The Role of Influencers in Social Media Campaigns

Leveraging research and conceptual models in underpinning an approach to social media campaigns is absolutely critical. I content social marketers should be using specific criteria to determine the extent and type of influencer. I use a set of criteria, based on the Work From Home of Keller and Berry * as they provided a simple set of factors in determining a social media influencer. Their five criteria are:

– Activists: influencers get involved, with their communities, political movements, charities and so on.

– Connected: influencers have large social networks

– Impact: influencers are looked up to and are trusted by others

– Active minds: influencers have multiple and diverse interests

– Trendsetters: influencers tend to be early adopters (or leavers) in markets

I found that these five criteria could be applied in a Chinese context and leveraging a simple checklist helped us rank and grade the value of an influence in a particular campaign.

Another interesting framework to consider is based on the Work From Home of Brown & Hayes. They provide insights into various types of influencers and the affect they have on the decision making process. It is an interesting idea that influencers have different roles at different times in a campaign.

Combining these two frameworks (Keller & Berry and Brown & Hayes) provides means to select influencers then class them into types of influencers. So what? Many might think that this is too academic and surely just getting influences can be done by doing a Twitter rank or Digg rank. But I would argue that you should not simply determine who but what and why particular people are used to ‘influence’ the wider online community.

My hope is that this post gives you a chance to reflect on what you are doing when putting a social media campaign together (particularly if you are planning to use influencers). But on a final thought, not all campaigns will benefit with using influencers. In some extremely high-involvement categories, this may Work From Home. But in low-involvement categories, I believe the approach is limited.

* Keller, Ed and Berry, Jon. The Influentials, Free Press, 2003

* Brown, Duncan and Hayes, Nick. Influencer Marketing: Who really influences your customers?, Butterworth-Heinemann, 2008