Understanding True Influence

Do you even know what true influence looks like? We get lost in the day-to-day of influencer marketing, where we count on people who post interesting things on social media to persuade their audiences to try and buy our products and forget the core thing we need to do … really influence people.

Does seeing a product in the hands of a person you follow on Instagram have a real impact on you? Probably not. I follow Patrick Janelle, @aguynamedpatrick, who has been a guest on the show before. His instagram feed is what I call an aspirational one. I aspire to be as stylish in my dress, home decor and what-not, as he is.

Never mind that I won’t ever be. 

But just because he wears a fancy watch or a perfectly tailored blazer or the latest comfy but snazzy dress shoes from Del Toro, or whomever, doesn’t mean I’m going to make a conscious decision to buy those products. In fact, I don’t wear a watch, and seldom wear blazers or dress shoes. 

Over time, it might be that when I’m ready to buy a new pair of dress shoes, I think, “I like what Del Toro has. Let’s go look at them.” I may never make a direct connection to Patrick, but it’ll have an effect through frequency of impressions. 

Still, that’s a fairly long-game and light form of influence. And some would say is not true influence. 

I wrote about a shining example of true influence in my book. Chapter 12 of Winfluence – Reframing Influencer Marketing to Ignite Your Brand dives into influence marketing as a proxy for what we generally know as public relations. In it, I tell the story of Naakh Vysoky. 

I’ll read the passage to illustrate true influence for you in today’s commentary. 

This episode of Winfluence – The Influence Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Tagger. It is the influence marketing software I’m using Cornett. They sponsor the show and provide us with their fantastic software to use.

I’ve told you how easy it was for me to kick out some campaign reports for the influence efforts I’m managing. Here’s all the information I have on the campaign report … and remember … I built this in five minutes using Tagger’s drag and drop report builder. But here’s all the things the client sees in either a webpage version of the report or a PDF I can kick out on a daily basis if needed:

The first page has the overall campaign performance in a succinct chart broken down by platform. So I see that this particular campaign currently has a reach of 2.4 million people and 102,000 total impressions. I see my total engagement, engagement rate and the organic lift for the content. But I see that broken down by Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and so on.

I then have a timeline chart so the brand team can see how the volume of content has hit over the last couple of months.

Page two breaks it all down by creator. So I get to see all those performance metrics by influencer. This makes it super easy to see who is performing well for us and who might need some help, paid spend to supplement their post and so on.

Next I have a list of the top Instagram posts for the campaign and their corresponding metrics, then Facebook. Then YouTube … you get the picture.

The drag-and-drop data options allowed me to build the report my client wanted and finds useful in a matter of minutes. You can have that too if you switch to Tagger.

You can see more at jasonfalls.co/tagger. Tagger is the new influencer marketing campaign software of choice for me. I hope it will be for you, too.

Note: Photo by Nina Strehl on Unsplash

The Winfluence theme music is “One More Look” featuring Jacquire King and Stephan Sharp by The K Club found on Facebook Sound Collection.

---