Influencer roles throughout the decision process (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“Influence” has recently become one of the key topics in social media. Everyone is running, or planning to run “influencer outreach” campaigns, hoping that the “influencers” will help them reach huge audiences or even persuade people to take some action, like buying products or services.

However, most people are still confused about what online influence is, how to measure it, and which influencers are actually relevant to their business and audience. It’s critical to understand these things before you go out and spend your social media budget on Influencer Marketing campaigns.

This primer is a collection of revealing articles that will help you maximize your influencer outreach initiatives.

What is Influence?

In the Altimeter report named “The Rise of Digital Influence”, Brian Solis defines it as “the ability to cause effect, change behavior and drive measurable outcomes online“. Its pillars are Reach, Resonance and Relevance.

How to do Influencer Outreach

Jay Baer argues that Influence has two components: audience and advocacy. Too many marketers are focused on Audience – finding influencers with the most followers or the most engaged audience. But if we define Influence as driving action, marketers should look to create Advocacy first, and then find large audience venues to amplify the advocacy.

Michael Brito of Edelman Digital argues the same.

But if you need to start with advocacy, do you really need influencers in the first place? AdAge argues that yes, but you need to separate influence from audience reach. Social Media Today agrees and quotes a report that shows how the long tail of influencers drives more results than a few celebrities.

So now that you better understand how to think about Influence, how do you actually run an influencer outreach campaign? Mashable shares 7 useful tips.

How to properly measure Influence

Social Media Explorer looks at a set of influence measurement tools that can help you score people on different influence scales.

But why would you need to look at multiple, different influence scores? Because relying on a single score might not give you an accurate picture, argues Jeremiah Owyang of Altimeter. This is because influence measurement tools are still in their infancy and have vastly different approaches to measurement methodology.

P.S. Do you know which people are influential for your company and market? I don’t mean celebrities. I’m talking about the people who are actually advocating your products and are driving the most conversations around your brand and market. uberVU uses patent-pending technology to find influencers who are actually relevant and engaged in conversations related to your brand.

Find your advocates today – get a demo uberVU!

Tagged as: influence, influencer marketing, influencer outreach, social media, social media advocacy, social media evangelist