Measure Your Influence

As of this writing, the nearly century-old media measurement company Nielsen is preparing to take a new tool to market that will attempt to provide accurate information about media consumption across screens and platforms. Nielsen claims its Total Audience Measurement Tool will be able to track media consumption on mobile devices as well as on television sets. The company has even partnered with Facebook to glean more demographic information from people who consume content on their mobile devices, matching viewers’ self-reported demographic information (i.e., age, sex, geography, and other characteristics) with their viewing habits.¹

Why should you care about measuring media consumption habits? Simple: Because it is now up to you to do just that for your audiences. What Nielson is only now preparing to do, you should already be doing for your brand’s engagement channels. Otherwise, there’s no way to know if what you’re doing works, if your messages are reaching their intended targets, or if you need to change your strategy.

Remember that just like mass media outlets, you have the power to affect and influence those who consume your content. That makes you an influencer. And that has value.

Although you may not yourself enlist Nielsen to research your audiences and influence, there are now many tools available that you can employ to learn more about the desires, interests, and characteristics of your audiences, people who are either current or potential clients, as well as customers or employers. The most common and reliable tool used to measure reach and engagement online is analytics data. Happily for entrepreneurial journalists and other creative professionals, there are numerous sources of analytics data available to those who use social media and have an online presence.

We discuss search engine optimization and Google Analytics in detail in Chapter 10. For now, simply consider the value of your influence online in terms of what you may want to do with it. While you start at zero on every social network and in every community, over time, especially if you become and remain an active participant on these platforms, you will build your community of followers.

Figure 8.2 Influence is about more than just numbers.

Credit: Shutterstock ID#217152226

While increasing followers is key to spreading your influence, and with it, awareness of your brand, keep in mind that numbers alone don’t tell the whole story. Increasingly, as more individuals and institutions around the world sign onto social media to compete for attention and media consumers’ limited time, engagement becomes a more important measure of success than mere numbers.

For the most part, social media engagement is great for brands. However, not all social media platforms are equally valuable to all brands. And success means different things on different platforms. Even within a particular social media platform, success may be difficult to measure.

One can have thousands of followers on Instagram while receiving only a small number of likes on the typical image she posts. That might show that while the community is large, engagement is low. This is important to understand if you hope to increase the impact of your messages. Simply reaching people without engaging them points to wasted time and resources. Why spend both attracting followers who will never show the slightest interest in your brand? It just doesn’t make sense.

In recent years, social media platforms including Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter changed their algorithms to promote engagement while attempting to marginalize spammers by reducing the visibility and reach of their messages. This is part of a larger movement across social media to emulate and increase human interaction to support a more authentic experience for legitimate users. The reason for this is simple: Since the earliest days of social media, individuals and organizations have found new ways to exploit the medium for profit, frustrating legitimate users and degrading everyone’s online experience.

In June 2016, Instagram reorganized the way posts appear in users’ feeds to favor engagement and, the app’s developers argued, to increase the likelihood that users would see posts that were more relevant to them. Among Instagram’s explanations for changing its algorithm was its argument that users missed a large number of posts they would find relevant when they appeared chronologically. By favoring posts with more likes and comments, Instagram pushed users to post higher quality content that would receive more likes and comments. For users to find audiences, simply posting content was no guarantee they’d be noticed, or their posts viewed, liked, and shared.

Although there was much concern and consternation about the algorithm changes when they first went into effect, they did not ultimately prove as damaging as many had initially feared. Like with most technology changes, people were slow to accept, and the issue soon disappeared from tech blog headlines. The bottom line is that engagement is the new measure of social media success. Presenting a brand in any way that could be perceived as spammy could prove fatal.

Leverage Your Influence Through Partnerships

You already know that if you have followers on social media, you are an influencer. That’s great news. However, you may actually need to reach more people in order to achieve your branding objectives. While it’s essential to continue to expand and cultivate your social media identity, you may eventually need to leverage your current reach by partnering with another influencer.

Figure 8.3 Leverage your own brand by partnering with others.

Credit: Shutterstock ID#316493429

While partnering with social media influencers isn’t difficult, it can be difficult to determine the right partners. Although it’s not an exact science, choosing social media partners is a delicate process. Selecting an online or social media partner is about more than just the number of each party’s followers, and whether a particular brand has an acceptable reputation. It’s mostly about determining how each brand can help the other. This is a nuanced idea. It requires an in-depth knowledge of your brand and audience, as well as those of potential partners.

First, let’s consider the matter of complementary focus. How do you determine what kind of social media accounts would align well with your brand? There are at least a couple ways to approach this. The obvious strategy would be to approach accounts that are similar to yours. If you are an advertising copywriter, reach out to other advertising copywriters. If you are a social media manager, reach out to other social media managers. This approach makes a certain amount of sense. If you are involved in the same business type, the fit may seem natural. In fact, there’s likely some overlap between your followers and audiences. But this isn’t wholly advantageous. In fact, if the overlap in audiences is significant, there may not be much for either party to gain.

You want to choose a partner whose brand resonates with a similar audience, but that does not compete directly with your brand. For instance, it may not make much sense for two brands that sell content marketing solutions to forge a partnership. Because the services they offer are the same, instead of potentially increasing the profile and sales potential of each, the brands may cannibalize each other.

Let’s assume, for instance, that you’re a freelance social media manager, offering potential clients content creation and management services. Instead of partnering with someone in the same line of work, you may want to partner with a designer who specializes in creating logos for online entrepreneurs or building websites—or with people who do both. Partnering with other creatives who offer services to similar audiences might allow you to offer special deals to customers who could be convinced to bundle services (i.e., logo and Web design, content creation, social media management) to save money and increase efficiency. It can also mean increased sales or growing client lists for both parties.

Now let’s consider the degree of influence or number of followers. An ideal social media partner has slightly more influence than you do. This means they may have a few hundred more followers than you do, but not a few thousand more. If a potential partner has too few followers, their value to you is limited. Always look ahead to those who are more influential or more successful at getting the word out about their business. As a general rule in business, keep your focus forward, concerned with those you admire or would like to learn from instead of on competitors coming up from behind.

Don’t forget that leveraging social media influence is a two-way street. While others’ social media profiles can bolster your own, it’s important to keep in mind that you also must also have something to offer. This means you should expect to grow a solid social media following before approaching others for partnership. How big a following is needed is up to you, although 1,000 is a good minimum for most platforms.

Let’s take the example of an Instagram partnership. Perhaps you have 1,000 followers. You’re not likely to get the attention of someone with 30,000 followers. With 30 times as many followers, they don’t stand to gain much from partnering with you. Instead, look for people with 1,500 or 2,000 followers. The relationship is more equal and there’s much more upside potential for both of you if your number of followers is similar.

An additional challenge is the fact each social network operates differently, which means that partnerships on one platform may not logically extend to partnerships in another. Each social network and the devices people use (i.e., desktop or laptop computers, tablet computers, mobile phones) claim different shares of various user demographics. For instance, core Facebook and Twitter users skew older, while millennials gravitate toward mobile apps such as Snapchat, and social media users around the world favor apps that may not be as well known in the West.

Unless you’ve identified potential partners independent of the platforms on which they reside, it may make more sense to start with the platform, then research potential partners for each. Don’t forget that partnership is about mutual benefit. While you hope a social media partnership will bring more reach and exposure for your brand, you want the other party to get something out of it as well.

While it’s impossible to completely control the way your brand is received online (such things as who follows your brand, or who likes your posts or official Facebook page), you can control the associations you make on behalf of your brand. Consider the following example of how this might work.

A graphic designer who creates logos and a Web designer may wish to partner on a more professional platform such as Facebook or LinkedIn pages, where they can cross-promote each other’s services through links, testimonials, and discounts or package deals for potential customers of each or both creatives.

That same graphic designer may also wish to target a younger demographic by cross-promoting on Instagram. Let’s imagine a partnership between the graphic designer and an indie rock band. Both have Instagram accounts, and each can promote the other simultaneously, reaching both their own followers and each other’s. The graphic designer posts on Instagram a photo or video of herself holding up a poster for the band that promotes an upcoming show, and provides a link to the band’s Instagram account. The band can then post a photo or video of the poster, crediting its designer and providing a link to her Instagram account.

This kind of cross-promotion not only leverages the reach of both accounts, but it also creates a sense of goodwill and strong positive associations for both the designer and the band, who appear to have promoted other people instead of themselves. The social media community rewards users who seem selfless or who promote others before themselves. Ironically, this kind of “selfless” promotion actually winds up doing more to promote the self than more direct attempts. This is why forging social media and online partnerships is such a valuable strategy for entrepreneurial creatives.

What follows are some other examples of types of creatives who could find synergy on social networks.

• Entrepreneurial journalists, content creators, text and video editors, Web developers, live streamers, social media managers, graphic designers
• Invitation designers, wedding photographers, videographers, clothing designers, florists, event planners
• Graphic designers, bands, event planners, custom printers
• Content creators, social media managers, Web developers

From these examples, it should be easy to see how synergies among creatives can help with cross-promotion by leveraging the audiences of each. This is the beauty of thoughtful partnerships.

Despite the obvious upsides, you’ll want to explore all the implications of a particular partnership before entering into it. This isn’t just about avoiding associations with disreputable brands and online identities. It’s also about maintaining a clear branding message. It’s difficult enough to quickly convey ideas clearly online and through social media, where attention spans are notoriously short. Muddying your brand message by partnering with an individual or company that has no logical connection to your brand could mean the difference between recognition and confusion, between a possible new lead and a quick dismissal by someone who sees a lack of coherence or professionalism.

Protect Your Influence

Although it is often among the milder concerns of individuals and companies on social media, associating your brand with other brands or individuals that are highly politicized or connected with controversial ideas or concepts could potentially undermine your brand. For the same reason a brick-and-mortar business would be wise to avoid planting campaign signs in its front lawn, it is wise to avoid possibly turning off customers or clients by taking a political stance, even in a passive way.

Of course in the highly connected and ever changing world of the Internet and social media, it’s impossible to prevent all possible negative associations. Further, problems may appear long after you have connected your brand to a social media account or identity. You can’t control everything—particularly others’ behavior.

For example, you accepted another Pinterest user’s invitation to post content on their popular board, “Places to Visit Things to Buy.” At some point after you started posting content on the board (and months before a presidential election in the United States), someone changed the board’s cover image to a picture of two prominent American Democrats surrounding the text “STOP ELECTING IDIOTS.” This created an association between the political ideas expressed through the board and your brand, which you have probably worked hard to keep apolitical.

While leveraging your reach by partnering with other people (often strangers) is a key social media strategy, it does come with some risk. That said, there is some risk involved in every public interaction you have online. Companies that are too risk averse to fully engage in the online world or that try too hard to control their online presence miss out on some of the Internet’s best features, including global interactivity and engagement.

Further, if a company is too controlled in its social media management, presenting only a corporate face and refusing to fully engage, potential clients, customers, and followers will be turned off and may disengage as a result. Smart organizations and individuals understand that the beauty and strength of social media and online interactivity is the fact that users, customers, and fans can engage with and develop connections to individuals and brands in ways they were not able to in the days before social media. In other words, you can’t win if you don’t play.

Make the Connections

Figure 8.4 You may not understand Snapchat, but you can’t afford to ignore it.

Credit: Shutterstock ID#427370260

Just because you build a professional blog, maintain active social media accounts or consistently distribute targeted content doesn’t mean your audiences will be able to find any of it. Even if it is readily available, your content needs to be both compelling and easy to access. That’s what marketing is all about. Keep in mind that while you are probably active on several social media platforms, the norms, limitations, and expectations of each is different, as are their respective audiences. Because some social media platforms, like Facebook and Twitter, are losing market share as younger uses gravitate to more real-time apps like Snapchat, simply targeting one or two platforms with which you are comfortable will likely prevent you from reaching large swaths of potential followers (and ultimately clients and customers).

Keep in mind that you may not be the target demographic for your own brand. Just because Snapchat may frustrate or annoy you does not mean you can ignore the platform completely. In a 2015 Slate article, “Is Snapchat Really Confusing, or Am I Just Old?: A 32-year-old’s Hopeless Quest to Understand America’s Fastest-growing Social App,” technology writer Will Oremus observed that Snapchat’s user interface can be tolerated only by those 25 or younger.² But that doesn’t mean he, at 32, could ignore it.

Essentially a photo messaging app for your smartphone, Snapchat’s defining characteristic is that its messages disappear after a few seconds. The app is famously popular with millennials, who remain its majority users. There are now more than 60 million daily Snapchat users in the United States and Canada.³ If North American millennials are any part of your marketing strategy, you can’t afford to ignore Snapchat. If you can’t find a way to incorporate it into your social media marketing strategy, hire a millennial employee or intern you trust to take care of it for you. While this may sound like the bad advice CEOs received years ago, instructing them to hand the social media reins over to the interns since no one was paying attention anyway, at least with Snapchat, messages that don’t quite align with your brand quickly disappear.

It now almost goes without saying that each time you post a new blog entry, video, photo, podcast, or anything at all, you should be using sharing tools to maximize your content’s reach. The more you can cross-market and cross-post your content, the more exposure you will generate for your brand. Most hosting platforms now offer built-in solutions for publishing posted content on other platforms, and countless plugins (add-ons to your basic site software) will do everything from sharing content on a schedule to prompting visitors to sign up for e-newsletters or create loyalty accounts for special perks. WordPress.com offers its own built-in plugins, which provide simple stats (a stripped-down version of Google Analytics) and search engine optimization among other basic tools. If you use WordPress.com, enable the Publicize tool to share the content you post to your Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Path, or Event-brite accounts. Set up Publicize by going to your WordPress dashboard, clicking on “My Site,” then “Sharing.” There you will be prompted to connect your social media accounts.

If you host your own site (instead of using a free WordPress.com site), you can choose from more sophisticated plugins, including options for more comprehensive search engine optimization and analytics, ecommerce, and other resources for increasing the effectiveness of your communications, improving your reach, and growing your community of followers. To find the plugins that are available for your blog or site, simply google “WordPress.com plugins,” “Shopify plugins,” or “plugins” + “your software (replace this with the name of your site software or host).”

Make a Plan

Even if you don’t use Hootsuite to manage your social media content distribution, you can refer to the Hootsuite blog for helpful resources. Hootsuite does exactly what it tells its users to do: Create useful content and make it available for free for those who may find it valuable. Although there’s no expectation that you will become a paying Hootsuite customer if you find the company’s content useful, you will likely develop positive feelings about the company for the free value it provides. Then later, if you find yourself looking for a company to assist with your social media campaigns, Hootsuite will probably come to mind.

The 2016 Hootsuite blog post “Six Social Media Templates to Save You Hours of Work”⁴ provides an excellent example of useful free content. This post, by Evan LePage, offers downloadable PowerPoints and templates to help you track and manage your social media posts and campaigns. You may find No. 4, Hootsuite’s Social Media Planner, particularly useful. For each day, this customizable spreadsheet lists times and social media platforms on the Y axis, and on the X axis, it provides space to add each post title, its contents, the link, and (to complete later) the number of clicks it receives. Download the Social Media Planner here:

• https://blog.hootsuite.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Social-Media-Content-Calendar-Template-January-2015.pdf

Automate Incoming Content

Now that you’ve established that you are, in fact, an influencer, and that your time has value, your next task should be determining how to make the best use of your power of influence given your finite resources. One of the best things about being an influencer on social media and online is that, assuming you have a smartphone and a fast, reliable Internet connection, achieving online influence is free. The greatest cost to you is time. (It may, though, cost you a little money to save time by using tools like the content automators over the next few pages.)

For most people, the idea of distributing content is every bit as daunting as creating or curating it. For those who also work other jobs, this can be a particular challenge, rising to the level of a job in itself. Even those for whom running and marketing their own business is their day job may struggle to get it all done. To keep the task from eating up all their time, they maintain a content marketing schedule, and automate at least part of the distribution process to get the job done. You, like them, need a plan.

Figure 8.5 Don’t waste hours every day looking for content. Automate the process.

Credit: Shutterstock ID#164143403

We established the utility and importance of curating content in the last chapter. The question we consider here is where to find content to curate, and how to build the curation process into your daily routines so that finding and disseminating it is less time-consuming than creating content from scratch, and distributing each post, podcast, photo, pin, or video individually. Without a streamlined process and go-to sources of reliable content, curation could start to interfere with the business or brand it is intended to support. Keep in mind that your time is likely your most valuable resource as an entrepreneur. Despite the common expression, you can’t simply make more time.

A good content marketing plan will keep you from wasting time casting about for content every morning or even every day. Although your content marketing plan can take any form, at the very least it should outline steps you plan to take at designated times each day (and probably each week and month) to find, gather, curate, and distribute content. You probably already have a few go-to sites, apps, podcasts, or even newspapers or radio stations you rely on for daily news. Keep checking these and other news feeds covering topics that align with your brand. What follows are some resources that can help.

BuzzSumo (http://buzzsumo.com/) is an online research tool that allows for sophisticated searching. Type in keywords and timeframes to find content aligned with your brand and relevant to your audience and community. You can filter them by type, separating written content from images, videos, and infographics. Content is shown in ranked order based on how extensively it was shared on social networks. You can then select stories or items to share based on their popularity across social networks.

Reddit (https://www.reddit.com/) has been around for a long time (more than a decade, which is an eternity in the Internet era). Although the interface is clunky and old, Reddit, which resembles an online bulletin board from the 1990s, remains a useful tool for finding trending topics online. Popularity of Reddit posts increase or decrease based on upvotes and downvotes from the community. Like BuzzSumo, Reddit is a search engine for online content. But it’s more than that. Both highly personal and democratic, Reddit is a passionate community of committed users. That means news can be skewed when the community takes ownership of a particular issue. Keep this in mind when you’re searching for stories.

Feedly (https://feedly.com/i/welcome) is a good resource for collecting and reviewing fresh content from around the Web. You can create a free account and set up alerts for topics related to your brand. Each topic includes information on specific content sources, including the number of readers, how many articles the source produces each week, and whether the content is delivered in abstract form or at full length. Simply choose a topic (i.e., news, food, tech, design, startups), and select among several feeds for each. Select which sources you would like to follow, and as new content becomes available from each source, it will appear in your Feedly feed. This way you can simply select all the sources that may provide useable content, and scan them in one place. The process is simpler and less-time consuming than randomly searching the Web for potentially relevant or useable content.

Pocket (https://getpocket.com/), a Chrome browser extension, is also a great way to collect content online, and access it from various devices. Pages and posts saved to your Pocket get synced across your devices running Chrome. When you find relevant content online, you can save it to your Pocket, then return to it later, when you’re ready to curate it for your own audiences.

Scoop.it (http://www.scoop.it/) functions similarly, as does Curata (http://www.curata.com/). Compared to its competitors, Curata has less of an indie feel. Its website conveys a notably corporate interface, focused on marketing and sales. As of this writing, the Curata home page emphasizes sales, specifically mentioning “supply chain.”⁵

Google Alerts (https://www.google.com/alerts) is another way to bring potentially relevant content to you instead of having to spend time searching for it. Google Alerts allows you to choose keywords and create an RSS feed that will deliver items containing your keywords to your email address.

Sites that highlight original content may provide more consistently high-quality content. For example, Medium (https://medium.com/) is an attractive repository of mostly thoughtful blog entries. Medium is searchable, and includes collections of related content that you may return to regularly for content relevant to your brand.

Instead of actively searching for content that may be relevant to your audience, you can automate the search process using a tools such as Content Gems (https://contentgems.com/), which filters content on the Internet and social media for the search terms you select, then emails it to you in a digest. You can then pick and choose which items you would like to bring to your own audience.

Automate Outgoing Content

Now that you know where to find online content, you may want to consider how to disseminate it without letting it take over your life. With all the social media platforms and options now available, strategic distribution of content is not only important but also necessary given the increasing time commitment. Without efficiency, one can easily find themselves lost in an ongoing quest to continuously post the right images, videos, text, and other information to the appropriate networks. It can consume entire days.

There are now a large number of apps available for those who would like to automate content across social media platforms and the Web. Hootsuite (https://hootsuite.com/) may be the most famous and the most established. (It was founded all the way back in 2008, the dark ages of social networking!) Hootsuite allows you to schedule and automate posts to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Google+. Hootsuite offers a free plan and four paid plans, each allowing progressively more uses, shares, posts, analytics, and other functions.

Others content automators include:

• Buffer (https://buffer.com/)
  • Integrations: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest
  • Membership levels: 5, including a free option

• SocialOomph (https://www.socialoomph.com/)
  • Integrations: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Pinterest, RSS feeds, blogs, and Taiwan’s Plurk
  • Membership levels: 2, free and professional

• SproutSocial (http://sproutsocial.com/)
  • Integrations: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google+
  • Membership levels: 3, none free (although they do offer a free 30-day trial)

Influence the Influencers

Influencers are (at least on social media) bold and confident. They aren’t pushy or demanding, but they stand by their online content, and they’re not shy about promoting it. After all, they need to assume they have something important to share with their audiences—and they do. There’s no reason to be shy about that. The only catch is that they must be mindful of what they do share, carefully balancing promotional content with a much larger proportion of useful or interesting non-promotional content.

While social media influencers must promote their brand without reservation or hesitation, they must be careful to not be perceived as self-promoters. Instead, they should be seen as purveyors of relevant, high-quality content. By providing useful content to their audiences and followers, their brand will quickly become indispensable. People will seek out the brand based on useful content the brand has delivered in the past. (Consider the Hootsuite example in the previous pages.)

In recent years, an entire cottage industry has grown up online to serve the needs of individuals and small companies looking to promote their homegrown brands. The smart people who have created sideline consulting and branding businesses to augment their own e-commerce businesses may understand the rule of relevant content better than anyone else. Although the technique is hardly new to sales, these online consulting firms are huge proponents of the strategy that encourages potential new clients to sample a certain amount of relevant content for free in the hope that clients and customers will then eagerly pay for more.

Figure 8.6 Influence the influencers by teaching what you’ve learned.

Credit: Shutterstock ID#352387571

These new professional online influencers are some of the best creators and distributors of relevant social media content anywhere. They understand online branding better than almost anyone because they’ve worked hard from the early days of social media to promote their own brands. They were early adopters, and they learned the lessons of those on the vanguard of emerging technology. In most cases, they found partners and professional groups early on that helped them leverage their own influence by combining it with others’.

Because the online marketplace is now so crowded, these Internet influencers understand that the lessons they learned promoting their brands are highly in demand among others now hoping to achieve similar success. They are, in other words, some of the Internet’s most successful influencers. But they won’t be the last. Although you may be far from being able to promote yourself as an online branding coach, you can still apply the lessons of these online influencers to promote your own brand and perhaps someday become a powerful influencer of other influencers.