January 22, 2018 3:28 pm
Published by Cara Shepherd
Influencers all possess multiple dimensions to their content; it’s what makes content unique. For each specific brand or campaign, taking a closer look at an influencers tone, personality, and professionalism will make the difference between mediocre and excellent results. To help understand the dimensions of our influencers, we apply a considerable amount computing power to the various elements that make up an influencer profile. These figures can then be measured and compared between influencers.
These tangible, data driven metrics make the job easier for marketers, helping them find their perfect match. This also rewards influencers with work for creating great content, managing themselves professionally, and delivering value to marketers.
Here are the four key themes that we look at when ranking influencers in our search results, ultimately helping marketers in their identification process:
Persona – The personality, biography, and location of the influencer
Audience – The age, gender, and location of their followers and fans across various media channels
Content – The type, tone, and performance of content, measured by the engagement rate of their audience, relative to similar influencers
Work ethic – The reviews from brands and agencies that have worked with the influencer in the past, together with their profile completeness and typical response time to requests
To get a better picture of this, let’s have a look at what some basic examples of these dimensions would look like and how you can use them.
Persona
Each influencer has their own identity, biography and digital track record. Webfluential aggregates content from all of the influencer’s linked channels, and With Watson, generates a personality sunburst that gives us a visual representation of their best attributes.
It also helps us understand what kind of consumer each influencer is – Are they interested in owning a car? What type of music and movies do they like? It even tells us about other consumer behaviors like shopping online and using a credit card.
Audience
The audience that follows, reads and engages with an influencer is important to marketers. Webfluential looks at the age, gender and location of an influencer’s audience. Further, we can understand their behaviors like their engagement, time spent on websites and repeat visits to an influencer’s blog.
This tells us more about the relationship between an influencer and their audience, it gives us an idea of the level of trust that they have built up, which in turn shows us who has the key to a specific audience.
From there we can easily identify those influencers who are in the best position to work with a brand looking to drive awareness and credibility with a particular audience.
Content
The passion of an influencer is captured in their content. Their writing, their videos, and their images are all expressions of their opinions and are held in high regard by their followers. Webfluential analyses the impact of content on an audience and compares this to the content of similar audiences, as well as the historical performance of an influencer’s content. This helps us to spot trends over time like the newest rising stars, the most consistent content creators and the latest “trending posts” and helps match them to the brands working with influencers.
Work Ethic
Influencers working with brands take their jobs seriously. Webfluential filters out the cream and minimizes time that would be lost trying to engage with influencers who aren’t really into it. To achieve this we look at several dimensions, but the result mainly hinges on the ratings they’ve earned from previous work done. The more good work influencers do, the easier it is for a brand to trust them, so we encourage influencers to do their bookings on Webfluential and gain positive reviews and a track record.
Additionally, we look at their profile completeness, their consistency in keeping their account up to date, and of course, how much time it takes them to reply to a marketer request.
Summary
In the same way that Google manages its search results dynamically through their Page Rank algorithm, which changes over time, we’ll keep adding insights and changing up the weighting so that our search benefits our platform for both influencers, the best of which get surfaced first, and for marketers, so that they can succeed when choosing the right influencers.
*This post was written by Wati Mbewu
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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.
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