In the latest episode of the Evolve to Succeed podcast, Rob Illidge—CEO of Social Republic—talks about the evolution of social media, from its early beginnings to the marketing powerhouse it is today. Social media and the rise of the ‘influencer’ can seem complex and difficult to grasp, especially because of the rapid-changing nature of the online world. In this podcast, Rob simplifies things and gives some pointers on how best to utilise this incredibly powerful tool.
Here are some highlights from the podcast.
You’ve got some really big corporate clients at Social Republic—have you seen those large organisations change their view of social media in recent years?
Yeah, certainly in the way they’re using influencers. It used to be a case of “Let’s work with anybody who’s got the most followers,” but then we started to advise them that, although you might be working with a female influencer who has a million followers and you wanted to promote a luxury handbag brand, we might actually find from research that 999,000 of her followers are actually men! So working with that sort of influencer is actually redundant because you’re not going to get the returns.
So what’s changed dramatically is brands going from mega-influencers to what we call ‘micro-influencers’. So it could be an Instagram user with less than 2,000 followers, but this person’s followers are all her friends, for example, and all engage with that piece of content and are all influenced by it and will actually take an action off the back of something she posted.
But certainly there’s been increasing spend across paid social as social networks have evolved and got better at what they do and the metrics they report on have improved. Even smaller brands have sat up and taken notice, especially during lockdown—we’ve been busier than ever these past few months because people don’t have much to do, so they’re generally going towards social media a lot more.
The term ‘influencer’ is sometimes thrown around in less than flattering terms. There’s a perception that it’s ‘not a real job’ and it’s just people getting paid to post selfies. How would you define an influencer, and if a smaller business wanted to engage with an influencer, how would they go about finding one that suits their brand?
You’ll see now that even on LinkedIn, people have their job title as ‘Influencer’ and there’s also ‘Virtual influencers’, which are CGI-created users, some of whom have over a million followers!
For me, the definition of on influencer is somebody who influences someone to take an action, so they’re recommending a particular product. And, particularly when you work in the industry, you can very quickly spot whether someone’s doing that effectively or not. It’s like when you used to advertise in newspapers—you wouldn’t put an ad in the paper just once because you can’t get traction or momentum, you can’t test it against anything. It’s the same for influencer campaigns—a lot of brands make the mistake of throwing money at influencers who they think are relevant and get them to promote their product once, gambling on the chance that whoever’s following them has seen that post and whether they’ve taken action. This is why brands are moving towards smaller, more niche influencers.
In terms of finding them, there are a lot of platforms that’ll do a lot of the research for you for free, but a lot of it is manual—simply searching for them yourself and finding a user who’s creating the content that matches your particular brand. Knowing the influencer’s audience is probably most important—who are the posts being shown to, and what is the probability that they will see them and engage with them?
What’s the first thing you look at when working with a new client or brand’s social media strategy?
Tone of voice. A lot of established brands may already have that in place, but a new company may not understand what their tone of voice is. The director might have a different idea on tone of voice in comparison to the actual business.
So look at tone of voice and how you want to be perceived by your audience and build that message in. Some really good questions to guide you would be something like, ”Who would you want to play your brand in a movie?”, “What film title describes your brand?” or “In an ideal world, which celebrity would you get to represent your brand?” This kind of puts a face to your brand and which direction you want to go in.