Author Archives for Murray Legg

About Murray Legg

Murray Legg is an active digital entrepreneur and holds a Ph.D in engineering. He is the strategy lead for Webfluential.

How to come up on top of the search results for marketers

March 7, 2018 2:35 pm Published by Murray Legg

As an influencer, it matters to you how you market and monetize yourself. You’ve worked hard to create engaging content and grow your audience base. People trust the way you tell stories, including marketers wanting you to include their brands as part of the stories you share. This year, we’ve rebuilt our influencer dimensions which we covered in this blog post. We’re the only influencer marketing platform that takes a deep scientific look at your IBM Watson personality insights and consumer tendencies, your audience categories and the performance of your content, as well as your work ethic and feeds that into an influencer search engine.

Influencer search results are important to influencers and marketers

This week we released a new version of our influencer search engine to the 8,500 brands and marketers that use our software to run their influencer campaigns. It’s a big improvement in helping marketers find the perfect influencers for their work. If you’re up to speed with how our influencer search works, and you do the necessary work to keep your profile updated and active, you’ll be able to rank higher on the influencer search and as a result, win more work. The most asked question by influencers to us is “Why am I not getting any work on Webfluential?” In almost all cases, the influencer hasn’t invested time into setting up their account properly, responding timeously to messages, or preparing their media kit, so they just don’t feature in influencer search results. Further to this, influencers don’t pay Webfluential to do pitch them for work, so we can’t ever be expected to favor one person over another. We rely on maths for this in our influencer search results. What does an influencer search look like? Well, we’ve actually released a public beta of our influencer search here with limited influencer results. For marketers on a Premium account, the influencer search results looks like the image below:

Influencer search results on Webfluential

Just like Coca-Cola, our influencer search algorithm is part of the secret sauce of Webfluential that only two people know about, so we’ll not be able to share just how to get to the top, but here are a few key ingredients for influencers to follow. Follow us on Twitter and keep your eyes open for some other secret reveals inside your influencer account.

Top tips for influencers to increase influencer search rankings

Update your search tags on your profile and make sure your selected categories accurately describe the content you produce
Make sure your email address and telephone number are up to date - we track all outgoing communications for delivery, opens and clicks which informs the description of “Likely to respond within X hours”
Create your IBM Watson personality insights. You can include those on your media kit. Here’s a blog post all about that.
Make sure you have a compelling and completed media kit. If you can take the time to create a personalized showcase of your content, brands are more likely to engage with you. Secret tip - add previous brand work you’ve done. That tells us (and marketers) a lot about you! Here's an example media kit reference
Share your media kit on Facebook, Twitter and include it on LinkedIn. We track how interested marketers are in you by viewing your media kit. You, too, can track this inside your dashboard.

Over time, we’ll include more dimensions as they become important to brands. We’ll keep you updated. In the meanwhile, hope to see you at the top of our influencer search results!

Measuring the Efficacy of Influencers

December 11, 2017 6:18 pm Published by Murray Legg

Once influencer search and collaboration are completed, the third and probably most important, pillar in any influencer marketing effort is measurement & reporting. We have written previously about a strategy to make the most of micro and macro influencers in a "rocks and pebbles" approach, and saw today a very well constructed analysis of L2 Insights' measurement of the efficacy of influencers. You can read the article in full here, but we've pasted below some of the key insights for your benefit. We set out to determine the average lift in engagement associated with brand mentions of influencers of 10 different community sizes, ranging from fewer than 20,000 followers to over 7 million. Our sample includes 5,038 influencers partnered with 875 brands across 16 sectors. Methodology: Our first task was to decide which influencers to study. We started at the brand level, cultivating a list of 875 brands balanced across sectors, and crawled these brands’ Instagram pages for mentions of other handles. Any handle that received more than one mention by the brand was flagged as an Influencer handle. The follower counts of these handles were collected, and all posts mentioning each handle were grouped. Across the 5,038 handles mentioned, we calculated the average lift in engagement afforded by mentions of each influencer as follows: Further analysis confirms that increased follower counts are perceived as more valuable by advertisers. Yet an overlay of all three data sets paints a clear picture of questionable efficiency in the influencer market. Many brands partner with middling influencers at middling prices in exchange for inefficiently low lifts in follower interactions. One can only wonder if these murky waters are in part muddied by cases of fraudulent influencer follower counts, resulting in low engagement in spite of large community sizes. Key takeaways: Beware the middle ground. Micro and macro-influencers are associated with the highest lifts in engagement, while influencers with medium-sized followings produce relatively feeble results despite the relative expense incurred by working with them.

Influence on Instagram

November 20, 2017 8:02 am Published by Murray Legg

2018 has seen a huge rise in brands embracing influencer marketing on Instagram and YouTube. We recently came across this infographic that details some of the trends and growth areas that will continue into 2018. It comes courtesy of X-cart, an ecommerce technology provider that a number of our customers use. These same customers help grow awareness and authenticity through influencers for the products that they're selling in new markets. Register as a marketer to start searching for influencers to work with you today.

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