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How to Get Influencers to Promote Your Brand

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Earlier this month, I published an article on how to leverage a large Instagram account to build a lucrative career. Today, I want to approach the same topic, this time from the brand’s point of view. Indeed, influencer marketing is a powerful tool. According

As this marketing channel blossoms, it becomes evident that there’s still confusion and uncertainty around how to approach it. Sixty-one percent of marketers responded to a survey agreeing that it’s difficult to pinpoint the correct influencers for a given campaign, which is why I wanted to find an entrepreneur or brand that has made a name for themselves through influencer marketing; a brand that others can learn from.

That’s how I was introduced to Sean Kelly, founder of Jersey Champs, an online clothing company that almost exclusively uses influencers to sell jerseys. In a recent interview, I took the opportunity to ask Kelly in-depth about his overall influencer strategy.

In the early days of Jersey Champs, Kelly was enrolled in Rutgers University and running the company out of his dorm room. After seeing a business opportunity in the popularity of sports jerseys, Kelly set out to see if he could sell jerseys with custom designs that weren’t necessarily related to sports. Fast forward three years, and Jersey Champs has sold hundreds of thousands of jerseys, with influencer partnerships including Logan Paul, rappers 2 Chainz and Logic, Mark Cuban and other celebrities and athletes. Kelly attributes much of his success to celebrity and influencer endorsements, telling me that “at first it was a matter of sending a free jersey to an influencer and praying that they would share it, and when they did it made our day, But now that we’ve grown so much and understood the importance of it, we have annual partnership contracts set up to legitimize and scale it.”

Kelly went on to explan that there are three significant lessons he believes have been responsible for Jersey Champs’s most successful influencer campaigns.

1. Be hyper-specific when considering partners.

With so many influencers to choose from, considering who to partner with can be difficult. “We defined our absolute ideal customer and then built our entire business and growth strategy around that, including the influencers we work from,” says Kelly. He and his team have positioned their brand around high-schoolers and college students, and their choice of influencer follows.

“We spent a lot of time trying to figure out who our customers follow on Instagram, the music they listen to and who they watch on YouTube to determine who we reached out to for a partnership,” he elaborates. “Once we discover a rapper or personality that’s gaining popularity, we don’t waste any time reaching out to them.” Kelly attributes a lot of this to being “tapped-into” the social media hype himself, making an effort to pay close attention to the Explore page within Instagram, trending news on Twitter and Google News, as well as frequently engaging with customers.

2. Judge an influencer’s value on engagement, not audience size.

With so many fake followers and unengaged audiences, Kelly jokes that he’s become a bit of an Instagram detective when it comes to spotting influencers. “For some people, it’s a kick to be featured on an Instagram page with one million followers, but when it comes down to sales, audience loyalty and engagement is way more important,” he says. “For example, partnering with Logan Paul is awesome for us, because he has such a strong relationship with his audiences, so when he wears our jersey on his podcast, we know people are going to watch the entire video and think highly of it.” Interestingly, 48 percent of marketers who answered an Influencer Marketing Hub listed audience loyalty as the most valuable factor when considering an influencer. But there is a powerful lesson here for anyone looking to work with an influencer: While impressive followings may be persuasive, it doesn’t reflect loyalty. According to Kelly, “Jersey Champs was built on partnering with actual influencers with loyal audiences who look up to them, not just personalities with large but unattached followers.”

3. Don’t settle on a single post.

Once you’re confident with your choice of influencer, Kelly recommends doing everything you can to maximize the transaction. “When we start talking to an influencer, we’re shooting off ideas of what we can do with them,” he details. “Custom jerseys, exclusive giveaways [and] fun ways of creating content. It’s not just about getting a single post on their feed. We want them to want to promote our brand and see value in it for them, too. That’s why we’ll design a custom jersey for them to help them ‘prime’ their audience so that they’re more engaged. It’s all about hype.”

Another big part of extracting value from influencers is accessing their audiences for paid ads. As part of the transaction, Kelly will often try to negotiate access to their Facebook-ad audiences, so he can supplement the influencer’s promotions with paid ads promoting Jersey Champs. As he concludes, “It ties back to the original point [about being hyper-specific]. A big part of marketing is getting in front of the right audiences, and if your influencer has done that already, you need to leverage that in many ways, not just a single post.”

Feature Image credit: Sean Kelly | Instagram

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Growth at 24Slides

Sourced from Entrepreneur Europe

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No evidence disclosure hurts Influencers: Instagram

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By Emma Koehn

A senior Instagram executive says there is little evidence that sponsored posts don’t perform as well as regular posts and transparency on partnership content is key to building trust.

Instagram fashion and beauty partnerships manager Kristie Dash has said influencers should not be afraid to label as ‘sponsored’ as more attention comes on the disclosures made by users when partnering with brands.

“Nobody wants their feeds to feel like one big ad and so, I get why there is a hesitancy [about being transparent with posts]. At the end of the day, if you’re not being transparent with your followers, you’ll lose trust over time,” Ms Dash said.

Instagram is launching its biggest marketing campaign in Australia this week.
Instagram is launching its biggest marketing campaign in Australia this week.Credit:Bloomberg

Ms Dash, who is based in New York and manages the Instagram team working with beauty brands and influencers, was in Australia last week for social media workshops with local small businesses.

The Age and Sydney Morning Herald asked Ms Dash whether Instagram needed to do more to ensure adequate disclosure of business partnerships given recent news that influencers have been under scrutiny by regulators in Australia over the level of disclosure they have given to consumers when promoting cosmetic dental products like Invisalign.

She said the platform had clear tools and guidelines to guide creators on what information to give their followers about sponsored deals.

“It is our job to educate the industry on how to use those tools,” she said.

Ms Dash acknowledged that influencers may have concerns about appearing authentic when creating sponsored content. She argued that if an influencer felt concerns about being authentic and was reluctant to be clear in partnership posts, they should rethink their agreements with brands.

“That kind of speaks more to the brands that creators are choosing to partner with. And if there’s that kind of concern… if it’s a brand that doesn’t feel authentic to you, then maybe it’s not the best decision to partner with [them],” she said.

“We have no data to prove that sponsored posts don’t perform as well as regular posts and we really, really encourage creators to be transparent about labelling when content is sponsored or a partnership.”

Instagram been focusing marketing efforts in Australia in recent months, launching a multi-million campaign in the local market last month.

Ms Dash said local brands were creating compelling content on the platform, with companies like Frank Body and Go-To skin care creating strong voices and “visual signatures”.

“They have very specific or easy to identify voices that when you’re going through your feed, you can kind of quickly tell it’s a post from that brand.”

By Emma Koehn

Emma is the small business reporter for The Age and Sydney Morning Herald based in Melbourne. Follow MySmallBusiness on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Sourced from The Sydney Morning Herald

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71% of Instagram Influencers Don’t Call Themselves That

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By Sandeep Rathore

If you’re struggling to spot Instagram influencers for your influencer marketing campaigns, then it’s time to change your approach. This is because most influencers have had it with the term ‘influencers’.

Creator or Influencer?

According to The 2019 Influencer Survey, 71% of Instagram influencers don’t actually call themselves influencers. Only 29% of Instagram celebrities give themselves the title of ‘influencer’.

Small Business owners with a limited budget often collaborate with micro Instagram influencers. And it goes with saying that the success of any influencer marketing campaign largely depends on finding the right Instagram influencers.

If you know what Instagram influencers call themselves, it will be easier for you to spot them. So, the next time, you should look beyond the ‘influencer’ title.

What do Instagram Influencers Call Themselves?

The survey states that the maximum number (34%) of influencers (with more than 25,000 followers) refer themselves as a ‘creator’. And 17% of Instagram influencers call themselves a ‘content creator’, while 11% of influencers label themselves as a ‘brand ambassador’.

Only 29% of influencers add the title influencers in their Instagram bios.

Are You am Instagram Creator or Influencer?
Image Source: Influencer-Agency

The finding of the survey implies that you should first search for Instagram creators if you want to reach a large pool of influencers. Then, you can look for the title ‘influencer’ to find influencers for your influencer marketing campaign.

Why Are There More Creators Than Influencers?

Modern Marketing Guru, Seth Godin, once said, “Content Marketing is the Only Marketing Left.” His words ring absolutely true.

Now, when more and more companies are putting ‘content’ in the center of their marketing strategies, Instagram influencers cannot attract brands if they don’t create quality content consistently.

Dave Leusink, the co-founder of Influencer Agency, says, “The creators that we represent are selected for the quality of their creativity. Someone from a reality show can quickly get 100,000 followers and call themselves an influencer, but the quality of their content often falls short of what we’re looking for.”

“The best paying brands only want to be presented with high-quality content. Creating relevant and engaging content costs blood, sweat and tears, and is a far cry from the content of short-lived reality stars who only post selfies. It’s not surprising that major influencers prefer to call themselves (content) creators,” He adds.

How to Find Instagram Influencers

Instagram is one of the most popular influencer marketing platforms. To leverage the true power of Instagram influencer marketing, you will have to find the right Instagram influencers for your campaigns.

Here are some proven ways:

  • Use tools like NInjaOutreach, Upfluence, HYPR, etc.
  • Search influencer directory like Izea
  • Scan general hashtags relevant to your industry
  • Search Google for relevant keyword(s) along with “site:instagram.com”

When you are making a list of Instagram influencers, you should always include those who have engagement on their posts and create quality, unique content consistently.

The Survey

The survey included 1,700 influencers on Instagram with 25,000 followers or more. All influencers who participated in the survey were 18 years or older. The influencer survey was conducted in September 2019. If you want to access the full survey, you can click here.

Feature Image Credit: Depositphotos.com

By Sandeep Rathore

Sourced from Small Business Trends

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What Does Your Brain on Influencer Marketing Look Like?

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By Blake Droesch

Measuring attribution and return on investment remains a key challenge when marketing with influencers—which means that it can be hard to quantify the merits of utilizing them. But neuroscience research from the UK, showing cognitive responses to traditional marketing vs. influencer posts, may provide some answers.

In May 2019, influencer agency Whalar and neuroanalytics firm Neuro-Insight analyzed reactions to influencer ads from UK social media users ages 18 to 65. The study looked at subjects’ “emotional intensity” and “memory encoding.” Respectively, these terms were defined as the strength of the emotion being felt and as the experience of committing something to long-term memory.

The research showed that influencer ads generated 277% greater emotional intensity and 87% higher memory encoding in participants than TV ads did. Influencer ads were also similarly more effective than Facebook and YouTube ads, particularly when it came to memory encoding.

Impact of Influencer Ads Compared to Ads on TV, Facebook and YouTube Among UK Social Media Users, May 2019

Shazia Ginai, CEO of Neuro-Insight, explained to us that emotional intensity and memory encoding were measured using headsets with sensors placed on the areas of the brain specifically responsible for those cognitive functions. “Our brains are very specialized, so these responses can be measured with confidence,” she said.

Researchers also took a look at the effect of “priming,” or the act of one stimulus subconsciously influencing how people respond to subsequent stimuli. When respondents viewed branded influencer content prior to seeing a non-influencer ad for the same company, their reaction was often more positive compared with those who had not seen an influencer ad beforehand.

The study produced similar results for influencer-primed linear TV ads: a 13% positive response (also referred to as “approach”), 103% greater emotional intensity and 58% higher memory encoding. On the other hand, influencer-primed YouTube ads showed heightened approach (63%), but they resulted in just 16% higher memory encoding and a 26% decrease in emotional intensity.

Impact of Influencer Priming* on TV, Facebook and YouTube Ads Among UK Social Media Users, May 2019

Influencers with audiences of varying sizes were also found to be more or less effective in different cognitive areas. Microinfluencers, who have between 100,000 and 500,000 followers, solicited the highest degree of approach. Participants’ emotional intensity and memory encoding registered at 62% and 55%, respectively, above ads within general content. (“General content” being that found on TV, Facebook and YouTube.)

Impact of Influencer Ads Among UK Social Media Users, by Influencer Category, May 2019

When respondents saw celebrity influencers, the memory encoding was 74% higher than it was during their general browsing state. However, their approach was down 54% compared with their reactions to general ad content, indicating that celebrity influencer ads were memorable for negative reasons.

By Blake Droesch

Sourced from eMarketer

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Influencer Fraud Costs Businesses Billions but Here’s What You Can Do to Avoid It

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By Erik Sherman

Hype isn’t a good reason to invest in marketing tools without thoroughly checking them out.

Influencers? Don’t trust ’em. Not the individual person, perhaps, but the concept as frequently presented. As a recent report notes, things are getting to the point that businesses lose a collective $1.5 billion a year in a combination of scams, users’ distrust, and invisible disengagement.

Not that it should come as a surprise. Rented followers is an old story at this point

Many influencers also have no idea what they’re talking about, as the late and apparently sometimes great Payless Shoes proved by inviting fashion influencers to a private showing, watch them go into raptures over the footwear, and then telling them the source.

“Shut up! Did I just pay too much?” one asked who said a pair of sneakers would be worth hundreds. Uh, yup.

The new study–really a meta-analysis by Roberto Cavazos, a professor at the University of Baltimore, on behalf of adtech company CHEQ AI Technologies–suggests that things in the influencer world are even more problematic. Here are a few of the issues he brings up:

  • Fake followers: There are scams aplenty in influencer marketing, like Potato, only without acknowledgment to prove a point and at much higher rates of occurence. Depending on the study, numbers of fake followers in influencer audiences range from 20% to 78%.
  • Sneaky tactics: People will grow their follower base by doing things like following others, waiting for them to follow back, and then unfollowing. If most of those others aren’t checking and unfollowing in return, it boosts the apparent figures without a real connection. The influencer is just another random person.
  • Attrition: Many people who use social networks lose interest or move on to other ones. A significant percentage–commonly 30%, according to figures Cavazos cites, but possibly going as high as 90% for many influencers–may no longer be there. The audience capacity keeps showing like the size of a theatre but many of the chairs are empty.
  • Audience distrust: This may be even more damning than the other items. Again, depending on the source of the stats, as few as 4% of people on the Internet trust what influencers say on social media and a majority of people think influencers are trying to scam their audiences.

I spoke with Lena Katz, a branded content strategist, who works with clients on content distribution strategies that often include an influencer component. She said all the problems are well known. “Fake engagement, being able to buy likes, is not new,” she said. It’s been going for years.” She thinks the audience disaffection has been growing over time. It’s bad news on the influencer front, at least how companies and agencies have approached it.

Katz suggested a few approaches she’s found to work. One is to partner with businesses or specialty tradespeople or solo practitioners who are influential in their own right among a customer base. Companies and people with actual revenue streams and not a dependence on Instagram posts. “It’s a reliable strategy for building influencer campaigns where you’re more likely to generate ROI,” she said, because the people going to that site or account are accustomed to actually doing business there. “The followers of their accounts are more likely to be real customers, not bot-inflated followers of ‘professional influencers’ that will never buy a product.”

Katz mentioned working with an apparel brand. Out of 50 “fashion influencers,” fewer than five were able to sell two items of clothing with a discount code. What did work? Having a wedding photographer do a fashion shoot then do giveaways. “It did 10 or 20 times better than any of the influencer posts,” Katz said.

Look for individuals or businesses with skills or products people seek out and where an influencer campaign might overlay well with what they do. “If you have a caffeine drink, [don’t get] a barista,” Katz said. Instead, look for “someone who would drink a caffeine drink to help them do their job better.” Who’s more believable? That barista or, perhaps, a bus or truck driver who has to stay alert on the road for hours at a time?

Companies can do well working with complementary firms or with corporate customers and doing cross-promotions. Katz did that with an e-commerce company that went from nothing to a multi-national business doing millions in annual turnover within three years.

Finally, consider social impact programming. “Pick a charity, something that aligns with your brand, someone that you would want to support,” Katz said. Support the charity with your own products or services.

And, in all cases, focus on tangible results, not engagement “because that can be faked.” Run promotions that require interaction, like people signing up with their email address for a giveaway. The more tangible the concept, the better a chance you’ll get something from it.

Feature Image Credit: Getty Images

By Erik Sherman

Sourced from Inc.

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Why General Mills is spending more of its digital budget on influencers

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By Seb Joseph

General Mills is spending up to a third of the digital budget for some of its brands on influencer marketing.

A recent campaign for the CPG advertiser’s vegan and fruit snack Lärabar cost £700,000 ($905,000) to promote online in the U.K., and around £230,000 ($298,000) of it went to influencers. Speaking at an Oystercatchers event in London on May 14, Arjoon Bose, head of marketing for Europe at General Mills, said the decision to spend more on influencers came from the need to show his bosses how effective influencers are compared to other forms of marketing.

By Seb Joseph

Sourced from DIGIDAY UK

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This is how much social media influencers really charge for posts

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By Danielle de Wolfe

With a quarter of all blog content now being sponsored, it pays to be an influencer

A new survey has revealed the true price of social media – with 19 per cent of influencers admitting they charge more than £250 for a single blog post.

The UK Blogger Survey, conducted by software specialist Vuelio alongside Canterbury Christ Church University, also revealed that four per cent of the 534 bloggers questioned charged more than £1,000 per post.

Shedding light on a world in which the hashtags #spon and #ad have become commonplace, the results show more than a quarter of all blog content is now compensated in some way.

Recent months have seen calls for greater regulation across the paid content industry, as the lines between gifting and sponsored content become increasingly blurred.

Joanna Arnold, CEO of Vuelio, says: “The influencer marketing industry is still in its infancy, so we expect to see further calls for transparency and regulation as it finds its feet.”

In line with these calls, the Advertising Standards Agency and the Competition and Markets Authority have collaborated to create the Influencer’s Guide – a handbook on the dos and don’ts of the advertising industry.

“Bloggers and content creators have had a bad press recently,” says John Adams, author of fatherhood blog, Dad Blog UK. “As a dad blogger operating in a market heavily dominated by women, I was interested to see that female bloggers are three times more likely to charge hard cash for writing blog posts compared to men.”

The survey also revealed that the notoriously crowded lifestyle, fashion and beauty sectors have seen a 14 per cent drop in blog numbers over the last two years.

Despite these findings, influencers affirm the quality and relevancy of their content remains a top priority.

Elle Linton, author of health and fitness blog Keep it simpElle says: “First and foremost, it’s about the brand; are they a good fit for me and my audience demographic, are they a brand I am happy to be affiliated with and do our values align?”

The news comes as the number of full-time bloggers citing blogging as their main source of income has risen 50 per cent year-on-year.

The survey also shed light on the direction bloggers believe the industry will take. Almost a quarter of bloggers surveyed believe blogs will become driven by advertisers’ needs, with 42 per cent believing their audiences will become more sceptical of bloggers’ motives as a result.

Mr Adams says: “As the blogging industry gets more professional, I would also hope us bloggers come together to create a blogging trade association. It’s an industry worth billions and there’s lots of talk among bloggers about it being a supportive community.”

By Danielle de Wolfe

Sourced from Evening Standard

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4 Influencer Marketing Secrets Entrepreneurs Need to Know

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It’s not just about celebrity status and followers

Potentially earning thousands per post, influencers are cashing in on their ability to captivate large audiences and thus heavily impact the purchasing behavior of their followers. It’s clear why brands keep throwing products and money toward these social media stars — influencer marketing works.

The top 50 Instagram influencers have more than 3.1 billion followers, as reported by Social Blade, and overall, 3.028 billion people, or 40 percent of the world’s population, actively use social media.

Here are a few more stats to consider:

  • Influencer marketing has 11 times the ROI of traditional digital marketing, as reported byTapinfluence.com.
  • Seventy percent of millennial consumers are persuaded by the recommendations of their peers in buying decisions, as reported by Collective Bias.
  • Thirty-seven percent of customers place more value on the quality of a post then its sponsorship and 67 percent don’t have an adverse reaction to sponsored content, according to Collective Bias.
  • Almost 40 percent of Twitter users have purchased a product or service as a direct result of an influencer tweet, according to Twitter.

I grew my first company in 2009 with influencer marketing (before it was even a term), which spiked sales and created crazy brand loyalty in a short time. We went from zero to millions in revenue in under 12 months.

Are you onboard with influencer marketing? If so, here are four tips to working with social media tastemakers you must consider:

1. Co-create with your influencers.

Influencers are a direct extension of your brand, so act like they are. Sew them into the fabric of your company by creating content together. Rather than just telling them what to post, learn about them and their audience and how your brand fits into their daily life.

I recently spoke with Sebastian Merkhoffer for an episode of my new podcast. He said he’s currently recording eight-figure annual revenue for his company, FitVia, thanks mostly to influencer marketing. “Influencer marketing is becoming a standard part of the marketing mix. For us, success in developing our core partnerships has stemmed largely from co-creating content together,” he said.

Merkhoffer said FitVia has influencers bring his products wherever they go. “Recently, we sent a German influencer for a detox weekend where she took her followers, and our team, along for the ride. It’s something authentic and far more engaging than just posting a photo of your breakfast.”

2. Leverage IGTV as the latest go-to social channel.

By 2021, it’s predicted that mobile video will account for 78 percent of all mobile data traffic, according to Instagram.

In June of last year, Instagram released IGTV to compete with YouTube. It wasn’t a home run off the bat, but marketers should stay keen on its advances to come.

“While user engagement with IGTV has been fairly disappointing so far, I expect Instagram to improve the functionality and visibility of IGTV content and put a lot more money behind getting brands to make use of the feature,” predicted Michael Edelmann, senior marketing manager at The Business of Fashion, on Later.com.

As a brand, it’s integral to keep an eye on these shifts to immediately track how your social media collaborators are responding. Are they early adopters to all the latest platforms? Or are they a bit more reserved, and stick with what they know?

As Alfred Lua explained in a Buffer article, “You might also want to check out less-known and less-popular social media platforms as well. For example, Musical.ly, a platform for creating and sharing short videos, has become very popular among teens. Other platforms you can check out include Anchor, Medium and Tumblr. ”

3. Focus on gen Z.

Millennials still hold the reins with more than $200 billion in purchasing power. However, gen Z is on track to become the largest group of consumers by 2020, and according to Millennial Marketing, they already account for $29 billion to $143 billion in direct spending. Gen Z is a growing section of the influencer economy across all platforms, making it vital for brands to consider their future consumer base.

For example, kidfluencers can be a massive opportunity for brands. “More people are looking at kid influencers for product recommendations. It’s definitely a long-term play. It’s building brand awareness and affinity through generations,” Zoe Marans, vice president of MediaKix, recently told Fast Company.

4. Slowly invest in influencer marketing.

Before you jump on the influencer marketing bandwagon, be cautious not to throw your entire marketing budget to YouTube stars. Sure, throwing $1 million at Beyonce to post about your product may reach hundreds of thousands, but that buzz will die in a matter of hours. Instead, start small to figure out what type of influencers will have the broadest impact.

“The key is to invest your budget into influencer marketing slowly,” Merkhoffer said. “I can’t stress how important it is to test, learn and then scale. The process iterates on itself and marketers must stay agile enough to integrate feedback as it comes through, not just once a quarter or annually.”

Even better, if you can use product or swag as payment to start a campaign, that can be an effective way to get influencer buy-in, especially if these are influencers that are already using your brand. As Lua explained, “If you are offering a discount or free samples for their followers, be sure to create a specific discount code or landing page for each influencer. That’s to help you with tracking the effectiveness of your campaign.”

Ready to ramp up your influencer marketing campaigns? Understand that success lies in your marketing team’s ability to nourish relationships that build trust between your brand and your target customer. Make sure you vet your influencers diligently and create a very clear deliverable so that everyone’s on the same page.

Feature Image credit: wundervisuals | Getty Images

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Choose Your Influencers Carefully

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By David Pring-Mill

Marketers need to do their own research, or else

When the documentary The American Meme was released on Netflix at the tail end of 2018, it seemed to encapsulate many of the themes dominating the past year. Digital media was all the rage — with a frequently tweeting POTUS, fiery online discussions, data-driven social media marketing, data scandals, and a high level of attention paid to the role of the media in public life. The doc tracked some of the events that led to this state of affairs in which credibility can be instantaneously created or curated. But it also exposed the seedy underbelly of the influencer hustle, in which ethics are viewed as something quaint that gets in the way of likes and followers.

There are influencers who maintain their followings by doing increasingly obscene things that capture public attention, even if it’s a horrified kind of attention. But if a marketer was just going by the numbers and the demographics, some of these personalities might look primed for influencer marketing campaigns. These numbers lie because the content matters. Imagine paying 60k for a “video review” by an influencer (which is not unheard of). Then the influencer says something bigoted. The influencer/advertiser boycott, predictably, begins trending. The 60k is wasted — and the brand damage puts you further in the red.

For an influencer marketing campaign to be effective, the influencer needs to offer consistency — a consistent audience, sense of quality, voice, and set of values. Without that, the deal might not be worth it. Marketers need to have a viable strategy for securing appropriate placements and audiences and minimizing risks. In these modern times, controversy can be deliberately stoked in a data-driven and strategic way, but the word “deliberate” is key. No one wants an accidental scandal. Brand safety still matters.

YouTube claims that advertisers are now less concerned with brand safety and have a renewed trust that violative content is being proactively removed by YouTube. A little over a year ago, YouTube hired thousands of new staff members to monitor content. But that is somewhat of a separate problem. When marketers make deals with influencers directly, bypassing the official mechanisms for advertising on social networks, they are put at risk by the individual influencer, who could do something outrageous in order to keep eyeballs on the account.

“I would argue that boycotts for an influencer often happen through other media writing about them, not on the platform or channel itself,” said Camiel Roex, a freelance growth hacking specialist.

Roex said that an influencer’s true fans are likely to forgive wrongdoing. He referenced the Seth Godin quote “people like us do things like this” to describe the dynamic.

“The followers from one of those big influencers empathize to such an extent with these influencers that they easily forgive them when they make a mistake, like saying something bigoted,” he explained. “It’s like one of their real-life friends slips up and says something they didn’t mean that way. You forgive them.”

Internet personality Logan Paul faced major backlash after his disrespectful behavior during a visit to Japan. Despite this, Roex pointed out that his channel has actually grown. “The backlash for him isn’t as big as you would expect. And his followers still love him and would definitely be influenced by his opinion on new products or services he advertises,” said Roex.

However, Roex cautioned that marketers need to do their research diligently before working with an influencer. They also need to make sure that the influencer can actually influence.

“A lot of people artificially inflate their numbers by using bot followers who like and comment to show engagement, fooling the algorithms,” said Roex.

He continued, “Don’t just go into business with an influencer after watching one of their videos on YouTube. Thoroughly go through their videos, observe their tone of voice and intent. Decide whether this is a person that you trust your brand with. That’s quite a big decision.”

Feature Image Credit: iStock/Getty Images

By David Pring-Mill

Sourced from DMN

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Is Facebook About To ‘Break’ Instagram, And What Does That Mean For Influencers?

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By  Zak Doffman

Ever since its sale to Facebook in 2012, Instagram has pulled off the trick of appearing detached from the aging brand, continual scandals and reputational taint of its parent. The ‘young and cool’ are on Instagram, and whilst most also have Facebook accounts, they’ll often tell you they no longer post or share on the platform. Even recent issues that have hit Instagram – a lack of transparency around paid-for posts, the hosting of dangerous imagery, the Fyre Festival – have more to do with the behavior of users than the activities of the platform itself.

There’s an argument that Facebook should not have been allowed to buy Instagram in the first place – it has damaged the market and neutralized a natural competitor. As one tech writer explained at the time of the deal: “Instagram has what Facebook craves – passionate community. People like Facebook. People use Facebook. People love Instagram – Facebook lacks soul. Instagram is all soul and emotion.”

Despite Instagram’s distancing trick from Facebook, they are very much part of the same money-making machine. Instagram ads are placed using Facebook’s systems. They share data. Advertisers (and data exploitation schemes) run content across both. But following the departure of founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, Instagram has lost its buffer. Even as stock analysts herald its potential to become the primary driver of Facebook’s ad revenue, if the glossy filter wears too thin, if Facebook gets too close, the brand will be at risk. And other platforms like Snapchat will be waiting in the wings.

Meet The Influencers

What could bring all this to a head is the quiet revolution in marketing that’s not so quiet anymore. The influencer industry will reach $10 billion in value next year and is written into the plans of every major brand around the world. Whilst these numbers are dwarfed by the value of more traditional online ad-placement, growth across the influencer industry shows no signs of slowing. It is the business model that looks set to change the rules of advertising. And despite Instagram being the shining star right at its center, Facebook needs to work out how to control the agenda for influencer marketing, or it risks undermining its own dominance in the coming years.

This revolution isn’t being driven by a few dozen A-list celebrities with millions of followers, or even by macro-influencers with a few hundred thousand each. It is being driven by the hundreds of thousands of micro-influencers, each with a few tens of thousands of followers. The micro-influencer is trusted within their niche. They are expected to use, and not just endorse, products. And what they say matters. Their following represents a targeted demographic. With more advanced tools becoming available to identify, validate and manage the right person for the right campaign, the elusive ROI from influencer marketing will become measurable. That could be a game changer for the marketing industry, all driven by Facebook.

Facebook: New Year, New You?

By any measure, 2018 should have been the year Facebook erased from its timeline: fake news; Cambridge Analytica with links to Russia and election tampering; congressional hearings; the founders of WhatsApp and Instagram heading for the exit; data breaches and data leaks; slowing growth, as the company started exhausting addressable planet.

But then Facebook’s results for the final quarter were released, revenue and earnings were up ahead of consensus, and management, shareholders and analysts relaxed – everything was going to be just fine. Yes, 2018 may have been a slow-motion train wreck, but the train was back on track. “Facebook is done apologizing,” explained Bloomberg. “For a moment during the earnings call, I closed my eyes and swore it was the glory days of 2015.”

Dig a little deeper, though, and beneath the veneer, there was an acknowledgment of the value Instagram brings to the company and the need to bring it closer to the core. Instagram is the ultimate social media marketing powerhouse. And, despite revenue growth at around 70% into double-digit billions of dollars, despite spawning the influencer marketing phenomenon, despite one billion daily active users and four billion daily ‘likes’, it is only just getting started.

When Instagram was purchased for $1 billion back in 2012, an article on the BBC News website neatly reflected the skeptical response to newly-listed Facebook’s first major acquisition: “I understand Instagram has 13 employees – so at $77m per head that makes it the most expensive business deal in history that I can think of.” Barely seven years later, Instagram is valued at around $100 billion and could be the prime driver of Facebook’s ad revenue growth in the coming years. It’s not looking so expensive anymore.

“Simply by being on Instagram, brands can make a positive impression on potential shoppers,” claims Facebook. “People surveyed say they perceive brands on Instagram as popular (78%), creative (77%), entertaining (76%) and relevant (74%).” In total, “87% [of people surveyed] said they took action after seeing product information on Instagram, such as following a brand, visiting their website or making a purchase.”

Instagram revenue fits the traditional Facebook model of placing ads in users’ feeds based on targeted data metrics as to who and where they are, and what they do and don’t do, like and don’t like. But as the primary driver behind influencer marketing, Instagram are also better placed that any other platform to monetize this new runaway industry.

Whether you contend that Instagram has democratized or demonized the marketing industry, it has certainly disrupted it. Now it threatens Amazon-like disintermediation. There has been a four-fold increase in the number of influencer posts on Instagram since 2016, and, according to Wired, the price of a post from a top-level influencer has increased ten to twenty times over the same period, to cost upwards of $100,000. “We’ve seen the [influencer] industry go from a rising marketing tactic to an essential part of most marketing budgets,” explains AdWeek.

Influencer Marketing: An Industry On Fyre

Whilst influencer marketing started with Paris Hilton, the ‘cult’ of the Kardashians and equivalent celebrities promoting to millions of followers, it soon cultivated the ‘insta-celebrity’, people famous simply for their feeds and numbers of followers. This has now morphed into the micro-influencer. Instead of millions of followers, an influencer will have tens of thousands – but in specific niches: fitness, beauty, fashion, parenting, cooking, yoga. And – now a major issue for Instagram – even more controversial subjects such as eating disorders and self-harm. This week, following reports that content had been implicated in teen suicides in the U.K., Instagram pledged to remove all such material as clamors for regulation started to ring around the industry.

Influencer marketing is not all glossy filters and carefully selected poses. There have been continual allegations of misuse and abuse. Micro-influencing has become something of a free-for-all: unregulated and unstructured, rife with bots and fake profiles, with machined likes and follows, with questionable claims that would not pass normal advertising standards. Unilever’s marketing chief made headlines last year when he called out social media influencers with inflated ‘fraudulent’ followings. And there has been a belated response from regulators to the clear circumvention of advertising rules by leading influencers who skirted around requirements to badge promotional posts through gifting arrangements.

On Monday in the U.K., the BBC aired a Panorama investigation into influencer marketing. ‘The Million Pound Selfie Sell-Off’ questioned the ethics and impact of an unregulated industry that some claim is akin to the wild west. “Advertising money is pouring into influencer marketing,” explained the program, but what are the checks and balances on what is being advertised? Especially when it is being advertised to the young. New consumers are choosing to interact with brands in new ways. And brands need to respond to that, or they risk losing out. And all this without the filtering and editing, without the material regulation and legislation that applies to more traditional platforms. Diet pills and drinks, unhealthy lifestyle choices, gambling, alcohol, self-harm. There is clearly a reliance on self-regulation across the industry – but that is unrealistic. Where the primary concern is consumer transparency, that’s one thing. But where the products can be harmful that’s quite another.

The Federal Trade Commission in the U.S. and the Competition and Markets Authority and Advertising Standards Authority in the U.K. have started to bear their teeth on influencer marketing, mandating a prominent and transparent level of disclosure and removing loopholes around ‘coincidental’ gifts from brands that have been promoted in the past. This has split the industry. Who owns up and who doesn’t? Do we differentiate between sideline earnings for a celeb or athlete from the primary earnings of a professional influencer? And what are the penalties for breaking the rules? The conundrum for influencers is that tagging posts as ads means less affinity with followers – but not doing so risks a loss of credibility.

Nothing better illustrates the perils of influencer marketing than the 2017 Fyre Festival, a Bahaman rival to Coachella that was “basically like Instagram coming to life,” according to one of those involved. Several hundred influencers promoted the event, and many took up freebie accommodation and VIP ticketing offers whilst neglecting to mention these incentives, making the social media storm seem organic. Ten supermodels, including Bella Hadid, Hailey Baldwin and Emily Ratajkowski, took to a yacht and a beach to make a now-infamous promo video. Everything was tailored to blast virally across social media.

The footage of disaster relief tents and limp cheese sandwiches in polystyrene boxes highlighted on the two documentaries now streaming on Netflix and Hulu might be funny, but millions of dollars of tickets were sold for an event that didn’t exist. The organizer, Billy McFarland, was jailed for six years and some of the influencers are being sued.

Looking To The Future

With hundreds of thousands of influencers, tools are required to identify the right one for a campaign or product, to validate the authenticity and quality of their following, to assess their reach by sector, demographic, location. Cue Facebook. If there’s one thing the company does especially, well it is using targeted data to make us click, like and buy. When the company launched its Brand Collabs Manager last year, AdWeek suggested that “the world’s largest social network just sent a clear signal that the future of advertising on its platform is influencer marketing.” AI will also come into play as the sector expands, better managing campaigns to get results, identifying the right influencers to work with, understanding reach and ROI.

Disclosure time: my partner is a micro-influencer with 30,000 followers – until recently she focused on fitness but is now shifting to ‘mummy-blogging’ with our baby due in April. As I write, I’m surrounded by packages from the brands that have sent cots and prams, clothes and accessories. I’ve now seen how the industry operates as a spider-web, agencies are linked and place one product after another, the brands have people on point, slots to be filled, firm ideas of who they want to find and how they want collaboration to come across. There’s a schedule of posts in a spreadsheet. Each one will carry the now obligatory #ad tag.

Influencer marketing has professionalized even at the micro levels. The influencer deciding exactly what and how to post dominates, but this is slowly being balanced with content plans as brands hire in-house or agency teams to manage their influencer programs. Specific influencers can now be told exactly what to post and when. For stories, the brands might send out people to film the influencer who then posts under their own account.

The question now is just as brands need to take care as to the authenticity of the influencers they use, including the true nature of their following, do the influencers also have some level of obligation to diligence the product or service they’re promoting?

Influencers would certainly benefit from demonstrating some level of discretion: “If an influencer accepts every opportunity that comes his way, no matter how much it contradicts with the previous week’s partnership and goes against their usual aesthetic, audiences will be able to spot their inauthenticity a mile off. Trust will be tarnished. Take away influencers’ trusted followers, and you take away their influencing superpowers.” For those with larger followings, this becomes the work of the agent or rep, but for the micro influencers, they need to demonstrate a level of commercial maturity that won’t be obvious to the freelancer. And this is critical because right now the micro influencers are seen as the most trusted, as the most authentic.

Resisting Temptation

Can Facebook, the ultimate influencer, resist the temptation to break Instagram, especially with no founders left to press for caution? The company has created material value by leaving the platform (superficially) alone, albeit with occasional touches on the tiller, such as with stories and ad sales. But left to its own devices, Facebook would do more, much more.

And so the first challenge for Facebook is how to manage Instagram as an increasingly critical contributor to its core performance without breaking it. The second and harder challenge is how to monetize influencer marketing as it disintermediates structured ad platforms. The opportunity is exceptional – but it won’t be easy. Facebook needs to manage Instagram without being seen to do so, and it needs to manage influencer marketing without suffocating the creatives or driving them to different platforms. Users will ultimately follow content.

The rise of the influencer and the disintermediation of traditional advertising is pushing regulators and brands to rethink their approaches. And Facebook is caught right in the middle. In an ideal world, Facebook needs to control the agenda, to professionalize influencer marketing, to play industry matchmaker at scale. But it needs to affect this trick without damaging the appeal of the platforms to the influencers and followers themselves.

For their part, influencers can expect the free-for-all ‘wild west’ to slowly come to an end – between regulators pushing for greater transparency and consumer protection on one hand, and brands pushing for more scientific data metrics and accountability on the other. Measuring the quantity and quality of engagement will become much more sophisticated and analytical. And we will also see the inevitable emergence of AI to design campaigns with near certain results. In the short term, influencers will be encouraged to demonstrate discretion in what and how to promote, to be clear with followers and to diligence the authenticity of those followers, and to play in a more competitive environment where Facebook (and others) will be able to report on the relative merits of one influencer versus another.

In the end, the challenge for Facebook is that it needs to draw Instagram closer to the core without damaging the essence of its brand, it needs to lever some control over influencer marketing without killing the buzz, and it needs to stave off the opposite pressures on its business model from regulators and investors. There is some talk that Facebook could come under regulatory pressure (or mandate) to separate – a ‘Baby Bell’ scenario for the data age. Time will tell. But in the meantime, the social media giant has its work cut out and can ill afford any missteps. This is the world of viral information and disinformation after all.

Feature Image Credit: Getty

By  Zak Doffman

Founder/CEO of Digital Barriers, providing disruptive AI and IoT surveillance technologies to defence, security and law enforcement agencies worldwide.

Find me on Twitter or Linkedin or email [email protected].

Sourced from Forbes

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