Declining effectiveness and ad receptivity, media fragmentation and a proliferation of ways to communicate with consumers continue to present a major challenge for marketers.

Influencer networks and algorithms appear to offer a helpful shortcut to navigate this territory, but how good are these tools at helping brands make meaningful connections with consumers? At Magnetic’s Spark conference in September we explored the role of human connections and the importance of trusted expertise as drivers of success in the new influencer ecosystem.

The anatomy of an influencer

Nick Southgate is one of the leading practitioners in the emerging field of applied behavioural thinking. Earlier this year he worked with Time Out to help them define what makes an influencer, the role they play in amplifying messages and the key attributes that make them a trusted source of information, or not.

The work found that there are two distinct type of influencers; Makers and Shakers. Shakers have very large social networks, enjoy helping others, actively provide advice and are confident in their opinions. 

Makers have smaller, but still substantial, networks but are much more passionate and knowledgeable about specific topics. The research found that Makers are more likely to have an impact on the decisions others take as they are seen to provide a trusted source of expertise.

These findings were further quantified by work done by Starcount for Magnetic which explores the new influencer economy. 

#LFW #MagMedia #Leader

Inspired by TimeOut we were keen to further understand magazine media’s role in driving and influencing social media conversations. We teamed up with 2CV to work on a unique project around London Fashion Week (LFW) – taking place the same week as our Spark conference.

In the first instance we identified all 350,000 social media authors who participated in LFW conversations during February 2016. This was distilled down to a list of the 50,000 most impactful authors which in turn was used to create magazine media and a blogger author groups. To draw comparisons on reach, influence and impact of each, we created our dataset based on the top 50 authors for each group.

The bloggers created a much larger volume of content than magazine media, but the data showed that people were 4x more likely to engage with the magazine media content. The trust they placed in the content reflected by the fact that people posted 8.5x more links to magazine media content on twitter than was the case for the bloggers.

Approach to content was vastly different between the two groups. Magazine media content was outward facing and brand centric, were the bloggers content was more internally focussed.

Despite the head start bloggers seemed to enjoy with size of their follower base and volume of content generated, the high level of engagement and active reposting of  magazine media content saw both groups reach 12 million people during fashion week.