Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

I was recently quoted as saying, “I don’t give a shit” if Instagram has more users than Twitter. If you read the article you’ll note there’s a big “if” before my not giving of said shit.

As quoted:

"If you think about the impact Twitter has on the world versus Instagram, it’s pretty significant. It’s at least apples to oranges. Twitter is what we wanted it to be. It’s this realtime information network where everything in the world that happens on Twitter — important stuff breaks on Twitter and world leaders have conversations on Twitter. If that’s happening, I frankly don’t give a shit if Instagram has more people looking at pretty pictures."

Of course, I am trivializing what Instagram is to many people. It’s a beautifully executed app that enables the creation and enjoyment of art, as well as human connection, which is often a good thing. But my rant had very little to do with it (or with Twitter). My rant was the result of increasing frustration with the one-dimensionality that those who report on, invest in, and build consumer Internet services talk about success....

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%....

I’m just going to come out and say it – no matter what the content is, if you feature influencers in it, it will do better.

I know – it’s not always what you want to hear. How come content can’t just speak for itself?

It can – sometimes.

But featuring influencers in your post is the most sure-fire way of straight up injecting content promotion into the post itself. You almost can’t fail, to be honest.

I know this from publishing over 100 posts on various blogs and consistently seeing a strong correlation between the number of influencers cited and the number of social shares and traffic the post brought in.

So, how do you go about building a post that’s built to be shared? Here’s three quick wins:...