In social media marketing, it’s all about influence

Who are the social influencers in your industry? If you don’t know, it’s about time to figure it out. Social influencers have the power to make or break your products and elevate or scuff your brand in social media. In certain industries, these peer influencers in social media are the new gatekeepers of what’s cool and what’s not. In order to reach these influencers, you need to first identify them.

A little more about influencers according to a recent blog post by Forrester on Peer Influence Analysis:

While just 16% of the US population, Mass Influencers are responsible for 80% of the influence impressions and posts about products and services in social channels.

This means that the actions of a minority of participants in social media are able to dictate and influence a vast majority of the buzz surrounding a product, brand, or service. It is estimated that over 500 billion consumer-generated impressions were made about products or services in 2009 and that number is constantly growing. The importance of figuring out who your influencers are has never been more important, but the question is ‘how do I find them?’

Identifying Influencers

With sources ranging from Twitter and Facebook to blogs and forums, you need to be listening for your brand or products online. Your consumers are out there talking, and you need to be able to do more than just gather mentions. This requires a new way of thinking about ‘social media listening’ and a social media intelligence solution to provide the results. To accurately understand who your influencers are, you need to both identify those with influential followings as well as understand the demographics of those individuals. Gender, age, and location are extremely important when determining who the mass influencers for your brand or product are.

Social media has made ordinary people into very influential word-of-mouth marketers. Since we have gone from informal closed conversations to public on-the-record group discussions about products, word-of-mouth marketing is now measurable. The more these mass influencers talk, the more we learn about who they are and how to reach them.