Influencers can help drive traffic and conversions for brands. While a TechCrunch post may get millions of subscribers but a low open and click-through rate, an influencer with tens of thousands of engaged followers can generate thousands of eyeballs and a conversion rate 3x higher than traditional advertising. As social media has become the dominant way people discover content, influencer marketing has become a key strategy for brands. Relationships with influencers are important to drive awareness and sales.
2. Can Influencers Help Me? Yep. (A) TechCrunch conversion: “Influencer” conversion: ~4M subscribers ~1.5% open rate ~ 60,000 eyeballs ~20K subscribers ~70%+ open rate ~ 14,000 eyeballs ~ mention you, endorse you, reprint your content…….or not ~ huge market for social media listening platforms now Hail Mary… Relationship driven
3. Idea: “Great Pages” are the ones with many links “PageRank” circa 1997 Links as votes
4. Today’s Internet Votes, Bookmarks, Comments, Tweets, Diggs, Trackbacks, Likes…….Social networking has taken over……
5. 80% of the articles & stories we pay attention to are found in a social network…..
6. 50%+ of that engagement happens during the first hour
7. How Wide is Our Influence? Twitter Avg # of Followers – 62.97 per user Avg # of Followees – 43.52 per user Facebook # of FB likes – 217.2 per item (liked) # of FB likes – 29.3 per user
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10. Real-time Off-site + On-site Friendfeed for your content PostRank Analytics http://analytics.postrank.com
Let’s step back for a minute and talk about how the concept of online influence originated.The genesis of online influence was really Google’s insight back in the late 1990’s that if you measured how many links there were to a particular site and its content, those sites that got linked to the most must be more relevant, popular or interesting than other sites. So when a consumer searched on something, PageRank would bubble up the sites and stories that had the most links to the top of the search results. Those sites in turn would naturally get more pageviews, and the entire ecosystem around advertising online and paying more for sites with significant pageview numbers came to be.But what’s the reality today?
In the mid 2000’s three significant technology developments caused a fundamental shift in online activity:Web 2.0 allowed audience members to not just READ the content on a site, but to INTERACT with it via comment engines.Blogging took off – anyone on the internet could create content and easily publish it, potentially reaching every corner of the world.Social networks exploded, allowing community members and friends to share, like, bookmark, digg, tweet and engage in “conversations” in a host of new ways not previously possible.In addition, social networks allowed each of us to “connect” with people we’ve never met and to create social circles that include both real friends (in the sense of people we’ve met) and internet friends – people we’ve never met and that we have much looser ties to, but that have a common interest or taste on some level.
In addition to that, over 50% of the attention we give content happens in the first hour after it’s published. The pace of volume of publishing content and the social activity related to that content is so rapid that for most of us, if we don’t see it on the front page of the network when we log in, we don’t scroll down through earlier pages to find things.
Here are a couple of other interesting statistics recently published by Scribd:The average number of followers in Twitter is almost 63 per user and the average number of followees is about 44.In Facebook, the average number of “likes” an item gets is over 217 and each user has “liked” something an average of almost 30 times.Let’s take the Twitter stat – for those of you on Twitter, chances are that the people you are following aren’t just your personal friends – they’re celebrities, industry gurus, topic area experts that you don’t know – in addition to people you have personal relationships with. But, you’ve chosen to follow them for some reason, and some have chosen to follow you, which creates a cross pollination of message and opinion that can travel far and wide.In fact there is a recent stat that 60% - 80% of all buying decisions are made without information coming directly from the brand – it comes from peers. (SOURCE: Francois Gossieaux author of "The Hyper-Social Organization”)All of these factors have created that massive advertising opportunity for brands and the agencies. They need to leverage social proof and the 80% statistic that I spoke about at the beginning.
At PostRank, measuring and leveraging the online social influence of publishers of content is our business. We help brands and agencies identify, measure and connect with the people on the net who have the most social capital in topic areas they care about.For the last 3 ½ years we have been tracking and archiving stories published to the web from all parts of the world in real-time, and at the same time collecting and archiving every social engagement event with those articles and stories happening across more than 20 social networks. By matching up that data, we can expose which authors/bloggers/publishers have the most loyal, active and engaged audiences – and therefore a higher probability to influence audience members - in the topic areas they write about. Every day we now collect about 7 million stories and 25 million social engagement events with those stories giving us a very deep and meaningful way to measure the online influence of content creators.
The second service gives you granular information about the author – not only how his or her content is performing in the social web, but:. What topic areas they are expert in;. What social graph profile or presence they have (ie. What social networks they belong to); and. What sorts of promotional acitvities they are willing to engage in with brands and agencies.Our real-time platform helps you to identify who and how you can leverage the network effect of these individuals to get better results.