Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

The power of word-of-mouth is amplified through social networks. These days, when you’re considering any purchase, you have an entire focus group to call upon via your smartphone any time, and that focus group isn't some random sample. These are people you care about, people you listen to and trust. These people are influencers, and through social connection, those influential voices can be virtually anyone.

And now brands are looking to tap into that potential.To get a better handle on the opportunities of influencer marketing, Tapinfluence recently commissioned Altimeter to conduct a study of more than 1,700 influencers and 100 marketers to get their insights into thecurrent state of influence and how brands can, and are, using it to advantage.

The full report contains some great insights into the growth of influencer marketing, particularly from the perspective of the influencers themselves, and they’ve incorporated the key findings into this new infographic....

Want to find key influencers in specific topic areas? You need the right tools to save you time. Find the top influencer research tools here.

But first you need to know who these influencers are.

You could hop from social network to social network, doing manual research. Or you could take the easy option and use a tool that is designed to do influencer research and get the insights that you need to leverage the power of influence.

In this post I’ve put together 8 of the best, with a range of different features and a lot of them are affordable or can be used for free....

In 2014 we can expect to see growth in influencer marketing including investment in identifying influencers and in the growth of outreach strategies to engage such influencers.According to InNetwork around $240m is spent in North America each year on influencer marketing. This is a figure we can expect to grow in 2014, partly because there is so little trust in advertising, but primarily because people trust people.

Surveys have consistently shown a low a level of trust in marketing such as advertisements, with some surveys finding up to 75% people do not believe advertisements. This is in marked contrast to recommendations from other people. The 2011 Neilson survey asked people what sources of information were most relevant to them when seeking information about products and services. The response was overwhelmingly recommendations from people. Over 90% of people felt that recommendations from friends were highly or somewhat relevant to them and 75% felt that consumer opinions posted online were were highly or somewhat relevant to them. This compared to ads on social networks being down at 36%....