Social Media Influencers
Link: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/identify-best-socialmedia-influencers/140074/
Today’s guest lecture from Lars Backstrom influenced this post. We’ve talked a lot about social networks in the course so far, and also about the strength of ties. This article delves into how people or groups become “influencers” on social media, and the correlation between ties and influence.
Today, social media is an extremely powerful marketing tool, and most businesses use social media for that purpose to some extent. So, what exactly makes a business or person an “influencer”? The article describes one as “someone who incites a group of people to do something.” This almost directly translates to the influencer having a large group of ties, so as to make a substantial difference through persuasion alone. Businesses need influencers as they “create instant trust” among audiences while improving sales. “Engagement” seems to be one of the most important metrics in determining influencers on sites like Facebook. The more likes, shares and comments that revolve around a post, the more visible it becomes. For a site like Twitter, engagement, while not as pivotal, also plays a large role. The amount of retweets that a tweet gets can identify potential targets that already display interest. Higher numbers of retweets lead to increased visibility. See the trend yet? Even Google+ measures engagement, through number of comments, profile views, and update views.
This process of finding influencers plays heavily on the concepts of strong ties, embeddedness, clustering coefficients, as well as the concept and categorization of “friendship links,” as explained in Chapter 3.4: Tie Strength, Social Media, and Passive Engagement. Influencers will, in general, have strong ties with their constituents, otherwise, they would not be quite as effective in influencing behavior, swaying discussions, or rallying support. It might be inferred that high clustering coefficients and high levels of embeddedness between an influencer and his/her followers would only increase the strength of the ties. As seen with shares, comments, and retweets, higher columes of each lead to increased visibility overall. Now, if a node were to experience engagement between many friend nodes and a common influencer node, as opposed to the same influencer node with only a handful of friend nodes, the odds of that node also interacting with the influencer would appear to increase.
While likes, views, and shares would represent maintenance of a relationship through following of information and one-way communication, comments and retweets would allow for reciprocal communication between the node and the influencer. These observable engagements would help businesses determine particularly strong influencers for their target markets, and would help them narrow down the field of potential influencers to only those who stand the best chance of increasing sales substantially for the company. When practiced with large social networks like Facebook, Twitter, or, to a lesser degree, Google+, the role of influencers in marketing today is almost irreplaceable.