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How to Define, Identify and Engage SocialMedia Influencers For Your BrandBy Nate Smitha – April 2, 2014

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Social media influencers are everywhere, and they are talking about your brand. This is whysocial media marketers are constantly buzzing with talk about influencers.

The term “influencer” is used everywhere, and it has become ubiquitous in how we discussvaluable relationships on social.

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The important question though, is what does influencer mean for your brand? Do you knowhow many influencers are talking about your brand? Do you measure how many influentialposts mention your brand each day?

To answer these questions you need to understand who qualifies as an influencer. In thispost we’ll talk about:

How you define influencers.

What you can do to find influencers.

Ways to engage them that can drive value for your business.

Understanding these core concepts will help you develop an influencer campaign that deliversreal results.

1) Defining InfluenceIn order to define influence, it’s best to start by thinking about what aspects give an individualthe power to influence others within their social sphere. The potential to influence can beboiled down to three attributes that are important for marketers to think about.

Those attributes are: Relevance, Reach, and Resonance.

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You may of heard of these before; they’re common criteria used by influencer identificationtools, and Altimeter has referred to them as “The Pillars of Influence”

Lets quickly address each attribute:

Relevance: The creation of content that is relevant to your brand, or relevant to a topicthat’s important to your brand

Reach: The ability to reach an audience that is valuable to your brand

Resonance: The proliferation or engagement with relevant content by an audience that isvaluable to your brand

Think about it, all three qualities are needed for a person to be considered an influencer foryour brand. For example, a celebrity with a huge audience that retweets everything they post,isn’t an influencer for your brand, until they start talking about your brand.

Note: To be an influencer, an individual doesn’t always need to reach a large audience,

sometimes reaching a small niche audience can be just as valuable.

Another thing to keep in mind is that just because someone is influential on one topic, it

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doesn’t mean they’ll be considered influential on another. For example, if someone is aninfluencer on all things automotive, it doesn’t mean that their posts about mobile devices willcarry the same weight.

Within our own personal networks, we recognize what individuals are experts on given topic;the same is true on social media.

2) Deciding How To Engage InfluencersMost social media marketers would say that they’re already engaging with influencers, andwould probably also say they’re seeking to grow that engagement. But “engaging withinfluencers” can mean a lot of different things, because there are many ways to engage withusers in a social space.

Most brands have a process in place to respond to influencers that mention the brand.Simply Measured’s Twitter reports allow you to email alerts to yourself when an influencerwith specific criteria mentions your brand or keyword:

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This is an example of reactive influencer engagement, but it’s also important to establish aplan for proactively engaging influencers.

Does your brand have a plan in place for influencer outreach? Knowing how you wantinfluencers to engage with your brand will be important for how you discover newinfluencers, and identify engagement opportunities.

There are many ways to engage influencers, some examples are to:

Have influencers recognize advances your brand is making in the market

Sway influencers to amplify a single campaign or piece of branded content

Entice influencers to follow your social accounts and regularly champion brand content

Persuade influencers to create original and valuable content for your brand

Encouraging different engagement actions requires identifying influencers with different levelsof brand advocacy. The degree to which someone is likely to advocate your brand can bedetermined by their social behavior (ex. what they post and how they interact with yourbrand, as well as your competitors).

The best and safest way to approach engaging new influencers is to start small, make themaware of product announcements and gauge their response, before calling on them tosupport your content and campaigns.

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3) Identifying Potential InfluencersBefore you can start proactively engaging influencers, you have to identify them first. This iswhere it can get tricky to expand your list of influencers beyond the group of influencers whoalready talking about your brand.

I’ll start by saying that I’ve used a variety of industry leading tools designed specifically forinfluencer identification and while some serious improvements have been made, thesesolutions still have their drawbacks.

The drawbacks result from one major issue; context. Like the technical challenges that plaguesentiment analysis, keyword queries and topical attribution are not yet advanced enough toalways identify relevancy and they rarely provide an accurate picture of brand advocacy.

The result can often be a confusing list of “influencers”, albeit with links to a collection ofsocial profiles, that are mostly on topic but that present only a few immediate engagementopportunities for your brand. For that reason, a human touch is still very much a part of theequation when it comes to identifying and vetting influencers.

That’s why I prefer to dive directly into the data I have, and the data I usually start with isTwitter. Why just Twitter data when I’m looking for social influencers across networks?

I start with Twitter because it’s still the primary channel for syndicating content from a widevariety of sources, especially blogs where more in depth original thought leadership exists.Twitter data is also an exceptionally open and public.

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By setting up a report for a keyword, or collection of keywords, I’m able to find users whoare relevant to a given topic – like the example above. Once I’ve run my report, I can see howfrequently individuals posts are pulled into that topic to determine their degree of relevancefor the topic that I’m interested in.

With relevance established, I can look at how frequently those on topic posts are engagedwith to establish resonance. I can determine whether their content actually gets shared, andby running a report on a group of potential influencers, I can analyze the quality of theirfollower network to make sure they are a valuable audience for my brand.

Audience quality for potential influencers plays into reach. If my topic is niche, I might be finewith accepting influencers with a smaller number of followers. If I’m looking to drive broadawareness, I’m going to be selective and only accept influencers with extremely large followeraudiences.

Since I’m already in the data, I can use keyword filters (for my brand, products and

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Nate SmithaI'm a Marketing Manager at Simply Measured. It's my job to deliver content in a waythat engages and informs social media professionals. My areas of expertise aremarketing automation, conversion and social media analytics.

competitors) within the same dataset to help determine the level of brand advocacy. I canmake informed outreach decisions based on whether individuals are talking just about mybrand, or also discussing my competitors, and whether or not they’re taking sides.

If the devil is in the details and the details are in the data, I think that’s where we as informedmarketers should also be.

Simply Measured’s full suite of analytics put that data at your fingertips, with easy tounderstand and share reports on all your favorite social networks. Get your FREE 14 day trialtoday:

Start Your Trial

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2 Comments Simply Measured

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Tessa • 9 months ago

Great information

www.fineandcountryng.comwww.udookonjo.com

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Blakeley derrick • a year ago

Great post! I especially like your methods for engaging users. I've been diving into social media research lately andthis was very insightful. I'll look more into simply measured to measure social media analytics. Also, if you find thetime, check out my blog and let me know what you think. Thanks for all of the information

http://blakeleyderrick.blogspo... △ ▽

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