screen Size: The screen size depends on your preference. You want to have a balance between size and portability.
  • Battery Timing: If you work outdoors or don’t have a socket available all the time, your laptop should have enough juice to get you through the day.

We recommend the Google Chromebook With Touchscreen if you are starting as influencer but I personally like and use the Dell XPS 13.

We also have a full article on the best laptop for influencers in case you want to check out more options.

2. High-Quality Camera

Sony A7III Best For Instagram

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An influencer’s equipment list wouldn’t be complete without a high-quality digital camera.

If you are a travel influencer, you need a portable camera with decent specifications. You may have to travel places to create content for your social media followers.

Action cameras are normally more suitable as they are designed to capture scenes in motion and are compact enough to carry around with ease.

You might think that your phone camera can take good enough pictures and that you don’t need a dedicated camera.

And that is true in most cases, but, an action camera can help you capture much more details in your pictures and videos, which would eventually help you attract more people to your profile.

Our preferred camera is the Sony A7III but here is a list of the best cameras for Instagram for more recommendations.

3. Microphone

Essential Equipment - Mic

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If you intend to produce videos, podcasts or go live on Instagram to influence your audience, a good quality microphone is a must-have.

You won’t want to attract your target audience only to push them away with bad audio, right? You also don’t want to make your listeners work hard to understand the audio in your videos.

To make your audio flawless, you want to have a mic that offers noise cancellation. This way, you won’t have to worry about the surrounding noises distracting the listeners.

A good quality mic doesn’t have to be ridiculously expensive though. You can get it at around $50 on Amazon.

We like the Comica CVM-WM100 but read our article on the best mics for vlogging and Instagram videos for more options.

4. Good Phone

Essential Equipment - Phone

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This is one of the most obvious ones; as an influencer, you need to be active on all social media platforms (or the most popular ones at least).

While you can use your laptop or computer to keep in touch with your followers, a phone is a much easier gadget to use on the go.

To make sure you don’t miss out on any communication opportunity, you need a good quality phone connected to the internet all the time.

Moreover, you might also want to have a decent camera on your phone. It’s important because there can be times when you can’t use a digital camera.

And, if you are a travel influencer or create content outdoors, you’ll also be needing a waterproof pouch for your phone.

Any high-end phone like the newest iPhone or Samsung Galaxy would do a perfect job but as long as it is a relatively new one you will be okay.

5. Tripod

Essential Equipment - Tripod

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While a tripod isn’t an absolute necessity, it can prove to be pretty effective at minimizing camera shake and improving your shots.

Tripods allow you to capture stable and smooth videos of yourself.

Not everyone can afford to hire a professional, so you need to have a good tripod at your disposal all the time.

To make your life easier, the Joby Gorillapod might be all you need but we have a full article on the best tripods for vlogging.

6. Ring Light

Essential Equipment - Ring Light

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If you want to become a successful influencer on platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, a ring light is a must for you.

Natural light won’t be enough in a lot of cases. With a ring light having your back, you won’t have to search for light to shoot a video.

But, that’s not all. A good ring light can also hide any blemishes that you might have on your face by reducing the shadows.

What’s more, it also illuminates both sides of your face with equal light.

If you’ve ever seen an influencer with a white round reflection in their eyes, that’s a ring light working its magic on the opposite side.

Here is something interesting: You can even set up a ring light on your phone’s camera.

So, if you think your phone’s camera is good enough, consider getting a phone selfie ring light as well.

But if you are shooting with a high quality camera, it will also enhance your content and ease up the editing part.

Overall, a ring light will improve the quality of your content and make it more professional.

Here is a list of the best ring lights or you can just get the Neewer Advanced LED.

7. Portable Charger

Essential Equipment - Power Bank

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A portable charger is one of the essential equipment you might not think is so important to have until you actually need it.

Power banks that you can connect with all kinds of gadgets. From your mobile phone, digital camera, and more.

It’s an important addition to your equipment’s list because you won’t find where to plug your devices all the time.

With a portable charger having your back, you can work without worrying about draining your gadgets’ batteries.

I personally use an Anker PowerCore 26800 but there are many options in the market for you to choose from.

8. Editing Apps

Your camera might be able to shoot exceptional photos and videos, but it won’t let you edit them.

Editing apps let you add an extra flair to your content, making them stand out and grab the attention of your followers.

Apps like Adobe Photoshop for photos and Camtasia for videos can even make your dull media exciting.

Photoshop might be a stretch if you don’t require heavy image editing.

If you want basic and simple image editing features, consider Snapseed. The app was developed by Google and offers features like white balance, filters, curves, and more.

Snapseed also lets you:

  • Add text and bokeh to your images
  • Crop and rotate them
  • Add a frame

9. Canva

Canva has taken the graphic design industry by storm and is continuously evolving.

The best thing is, their free version is great to create all types of social media designs.

Of course, it does have a paid plan with even more features, but the free version is good enough for most users.

You can even download Canva’s mobile app and create your designs there, so it is pretty convenient.

If you already have a team, it also lets you collaborate with them within the app.

Another stand-out advantage of Canva is that you can easily create a pretty cool media kit on it.

Media kit’s are a set of promotional documents that showcases your core values, metrics, who you are, and anything else you want.

As an influencer, having a media kit is a good way to attract and get better clients.

Here is what to include in your media kit:

  • Basic information about yourself
  • Your follower count on social media
  • A summary of your partnerships
  • Your pricing

Once you log into your free Canva account, you can start designing, collaborating, sharing, and publishing your content.

canva editing
Source: Canva.com

The great thing is you don’t have to be a designer to create eye-catching designs on Canva. The online graphic design tool has a lot of pre-designed templates for a variety of industries.

So, all you need to do is select a suitable template and make the necessary changes to fit your aesthetic.

You could, of course, create a design from scratch as well.

canva features
Source: Canva.com

If you are not convinced yet, another great thing to use Canva, you can even schedule your social media posts with the tool, this feature doesn’t come on the free plan though.

You can try the paid version for 30 days for free and see if you need the extra features or the free one is enough for you.

10. Lens Camera Hood

Another way to improve your content created with a high quality camera is getting a lens hood.

If you don’t want stray light to spoil your images with lens flare, you might want to consider buying a one for your camera.

A lens camera hood prevents glares, keeping your images clear.

The lens hood might be different depending on the camera you have so we can’t recommend you one without knowing which model you have.

So do a little bit of research and get a lens hood for your camera.

Your goal as an influencer is to attract more followers and keep them engaged long term.

Achieving that without the right tools will make you work 10 times harder.

You might already have some of these items, for instance, laptop, mobile, and even camera. Which are probably the most expensive of the list and there is probably no need to get new ones.

But, the rest of the tools don’t have to cost much if you want to get them.

Here is a quick recap of the best essential equipment influencers need:

  1. Laptop
  2. Mobile
  3. Mic
  4. Digital camera
  5. Tripod
  6. Ring light
  7. Editing apps
  8. Canva
  9. Lens camera hood
  10. Portable charger

If you are thinking of becoming an influencer or you are already one and want to take your career to the next level you’ll be needing them.

Other Useful Gear

Above we listed the most important gear influencers need but here we wanted to add a few other items that are a little more specific for certain influencers but can still be useful for you too.