Pursuing and Cultivating Influentials

 

Pursuing and Cultivating “Influentials”

Call them “influentials”: they are ambassadors, tastemakers, connectors, brand

advocates, loyalists. Not all members of a fan community are equal: some are

substantially more active and boast wider reach, with bigger friend networks,

stronger reputations, perhaps an active blog readership (or even print media

readership or other bricks-and-mortar constituencies). Their opinion carries

greater weight and influence.

These influentials can make a difference, especially to a smaller, newer, or

niche-focused online community. When you are building and cultivating a social

network of customers and fans, don’t just blindly solicit everyone you can reach.

Do a little homework.

1. Search for people tweeting about your company, brands, market or industry,

rivals, or the topic you specialize in. Whether it’s beer, bras, bike tires, or

business school, your industry already has a thriving community of experts

on Twitter. Follow them.

2. Over a period of weeks, keep searching and following people that specialize

in your area of interest until you have at least 50.

3. Develop a list of the top 10 or 20 people who have the best potential to be

your brand ambassadors. These will be the Twitterers who:

a. Obviously love your brand and speak highly of it without being

prompted to.

b. Tweet frequently and do it well—with energy, authority, and

personality. Perhaps they are behind trending topics or hashtags in

your industry.

c. Have lots of followers. Ideally these followers are themselves

interested in your business; they’re active and widely followed on

Twitter. That’s the network effect!

d. Earn the most retweets and replies.

4. Actively engage with these core Twitter community members, using @

replies and retweets to commend them for good posts, or thank them for

flattering posts about your company or brand.

5. Meanwhile, post your own tweets, establishing yourself as an interesting

voice in your area of expertise. Some of these star Twitter community

members will begin following you as soon as you follow them; others may

not notice you until you retweet @ reply or otherwise engage them.

6. Once you have the beginnings of a relationship, cultivate it through

meaningful back-and-forth. Ask how you can help them. In my experience,

we have featured influentials on our blog, rewarded them with “surprise and

delight” campaigns offering free products, and reached out directly with

requests for input.

The reasons for all this microfocus on the core people who make up your Twitter

followers are as follows:

1. It’s the best way to build a community worthy of the name—not just a

faceless and disengaged list of Twitter handles, but a core circle of like-

minded people who truly feel connected with you and the larger mission ofyour brand or organization.

2. The resulting connection and passion of your follower network ensures that

when you post, your messages are more likely to be noticed, retweeted, and

replied to. This interaction extends your reach, which is the path forward to

organic growth.

In short, if at the start you do the slow, hard work of recruiting the influentials,

your community’s second-phase growth will be easier and more naturally linked

to the network effect of Twitter.

On Facebook, communication is a bit harder, since a brand or company fan page

can’t make friend requests. If you are connected as admin to the fan page,

however, you can use your personal profile to suggest that your friends “like” the

page. As of fall 2012, fans can direct-message to brand pages, and brands can

direct-message a fan—but the communication must be initiated by the fan.

Communications preferences between Facebook fans and brands are a rapidly

evolving landscape, however. Grocery store chain Fresh & Easy sometimes

performs customer service by having its Facebook admins reach out to particular

fans via their personal accounts, always identifying themselves as Fresh & Easy

employees, in order to address a fan’s question, complaint, or concern voiced on

the Facebook wall. “Some situations call for a more personal approach than what

you can do with a wall post reply,” says Nicole DeRuiter, Fresh & Easy’s social

media manager. “It blows people away when they notice the [Facebook]

message is from our brand.”

2

Here are some other ideas for finding and connecting with influential Facebook

members:

In choosing admins for your Facebook fan page, find a number of people

who are known in the industry or publicly associated with your brand. They

could use their personal profiles, but often it’s more effective and presents

less conflict if these people have separate “business” profiles that they can

reserve for their business persona.

These admins will research and seek out influential customers, critics,

journalists, and business partners and connect with them individually on

Facebook. Similar to the rules of engagement on LinkedIn, these can be

professional relationships rather than personal ones, but they all should be

people known to your admins.

Admins will then suggest that their friends “like” the page.

Meanwhile, your role as a social media manager, is to tap your consumer

database and internal industry contacts to send a direct e-mail to suggest

they “like” your page. These should be your best customers, people already

known to you, with whom you genuinely want to interact on Facebook. The

point is to build a tight network of engaged fans and brand advocates as the

heart of your online community.

Promoting Your Online Community

Facebook offers three basic ways to build your audience:

Invite friends,

Share your page, and

Employ paid Facebook advertising.

These are in order of scalability. Inviting your few hundred friends is a nice start,

but it’s only a start. Sharing extends your impact, allowing you to post about

your page on your own timeline, a friend’s timeline, in a group you belong to, or

in a private message. Again, these techniques can get a community started, but

they don’t scale—and you need to be judicious in what you share and with

whom. Never spam your friends!

With the initial alpha community established, now you want to build up a big

audience of loyal fans. Communities do reach critical mass, where the “friends

of fans” reach extends toward the million-plus mark. At that point, all you need

to do is post, and your community will grow, by hundreds of fans a day. Why?

Every post you make, assuming it has the hallmarks of good, provocative,

interactive content, will inspire a number of comments and “likes.” These

comments and “likes” are broadcast across Facebook to all the friends of fans.

The same occurs with Twitter posts that are enthusiastically retweeted.

Best practices for promoting your online community:

First, prominently display on your website the logos of Facebook, Twitter,

Google+, and YouTube or other social icons. Subtle little footer icons are

getting to be common practice, but I’d challenge you to think bigger. Take a

cue from Redbox, which dedicates a full 20% of its footer real estate. 

four square inches, to large, eye-catching icons for Facebook, Twitter, its

SMS “Text Club,” and mobile apps for iPhone and Android. Importantly,

Redbox includes a call to action (“Stay in Touch”) and a consumer value

proposition (“Preview & Reserve Movies!”).

Consider integrating those icons by using widgets or via an application

programming interface (API), so users never have to leave your website in

order to “like,” “pin,” or “follow” you.

Display those same logos in the header or footer of the e-mail newsletters

and promotional campaigns you send to your house e-mail list. Don’t forget

to do this in automatic transactional messages like shipping confirmations

as well as in your promotional e-mails.

Display social media URLs—and value propositions—in your catalog,

sales collateral, or other direct mail.

Early on, seek to do something out of the ordinary, something worthy of word-

of-mouth buzz or media mention. There’s a fine line between catchy and

gimmicky, but I must say I am a fan of novel promotional campaigns that have

cut through the noise to celebrate and reward the growth of online communities.

Here are some grassroots, low-budget, guerrilla marketing efforts that have made

a splash:

For every 1,000 “likes” it receives, Dog Bless You

(www.facebook.com/exploredogs) donates a service dog to a needy US

veteran.

British artist Greg Burney (@gregburney) pledged to draw tiny profile

portraits of his first 3,000 Twitter followers.

The guys at College Humor promised, via a YouTube video, to wear a

“beard of bees” when their Facebook page

(www.facebook.com/collegehumor) hit a million “likes.”

The first time someone does a campaign like this, it’s genius. The second time?

Ho-hum. It’s copycatting, and it has no impact. So I present these ideas not as

blueprints, but as challenges to you to think creatively.

Already it’s quite common for brands to celebrate milestones for numbers of

followers or “likes” by giving away prizes or money (usually in the form of gift

cards). I wouldn’t discourage it I do it myself for programs I’m involved with

but it is getting harder to make much of an impact with small giveaways.