Social Marketing: Hybrid Approach to Identifying Targeted Influencers

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With any social marketing strategy influencer engagement and identification usually ends up at the top of the list. If you’re unfamiliar with influencer marketing  it’s simply the act of targeting specific key individuals rather than the target a market as a whole. The individuals that are targeted have a strong influence over potential buyers in their niche.

Influencers may be potential buyers themselves, or they may be third parties. These third parties exist either in the supply chain (retailers, manufacturers, etc.) or may be so-called value-added influencers (such as journalists, academics, industry analysts, professional advisers, and so on). Source :Brown, Duncan and Hayes, Nick. Influencer Marketing: Who really influences your customers?, Butterworth-Heinemann, 2008

Before I dive into how to identify influencers in your target market you need to understand the different types of influencers that are out there.

Top influencers

• These influencers are pros, they are limited in numbers but most of all they are usually very hard to build relationships with unless you have an amazing product or willing to fork up a nice sum of cash. They do hold an amazing amount of power and can drive sales, traffic to a website that is why a lot of people focus on them or are willing to pay money to have them talk about their product

Influencer Multipliers and Action Consumers

• This group of influencers are the sweet spot for most social marketers even though their mostly overlooked. These are semi pro bloggers, engaged enthusiast and very niche online community leaders. The beautiful thing about these people is that they can drive interest in their range of influence, they’re looking to make connections, if they charge its usually not that much and they’ll give you attention more than a major influencer ever will.

Casual Users

• This group of people usually curate content and ideas from the other groups above.

Social media requires solutions that enable analytics on huge volumes of conversations while simultaneously gaining quick, deep understanding of voice-of-consumer to better inform strategic goals and plans. Most importantly you need to identify the right kind of influencers for your social marketing strategy and these usually are (influential multipliers and action consumers). As of right now there are Three ways to go about identifying influencers in your target market:

Paid Services:

• Pros
  • Easy to use
  • Usually they crawl the entire social web (Facebook, Twitter, blogs, forums and Q&A sites)
  • Top tools include Radian6, Sysomos and SM2
• Cons
  • Usually will cost a significant amount of money $500+ a month
  • Most tools focus simply on monitoring social media conversations, utilizing rudimentary keyword/Boolean search techniques.
    • This leads into that these tools can easily identify top influencers (that you probably already know) and can miss out on the influential multipliers and action consumers that were you are more likely to have better success creating relationships with them.

Free Services:

• Pros
  • Easy to use
  • no costs involved
  • Top tools for finding influencers – Twibes, Regator, Rap Leaf and Klout.
• Cons
  • Usually they don’t search the entire social web, you have to use different tools to look at Facebook, Twitter, blog and forum influencers
  • They don’t usually have a refined/advanced search – extremely dependent on keywords
  • Accuracy and stats usually vary from one tool to another – you don’t know if they’re correct or not
  • Usually miss out on influential multipliers and action consumers

Manual Search:

• Pros
  • human’s can discern sarcasm, sentiment, tone and real influence
• Cons
  • Persona needs to have experience doing this
  • Extremely time consumer
  • And can be very costly if you need to hire an external professional to do the research

Hybrid Approach

Now that you know the differences between social monitoring tools and the different types of influences that exist I’m going to run through Hybrid approach using manual search and free services. There are many different tactics that you can use but if you’re limited on budget this is a great way to identify targeted influencers in your market.

Step 1

To start things off identify the market that you’re looking for influencer, for this example I’m going to use the mobile tagging or action code industry. Once you have your market identified go to SlideShare and search for PowerPoint presentations on your topic of interest. Below you’ll see that I found a recent slide show that has received some great numbers since it launched.

Most peoples intuition would be to search through the people who are making comments or check out the Facebook and Twitter posts but there’s another section that is often overlooked that has amazing value for finding influencers. If you scroll down the SlideShare page you’ll see an “About This Presentation” section where they show all the different types of view that the presentation has received. If you scroll a little further you’ll notice “Embedded View” headline and underneath it URLs for different websites and blogs that have embedded the presentation into their site. If you click on the litte blue “more” button it will expand the list so you can see every blog or website that has embedded the SlideShare. This is extremely valuable because you can instantly create a list of targeted influencers in the space because they’ve already shown interest in the space since they’ve embedded the SlideShare into their site. It also shows how many views each blog or website received on the page that they embedded the PowerPoint presentation.

Step 2

Create an excel sheet with the following fields and copy and paste the URLs into it.

• Use the following tool to fill out each field
• Site Name/URL – This came from SlideShare
• Contact Name/Info – Search the site (the about page is always a great place to start
• Facebook/Twitter – Most sites have their Facebook and Twitter accounts on their main page
• Traffic – Use Compete or Alexa
• Klout Score – Use Klout it’s the best free influence measuring tool
• Influenced by – In their clout score you’ll see who influences them (usually 5 listed) add these people in
• Notes/Last Contact – Make sure you keep track when you reach out to the influencer on what you talked about and when

If you step and repeat for every site or at least the top viewed sites that slide share has shown you, you’ll have a good idea of the influential landscape of the marketing you’re interested in. Use the excel sheet to keep track of how often and what you talk about with influencers. Once you’ve gone through the slide share use the “influenced by” field to help build a more in-depth list and create new relationships.

I hope this helps and if you have any questions about this process leave me a comment. I’ll update this post with other engagement tactics in the future.

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