Who do you like to hear from? Celebrity or Micro-influencers?

For the longest time, traditional brands did things like this with either celebrity endorsement (Jordan + Nike) or fictional mascots (Fido Dido+ 7 up). While both of these models have proven highly successful in the past, the changing landscape of social influence is requiring an updated version of this strategy.

About 70 percent brands who on Instagram now are putting more emphasis on influencer so as to reach target consumers. There is no doubt that brands both large and small are trying to involve influencers to exclusively support the brand for the long-term. However, here is the question need to be discussed: how to identify most valuable influencer? If you are taking charge of social media on behalf of a brand, what criteria will you follow when you are selecting influencers to partner with.

Last semester, I did come up with these questions when I were working on an entrepreneur project which needs to involve influencers to promote our restaurants located in Shanghai, China. I did research on this side and have some personal insights on this topic as an entrepreneur.

As we all known, digital agencies do provide the service on sourcing and connecting with influencer, even generating content on behave of brands. Besides cost, instead of hiring agency to identity niche influencer or hiring influencer to promote our product, why not someone in our team to be the influencer who communicate directly with the consumer? This way the individual can promote your brand in a full-time capacity and have actual impact on what’s happening at our company. Also, the individual (either entrepreneur-self or team member) act with enthusiasm and passion. They are not just promoting our brand, but also the brand’s biggest fans.

The next question will be how to create leverage and followings within a short period of time. My answer will be Content and Cross-promotions. The content released at very early stage need to be made as a virus, which let the early adaptors (early followings) spread the idea disproportionately. After our brand account attracted some amount of followers, the entrepreneur can start tracking your followers’ following. For example, if 20 out of 100 followers are following a dozen of DJs, I may come up with the idea that one of the segmentations may be the hipsters or clubbers. By analyzing the followers, a short-list of segmentation provides support on searching valuable influencer to partner with. This way increases the chances of finding the most valuable influences at a lower cost.

It is common sense that a new brand/business have the eager to use a general way or sportsman to create as huge buzz as possible, or attract as much market awareness as possible. Then, the brand can go to celebrity endorsements to achieve the goal, if the brand have enough budget. For entrepreneur, it is not reasonable to use famous influencer to reach millions of potential customers at very first stage. Instead, being influencer by yourself at first and sourcing the suitable influencer to partner with later is a reasonable approach.

Reference:

Valuing Influentials Means More than Just Counting Connections. Retrieved from: http://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/valuing-influentials-means-more-than-just-counting-connections/