Social media is one of the strongest marketing means of today. The powerful media completely revolutionized people’s lives, how everyone connects with others, and how they perceive brands. With 3.78 Billion people using social media, it is undoubtedly a great place for businesses to launch their products, for people to create meaningful relations, and of course, for influencers to build their presence.
Influencers and digital celebrities are one way for brands to reach millions at a time and even increase their ROI by 11 times! They help channel the voice of various brands into more relatable terms when it comes to internet denizens. And, because about 50% and more of each generation use social media, brands can target almost any age group, gender, community, and more. So, having someone advertise a product that people look up to, as in the case of influencers, the chance of success is very high.
Hence, to make it more understandable, here are the complete details of how influencer marketing is revolutionizing social media. But first, who are influencers?
Who are influencers?
There isn’t a strict definition when you want to understand influencers, but anyone with a large, loyal audience that regularly checks on them and the stuff they post can be considered as an influencer. Now, they can have varying rates of success.
Various influencers are already celebrities on the big screen, or actors, singers, and more like Taylor Swift or Beyonce, while others built their presence through social media itself. They can be Youtubers, Instagrammers, or internet bloggers. Most celebrities, famous athletes, digital celebrities, brand ambassadors, and bloggers also identify as influencers.
Recent statistics by MuseFinds show that 92% of people tend to trust social media influencers
over traditional celebrities. One best way to use influencer marketing today is getting hooked to a great influencer marketing software like SocialBook. It helps find the best influencers for you so that you can collaborate and manage influencers easily. It aids you in running efficient influencer marketing campaigns along with measuring performance and increasing your ROI!
How social media is changing owing to influencer marketing
Naturally using influencer marketing software, brands can easily leverage the power of influencers and increase their outreach, hence, essentially changing the face of social media. See how social media has changed over time with the dawn of influencer culture:
Facebook reigns supreme for marketing
Facebook was all the buzz back in time when people migrated to the platform to connect with friends, family, and people around the globe and check on them. It still is the platform of choice for many to stay aware of their loved ones, but lately, its fundamental essence has shifted from a chatting and photo-sharing platform to a market platform.
Facebook saw a lot of changes with the coming of Facebook ads, sponsored or boosted posts, and now it’s witnessing a lot of change due to Facebook Marketplace, too.
Yes, it continues to be a platform for having fun with your acquaintances, but majorly brands are using it to reach a higher audience in both B2B and B2C industries. Influencers and celebrities use it to promote their personal brands or add in the word of favor to share other brands. Facebook influencers command 46% of purchases made through Facebook due to them and aiding to market to the 48.5% B2B marketers on Facebook.
Making up for ad-block technology
Social media started as a great place to know what’s going around the world, engaging with family and followers or some entertainment. But soon, ads toom over, resulting in users being bombarded with countless adverts taking away the fun from using social media. Yes, ads are great for marketers but not so much when you are trying to listen to some comforting music and have to deal with non-relevant stuff for five precious seconds. People got smart and installed ad-blockers, once again changing social media.
Needless to say, influencer marketing came up as an effective way to make up for blocked ads because peer-to-peer advertisement is much better than a brand ad hogging up your screen space. Consequently, intelligent social media solutions rely today on influencer marketing more than ads. It provides visibility to brands and helps them reach already niched audiences of bloggers or influencers.
Making content king
Remember the times when brands and companies used to buy tons of followers, views, and likes? It may have worked for some time, but it isn’t quite feasible in the long run. Witnessing the unflinching loyalty of influencer followers, big companies on social media understood the meaning of high-value content and engagement. Today brands and even celebrities take notes from influencers. They have started engaging with their audience. Posting content with value is preferred to win over followers rather than buying bots.
Additionally, social media now highly values the say of the audience, and that is how various brands and influencers create their content. Social media is just isn’t a place to post but more of a site to gather analysis and learn what your niche audience loves more.
Instagram to build influence
Now that it is evident that influence is building and not purchased, platforms like Instagram and Snapchat have gained a lot of popularity to enhance influence. Thanks to fun features like the audience being able to ask questions through stories, participate in polls, surveys, and more, influencers feel closer to their audience than ever. The data of these polls are readily made available to the content creators making it highly accessible to see how content impresses people.
Insights and accessible analysis on social media are helping almost everyone to extend their outreach now without much knowledge of complicated social media strategies. Hence, social media has completely changed how celebrity statuses are perceived and helped build closely-knit communities of creators and fans.
Interesting related article: “What is Digital Marketing?“