How much influence do ‘influencers’ really have?

It has been the noisiest buzzword in marketing for the past two years. Massive budgets are being thrown at it. Yet, much of the spending on the so-called “influencer” is going to waste.

Typically, big brands recruit “celebrities” with massive followings to serve as messengers to share branded content with their online fans. For example, luxury bag brand Coach contracted singer and actor Selena Gomez to punt its products via her Instagram account, the most followed in the world.

In social media, personalities who are unknown in the mainstream often build up communities of followers that come to be regarded as communities of influence in their own right.

Brands then recruit these “microinfluencers”, in effect, on the same basis as the mainstream stars: as minor celebrities within their own niches. The size of their following denotes their value.

A question that marketers cannot answer convincingly, however, is how effective their influencer marketing strategies have been. In other words, have the influencers really had an influence on perception, loyalty or sales?

Now, a new research study has lifted the veil on how influence builds in social media.

World Wide Worx, in partnership with social intelligence platform Continuon, worked with 50 major South African brands that allowed access to their social media accounts.

For three months, every interaction with these brands on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram was monitored.

By the end of the period, no fewer than 100 million pieces of data had been collected, and 5.25 million unique individuals were found to have interacted — or “engaged”, to use the social media buzzword — with these 50 brands.

Engagement could be in the form of a comment, a shared post, a retweet, a like or anything that represented part of the “conversation” around the brand.

The study tried to uncover a more elusive number, though: how much of this engagement resulted in others also engaging? That number would denote the true scale of social media influence.

The number was far smaller: only 355 000, less than 7%, of these individuals had a direct influence on the conversation.

An equally startling finding was that influence had nothing to do with the size of the following — either of the brand or of the influencer. Far more significant was the authenticity of the messenger, and the willingness of the messenger’s followers to take the conversation further. In other words, a celebrity sharing a brand message, and getting a million likes or retweets, may not necessarily be as influential as that number suggests, if the people who have liked and retweeted the message are not, in turn, liked and retweeted.

Yes, they are getting a reaction, but the reaction is purely about what the industry calls “reach”. It is not turning into conversation, or extending brand awareness further. Continuon founder Bradley Elliott refers to this concept as “the velocity of conversation”.

This principle barely exists in the marketing community, as most metrics end with the number of followers and “first engagers” with content. In effect, says

Elliott, the industry needs a new vocabulary to describe real influence.

“Reach as it is currently measured is dead,” he says. “Resonance and relevance are the new currency, and velocity is the fuel of conversation.”

Resonance and relevance are the new currency