October 6, 2014 10:59 am
Published by Murray Legg
The basis of the ecosystem of influencer marketing, or bloggertising, is high quality content. Behind the content, Webfluential algorithms offer a mathematical solution to marketers asking the question about who is right to talk about their brand, given the age group, location and interests of the target audience. Webfluential offers the quantitative reasoning behind the ranking of digital personalities and publishers best suited to influencer marketing campaigns. Still, a qualitative reasoning needs to be taken into account when considering influencers and is the service typically provided by the creative or digital agency working with a brand. The platform will suggest influencers, but the marketer has the ultimate say in who is contracted.
One of the most common queries marketers and influencers alike have about influencer marketing and the Webfluential platform is about the methodology that ranks these influencers. This post aims to provide clarity to the question, and earn favour from the truths that mathematical algorithms provide.
In much the same way that search engines don’t reveal their weighting of factors within algorithms, they do give guidance on what affects organic search ranking. We intend to follow the same course of action, by providing guidance on the metrics that affect influence – as far as we are able to calculate it.
The starting point of an analysis of an influencer is their reach. Reach, or unique visitors, followers or fans, is the verified number of people interested in or relying on a social channel for news or information. This audience is interrogated to understand their age demographic, location and interests. Depending on the API, this information is considered in various formats, but is typically the information given to you when looking at your Google analytics.
Once the reach of an influencer has been defined, influence is calculated based on the impact with which that news and information shared with their audience is received. We call this the “audience impact” and is comprised of the relevance and resonance of content that an influencer shares. A large, unengaged audience does not make for an influential digital personality.
Relevance is the measure of how engaged the audience is with content shared by an influencer. On Twitter, it’s the percentage of favourites and @replies relative to the audience size. On a blog, it’s the ratio of new to returning monthly unique visitors, rate of change of time on site and location and interest group demographic change.
Resonance is the ability of content to go viral – or be shared with audiences outside of the immediate audience following an influencer. Retweets and subsequent favourites; high growth in new unique visitors and keeping to the audience demographic and interest group, just growing in scale, are metrics used to calculate resonance. Facebook offers a page impressions versus page impressions (viral) metric that is a great measure of this – which you can see here.
On Webfluential, algorithms run every hour to rescore influencers across reach, resonance and relevance. It’s a process of relativity, where everyone on the platform is scored relative to each other, and ranked accordingly. As the social platforms work to share further insights through their APIs, we will use these to further qualify our calculations. What this does mean, for influencers and marketers, is that the influence score is something that is fluid, and changing on a month to month basis. This encourages influencers to maintain engaged and active profiles, and that the influencers selected for a campaign offer the best value to the marketer at that point in time.
Image credits: http://zachbussey.com/
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September 30, 2014 9:35 am
Published by Murray Legg
The reality of a digital path to purchase is covered in three steps, illustrated in the image below. Create Awareness > Encourage Consideration > Acquire Customer. It is evident that a brand can influence a consumer on this purchasing journey, and so influencer marketing was born.
Research by Google and SocialTimes is indicating a significant trend towards online research and peer endorsement of a brand or product before purchase. Brands can ensure that they have their products and offerings discussed not just on their own websites, but on influential blogs and social channels by making use of influencer marketing campaigns.
For a recent study on how Smirnoff got this right, read our recent blog post here.
Webfluential scores influencers across three metrics – reach, resonance and relevance. The reach, or audience size, only makes sense if the impact of an influencer’s content is engaging (relevance) and is shared with additional audiences (resonance). Algorithms calculate scores hourly, so when influencers are used for a campaign, their scores are highly reflective of their influence at that time.
We ran an internal report last week on South Africa’s top 15 bloggers – influencers currently offering best value across these metrics:
- Offering an engaged audience (high resonance and relevance)
- Localised, niche audience across age groups and interests
- Best value for money from a cost/post point of view
- Ability to reach across various channels, including their blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube pages
In alphabetical order, these influencers are listed below. Influencers have given consent that their names be shared publicly.
Between 10 and 5 (Arts; Creative; Lifestyle)
Don’t Party (Entertainment; Sports)
Geeks Doing Stuff (Gaming; Technology; Pets)
Getaway Blog (Travel)
Gevaaalik.com (Entertainment; Music; Lifestyle)
JHB Live (Entertainment; Music; Lifestyle)
Just Curious (Celebrity; Lifestyle; Entertainment)
Lazygamer (Gaming; Technology)
Life Is Savage (Entertainment; Celebrities)
Memeburn (Technology; News)
One Large Prawn (Creative; Entertainment; Photography)
The Pretty Blog (Creative; Fashion; Lifestyle)
The Wheel Deal (Motoring)
Travelstart Blog (Travel)
Watkykjy (Entertainment; Music; Lifestyle)
Over 1500 influencers globally are registered on Webfluential, reaching a collective audience of over 25 million people. To create a campaign, simply sign up as a marketer here, and try it out.
Image credits – Kirsty Sharman; Social Times
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September 16, 2014 11:03 am
Published by Kirsty Sharman
Two of the lesser known benefits of influencer marketing—the tactic to have credible digital personalities talk about your brand—are Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and social conversation fire-starters.
Search Engine Optimization is the process of optimizing a website as a means to obtain a high ranking organic placement in search results. Higher placements in search results usually yield more visitors to the website.
There are over 200 factors which are processed by Google to determine where a website appears on its results page following a search query. One of the more important factors is the number and quality of inbound links to the website.
During the month of June, Smirnoff launched their #ExploreTheNight marketing campaign to promote the latest addition to their product offering; Smirnoff Ice Double Black with Guarana. The campaign created awareness around the launch by asking people how they explore the night and encouraging them to add their experiences to the Explore The Night platform using the hashtag #ExploreTheNight.
Webfluential was tasked with enhancing the reach and creating online talkability around the Explore The Night Campaign — using the right influencers in order to get the message to the right audience.
Besides for the obvious short term benefit of talkability, our influencer marketing campaign yielded a long-term benefit which will add value to Explore The Night throughout its duration. The Google search results for the brand initiative illustrate the benefit of SEO – the top five links from the chosen influencers rank higher than the Smirnoff owned website.
The second benefit influencer marketing highlights is the ability to start the conversation tone and sentiment and influence the volume of discussion on social platforms. By investing into the right influencers addressing your target market, and providing great content to discuss, social amplification can leverage the distance that the conversation travels.
Recently, Webfluential was briefed to run an awareness campaign for Nando’s Mass Hysteria. The volume of social discussion is given in the graph below. Note the seeding of conversation by the right influencers, driving conversation from their audience.
In the digital age anyone can create a community and cultivate an audience that trusts the value of the content provided. Consumers choose their brand ambassadors and the communities they belong to. The platforms and digital insights available to marketers has changed the notion of influence such that brands don’t have to aggregate their own audiences anymore. Influencer marketing allows brands to leverage the audiences and communities of trusted influencers.
Sign up as a marketer here to run your own influencer search. Try out your first campaign.
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