The Web Influencer Discovery Report

Your Best Investment in Social Media Research

Often we can be so focused on our own blog or Facebook group or Twitter stream, that we sit back and wait for the online community to grant us authority, to favor us with their attention. Anyone who's tried that knows... the web can be a lonely place!

That's why PROsocialmedia is such a strong advocate of finding out who the top online influencers are in your market space, getting to know them, and forging long-term relationships so you can - with a lot of hard work and a smidgen of luck - get those opinion/thought leaders to favor you.

Even just one link, one positive blog post, or mention in one of their videos, can do more for your traffic and response rate than anything else. After all, legions of followers pay attention to what this Pied Piper of the web is saying!

The Top 8 Reasons you Need to Find Web Influencers in your Market

1. Types and degree of usage of social media sites can vary quite significantly from one country to the next.
2. Social media phenomena are often shifting, and it's important to know the media emerging as well as that which is already embraced in your target market's region.
3. Social media channels (tools, platforms, communities) can change fairly frequently (although that speed has slowed down in the last couple of years), so staying abreast of new communication methods is key to spending your social media budget wisely.
4. You want to stay ahead of your competitors in as many social media channels as possible. As always, being "first to market" - i.e. joining a certain channel or community before any of your main competitors do - is a big win for business.
5. Planning for the long-term: Knowing who your prime Web Influencers are means you can start setting timelines, milestones and budgets for the digital outreach work you'll be doing that year, without scrambling at the last minute to react to competitors' events, launches, etc.
6. Making friends/associates with web influencers means you'll get preferential treatment by these influencers over your competitors, who come late to the party.
7. Brand awareness - for a new, or lesser-known, brand, optimizing one's social media presence has huge payoffs: It's how folks find out about you, spread the word (if they like what they see), become "fan-sumers" of your brand, and buy your stuff.
8. E-commerce: Nowadays, people do most of their product research online - and not just by Googling; they troll for reviews and ratings by peers or strangers - really, by anyone who is as interested in the subject as they are. So having a strong social media presence - in interactive communities where folks can read others' reviews/ratings, leave their own reviews/ratings, vote on content, create content and distribute it, share, download, etc. - is a powerful way to stimulate e-commerce sales.