Meta Leadership Primer: Social Media Influencers

In case you may not already know, many brands today have moved across the line and are ahead of their competitors because of their understanding of the impact of influence on their customers. It is a lot easier for a person to believe the quality of a product when they are being recommended by someone they have some sort of connection to. This human psychology has led many brands to make use of influencers to market their products.

So, who are Social Media Influencers?

Many people are active users of social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, WhatsApp and many others. We spend most of our time surfing through feeds, reading posts that pop up on our timeline, liking, commenting and even sharing content that we feel is necessary to share so that others will see them as well. Most of the time we come across unique users with posts that have hundreds of thousands of likes, comments, and even shares. We may be compelled to visit their timelines or profiles as the case may be and find out that they have accumulated a large number of followers (audience) let’s say hundreds of thousands or millions of followers. These followers share a lot of things in common, and this unique user represents their commonalities, and as such, they are influenced by the activities, posts, and suggestions of this individual thus, making the user a social media influencer.

While most social media influencers are real-life celebrities, some are not but still have the ability to communicate with a significant number of humanity for free and in real-time.

 

Importance of Social Media Influencers

The use of social media influencers in the domain of digital marketing today because most businesses are harnessing the power of influencer marketing to promote their brands and the reason why companies are making use of influencers is not as farfetched as it may sound.

Audience demographic: Every social media influencer has an audience of specific demographics. What this means is that the followers of any influencer share a lot of things in common and so makes it easier for brands to communicate with those specific audiences without having to look around for them. For example, a social media influencer who is a basketball/soccer star gathers followers who are not only are specific sports fans but most being team loyal as well. Most (over 80% would be male), and this makes it easy for brands like Nike and Men’s Fashion to communicate with these audiences through the influencer. With increased conversion rates and reduced costs over traditional channels of print or TV.

Increased Revenue: As I mentioned earlier, it is more convincing for your potential customer to purchase a product because an influencer recommended it as they share a “Like Me” connection. These influencers have significant influence in the lives of their audiences; Hence them given the term “influencers”. When influencers promote a brand on social media, it brings this brand DIRECTLY to the awareness of their audiences and increases the chances of product, service or sale conversion.

 

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Reputation: Social media influencers are highly respected individuals –influential in their very specific ways. If an influencer promotes your brand, it tells a lot to their followers about your brand. It depicts quality in most cases and commands a certain level of credibility or validation. Let’s look at it this way, Pepsi, for instance, is a big brand that has earned a long-lasting reputation by using influencers for marketing the brand on different platforms including social media. Your business can go a long way in gaining such respect by using the right social media influencers. Exactly how to identify the right social media influencer for your particular offering is beyond the scope of this post.

Leveraging social media influencers for brand marketing can be expensive and time consuming if not gone about intentionally, because most of these influencers know their worth and charge high rewards for their services, but I must assure you that the investment (time and money) is worth it, and you can start small with local influencers to gauge the measured reach and impact before expanding this into one of the pillars marketing strategy.

Have you looked inside of your organization to see who might be an influencer? Your staff have other interests beyond the work they do for you. Of which they could possibly have a following on any given platform that you could leverage for your business goals.

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