Andrew Young's Blog

Identifying Influencers isn’t an exact science and there are numerous ways to identify the right influencers for your company. However, there are a number of categories that companies can form a metric in order to search for the right kind of influencers.

1. They have Massive Reach – this can be gauged by their affiliates, the number of followers or friends and how many social media channels they are active on.

2. The Production of Content – content creation keeps people engaged and the frequency allow people to come back and forth to the influencer. Creating the right content and variety is also key.

3.They Listen and Reply – churning out content constantly is an important feature but it is crucial that they listen and provide compelling information to users. This can come in the form of retweets, linkedin discussions and replying to user feedback to content and

4. Natural Recruiters – often key influencers might be involved with advocating a certain theme and often push for events related towards their aims. (eg. volunteering for conferences or technology)

In the vastness of the social media, its often easy to overlook and be tempted by the number of opportunities to connect with people. Businesses often find it difficult to look for ways to reach out to these audiences but often times, people create barriers towards business entities and therefore key influencers come into play.

Key influencers are extraordinarily important to business firms looking to branch out to social media because of the potential they have to reach audiences in a non-biased format. People find it much easier to connect with other beings and having a key influencer would add a little more credit and reputation to the firm’s business.

Key Influencers also create lots of up to date content that enable repeat viewers. Business often give a robotic almost planned form of outputs while key influencers are spontaneous and free flowing.

While targeting key influencers should always be a goal for, identifying them is always a difficult task due to a number of characteristics. Thats why in my next blog I will address how to identify the right key influencer for you.

Social Media is an popular word that is thrown out every opportunity that usually promises a lot but under delivers most of the time for new entrants into the channel. Often times, its not necessarily the channels fault but rather the expectations and execution that is lacking. So here a few common mistakes that businesses run into.

1. Social Media isn’t just about promoting your company: Most firms run into this trap easily and quickly boast about themselves and litter the media with tons of contests and prizes. Unfortunately it only facilitates a one way conversation and doesn’t take advantage of social media’s key advantage. Try to spur up conversation and participate to develop trust not just sell sell sell.

2. You compare yourself to bigger companies with fancy campaigns: While we do run into comparisons with competitors and big brands, social media is a platform that enables almost any firm with any number of resources to be effective in social media. Clearly outline your goals and achieve them, don’t focus on doing what everyone else is doing.

3.Social media is not free and does require financial commitment: While it certainly doesn’t cost much except time to put up a Facebook or twitter, content creation takes a much larger financial impact than people first think of. Social media requires two way dialogue to be successful and to do so  requires almost immediate response to questions as well as content to encourage discussion which actually use up alot of time

4. Social Media is not a hard selling channel: Whiles it is yet to be proven whether people actually purchase many things through social media ads and whether its the next goldmine for companies, social media has not been widely successful at directly driving purchases. Social media has tons of different metrics and goals to achieve and hard sells should never be the only focus. Building awareness and trust are always key

5. You don’t have to be everywhere: The divide and conquer strategy doesn’t really apply with social media. Its always more advantageous to focus on 1 social media with tons of activity than divide yourself to look at 3 or 4 different channels. In the interest of resources and effectiveness, never feel too pressure to join every new form of social media.