Blog post

The rise of the socially powerful

INFLUENCER  [in-floo-uh n-ser]  A person or who has the ability to influence the behaviour or opinions of others through social media.

Monitoring the impact of your influencer campaigns can help you understand your audience, create more effective content to engage and grow your customer base as well as measure the impact they are having on your brand. 

Influencer marketing can yield significant results, particularly on visual-focused platforms such as Instagram, Facebook and YouTube. Since the inception of Instagram in 2010, influencer marketing on the platform has increased exponentially with a growth in social action of 39 per cent in 2018 and a daily active user list of greater than 500 million. Influencer marketing statistics have indicated that 82 per cent of consumers are likely to follow an influencer recommendation and brands have found it to be an effective channel to promote and grow their brands.

At present, more and more brands are including influencer marketing into their overall marketing strategy in order to add value to their brand and better engage with their audience. And although it can be one of the more affordable channels to gain more customers, proper campaign planning is still required to ensure you get the most out of your investment.

According to Influencer Marketing Hub, 10.5 per cent of brands consider the audience relationship to be the most valuable factor when collaborating with an influencer and will more and more brands.

Measuring your success

Measuring the success of your influencers is crucial to understanding if your strategy is working. By utilising social media monitoring, you can monitor information relevant to your business. For example, you might want to track and measure:

• Brand mentions (with or without direct tagging)
• Relevant hashtags (branded and unbranded)
• Mentions of your competitors
• Keywords or trends applicable to your industry

Social media monitoring in our Mediaportal helps you track key social metrics such as brand awareness and social share of voice. With this information, you can use it to test social campaigns, track ROI and build on improving future campaigns.

The level of influence

As an influencer is an extension of your brand, it is important to seek out influencers that align with your brand values and align with your products and services. It’s also important to understand the different levels of influencers as their audience size can determine their engagement rate. Interestingly, once a social influencer reaches a critical mass of followers, audience engagement begins to decrease.

Micro-influencer 

The largest group of influencers are known as micro-influencers – holding approximately 500 – 10,000 followers. Micro-influencers are a good asset to brands as their followers are interested and engaged with the influencer, which in turn, results in a higher engagement rate – approximately 25 – 50 per cent.

Macro-influencer

Macro-influencers have around 5 – 25 per cent engagement per post with audiences ranging from 10,000 – 1 million. Although the engagement rate is lower than micro-influencers, macro-influencers can reach up to 10 times more people. 

Mega-influencer

These influencers could be a social media celebrity.  Although they can have a following of over 1 million, their engagement rate is approximately 2 – 5 per cent. 

Relevance, Reach, Resonance

Although there are many benefits of influencer marketing, influencers can also go awry if they fall out of favour with their audience or unexpectantly decide to move on from a brand. In addition, like any marketing campaign, there is financial risk with influencer marketing. Unlike the world of cost per click, cost per acquisition and cost per thousand, influencers don’t control who sees their content. Instead, influencers rely on ‘organic reach’, meaning their success is based off the algorithms of Instagram, Facebook and YouTube. Brands face the risk of engaging with influencers that do not have the right type of audience or do not continue to mutually align with the brands strategy. 

To mitigate risk when choosing an influencer, an influencer marketing strategy should be created, and the 3 ‘R’s – relevance, reach and resonance are areas that should be a key focus and making your decision.

Relevance

Ensure your influencer is relevant to your brand, one who has expertise and subject-matter credibility, as well as well developed, solid relationships with their followers. Identify the topics of influence that speak to your brand’s target audience and purchasers and determine if their audience is one you would like to engage with. The influencers demographic should also be considered to determine if they are relevant to your brand and will continue to be influential with their audience.

Reach

If you’ve chosen and targeted your influencer correctly, you not only gain the influencer’s responsive audience, you obtain that audience’s audience too. To mitigate damage to your brand reputation and equity, a natural alignment between your influencer and brand messaging is important and it’s crucial your influencer comes across as authentic and real.

Resonance

Seek out and research influencers that will be a good fit to your brand including content quality, reach, engagement, and an alignment of values with your brand

Also ensure all earned media is reviewed and identify which influencers work best for your brand. Repeat this to continue having a strong influencer marketing strategy.

Since influencer marketing is about building strong relationships, a strategy that values a mutually beneficial relationship is important as well as one that aligns with those who are active in the relevant verticals. By tracking conversations that are being had about your brand you can uncover what your audiences actually find engaging and continue providing relevant content tailored to their values, interest and needs.

If you’d like to learn more about social media monitoring or anything media intelligence related, get in touch with us today