The cover header in my LinkedIn profile is from a talk I gave five years ago about the science behind social influence. It was in sunny Prague, at the Socialbakers Engage conference, and later at Marketing Week in Athens, Greece. At both events, I was excited to talk about the science behind social influence, and a methodology I developed (using Brandwatch data and Tableau) to map influencers, and to better assess which talent and content creators to work with for successful campaigns.
That was 2018. A lot has changed since then. TikTok happened, along with the speedy rise in short video creation and consumption. Social tools have changed too, including the very company whose event I spoke at (Socialbakers is now Emplifi). Mergers, acquisitions, and changes have taken place in the social MarTech space. While much of what I discussed in my talk is still relevant today, there’s a lot of new interesting behaviour that warrants a quick update.
The Rise of Content Curators
Back in 2018, the main way to categorise influencers besides their subject matter was by the size of their audience (e.g., micro-influencers having an audience of 10K-100K followers). While that is still somewhat valid, there’s now a more nuanced way to classify influencers: content creators vs content curators.
Content curation is the process of discovering, gathering, and presenting relevant and valuable content to your audience. It involves sifting through the vast sea of information and handpicking the best pieces that align with the interests and needs of their target audience. It takes great skill to take the best of your niche and curate content that you know will strike a chord with your audience — be it with a like, a comment, a share, or even a screenshot to get back to later.
This trend of content curators exploded on TikTok last year, and it’s still going strong in 2023, and I can see why — it’s an excellent way to stand out from the crowd.
Why it Matters
If you’re researching an overly saturated topic, start with the communities around content curators. They offer valuable social intel on audience habits, brand preferences, and emerging trends. Tools like Buzzsumo, with its influencer database across Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok, can be a great starting point.
The Emergence of De-Influencers
De-influencing, an antithesis to traditional influencer marketing, is still going strong after peaking in 2022 and early 2023. This is partly linked to how social platforms like TikTok and Instagram are the new avenues for search and consumer consideration. De-influencers aim to promote conscious buying choices, limit overconsumption, and address the environmental impact of people’s purchase choices. They provide honest reviews of overhyped products and advocate for transparency and accountability.
Why it Matters
The ramifications of this trend are outlined in this excellent post from 10 Yetis Digital.
As a researcher, I’ll add this tip: if you have access to a social monitoring or social listening tool, I always recommend building a “crisis query” and segmentations with negative keywords and hashtags that may pop up eventually. For example, I recommend adding keywords like #boycott*, to stay ahead of future potential crises). While “boycott” is just one example, you should definitely add # deinfluenc*, today. As in, right now. Set an alert to make sure that if these mentions start appearing for your brand, you can be ahead of that curve to monitor what’s going on and assess what needs to be done.
Social Overlap and Multi-Platform Usage
Back in 2018, and the years before that, I would often overhear conversations between community managers and marketers about “hiring an Instagram influencer”, or “collaborating with a Twitter influencer for an event that need to be live-tweeted”. While I’m sure that some of those conversations still happen today, it’s worth noting that the average social media user is active on six or seven different social media platforms, resulting in significant content overlap. It’s common for consumers to follow the same influencers across multiple platforms, expanding their sphere of influence.
Why it Matters
The fact that we use multiple social media platforms isn’t a new trend — that number goes up year after year. The fact that we follow many of the same content creators across multiple platforms isn’t a groundbreaking trend either — we know it, we see it, and we experience it in the way we consume social media and in the ways we’re influenced by it. This update is more of a reminder: if you have a social intelligence stack, it’s time for a deep review. I covered part of this in yesterday’s post about setting up a social intelligence capability. Still, in a nutshell, it’s time for a review based on today’s social landscape and MarTech landscape:
- Social landscape: where do you have an organic presence, i.e., people mentioning you, even if you don’t have an account there? How have recent new or changed social features changed the way people talk about you, e.g., are there new Twitter Communities popping up, where people exclusively talk about your brand or your category? Is part of your audience migrating to alternative platforms — and is part of your organic presence leaving with them?
- Tech landscape: with changes in API access from platforms like Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook, how will your access to their data change (whether you collect data manually through an API or a social MarTech tool)? Will you get more or less data? Will you get different metrics, or will your data provider shut down some of these features because of these changes?
These are just a few examples of questions you should get some answers and clarity on, even if the answer is “we don’t know yet, but we’re working on it”. I invite you to have a conversation with your customer success managers for the Social MarTech tools you rely on, especially for social intelligence research.
(Sidenote: while I focus a lot on research, I invite you to do the same for any social MarTech tool you use — be it for influencer management or social media management, social publishing or content scheduling, etc.)
Thankfully, many social MarTech providers keep their customers regularly updated with a changelog and product release notes, either on their site (e.g., Hootsuite), or through regular emails — or sometimes both. Either way, there’s no better time than now to figure out how the changing landscape of social media and social tools will affect how you report on social influence, and what that will mean for you.
Sure, the landscape of social influencer marketing is ever-evolving, but in a way, that’s also what keeps it exciting. Lastly, if you’re looking for more info and research on consumer behaviour, influencer marketing, and social media usage, I highly recommend checking out GWI’s latest reports on those topics: gwi.com/reports
