Discover Your Best Influencers

Let’s say your business just released a product and everyone is talking about it on social media. Congratulations! You now have thousands of mentions, posts and tweets. But are you getting the chatter you actually want?

For organizations establishing influencer marketing programs, finding the right influencers to be part of your communication programs is one of the greatest challenges B2B and B2C marketing managers face.

One of the biggest hurdles is determining online sentiment: What is the attitude audiences have about your brand across the web? A simple tally of your brand mentions only tells you how much people are talking about you online. Investigating who is influencing the dialogue and where the amplification happens is equally important. How else do you know if your mentions are going to foster positivity — or fester negativity?

FACT: Sixty-one percent of consumer shoppers confirm that their purchase decisions are impacted by online influencers who speak about a brand or a product.

FACT: Seventy percent of B2B professionals confirm that influencer marketing helps to improve brand awareness and reputation. Fifty-six percent say that it helps to generate new leads, too.

Discovering your champions

The key is attracting influencers who have an existing affinity for your brand to become natural advocates for your business. An organization’s greatest promoters may not even follow you! Instead, they may mention your brands, products and even your competition. Such dialogue can then be collected, analyzed and monitored for sentiment and perceptions, giving you insights gained to help orient your marketing efforts to influencers that matter most.

At Metric Centric, our analysts frequently engage with businesses and agencies that need to discover influencers through the examination of conversational data analytics. Once we understand why a client needs influencers and what their expectations are, we follow a five-step process to support their search for the right influencers:

• STEP 1: Define the type of influencer that has (or could have) affinity toward the business brand or product;
• STEP 2: Design a social listening program to identify relevant influencers;
• STEP 3: Assist our client when informing influencers using proper messaging points;
• STEP 4: Work with our client to examine influencer participation and engagement;
• STEP 5: And continuously monitor influencer marketing programs for ongoing success.

Each step is vital for long-term achievement. But that first step — defining the type of influencer — is essential for any influencer marketing program to succeed. As long as you know what to look for, real influencers are easy to spot and fake influencers can be avoided.

Here’s where we get out our calculators

A metric we use to identify the best influencers is reach amplification rates. Avinash Kaushik, a digital marketing evangelist at Google, explains amplification as “the rate at which your followers take your content and share it through their networks.” In short, the higher an influencer’s amplification rate is, the more engaged their followers may be with them around certain topics – and that’s good intelligence to have as you expand the reach of your brand, your products, or your services.

Here’s where the math comes in. We use a simple calculation to determine reach amplification: The number of an influencer’s posts divided by the total number of followers that engage with that influencer’s content. Multiply that number by 100, and voila! You’ve got yourself an amplification rate.

Whether you like it or not, people are talking about your business and your products online. That’s why you need to be on top of those conversations to properly listen, respond and engage your audience.

If you’re planning to develop, grow or rebuild your influencer marketing programs, let’s talk about how our social listening and conversational analytic programs can help you.