I’ve recently found an excellent website (listorious.com) where you can find experts on a specific topic. There I found a colleague PhD student Michael Wu that has done research on the factors of social media influence. Ifound the information very concrete and straightforward that could enrich the current information of practitioners. In this blog I will give a short overview of what he has found.

Influence: a 2-way street

Influence can only occur if there is an influencer that has the power to influence its target group AND if there is a target group that wants to be influenced.

You can gain the power of becoming an influencer when you have (1) the expertise and (2) the ability to transmit your expert knowledge through Social Media. Your information will only have influence if there is a targetgroup for that knowledge. The  likelihood that you will influence your audience depends on four factors:

  • Relevancy: the information spread should fulfil the information need of your audience. If your information is perceived as spam and irrelevant, the audience will ignore your information.
  • Timing: make sure that you spread your knowledge when your audience needs it. This is probably one of the hardest things. Luckly there are several apps such as Icerocket and Google Trends that could help you with that.
  • Channel: make sure that you’re using a social media channel that is also being used by your audience.
  • Trust: Your audience should trust you. Otherwise your info will be downgraded by the target.

If any of the above four factors are not in place, the chain of influence will be broken and your expert knowledge will not reach your audience.

Practical Implications

Micheal Wu has showed that becoming an influencer with the help of social media is hard work and the following lessons can be learned :

1)    It’s not about using as many of social media applications as possible and hoping that by spreading all the information you get, someone will might find your information valuable.
2)    It’s all about strategically using the unique features of the different social media applications to share your knowledge with a group of people that have an interest in it. The web 2.0 categorization of Anderson and the web 2.0 as marketingtool-framework of Constantinides are very useful frameworks for doing this.
3)    People will find you if your knowledge of expertise is clear. For example, if your blog, tweets and FB page discuss a broad band of topics from social media to shoe trends to pencils and the topics are not related to each other, you will scare of your audience, because it does not matches the profile of topics they were looking for.
4)    To be an influencers it’s not enough to be knowledgeable. You will also need to have the ability and the knowledge on how to best spread your knowledge through social media. If you’re only active on one channel, you will only reach that specific part of your audience that is  active on that specific channel. Therefore, you need to exactly know on which channel(s) your audience is active. If you don’t know how to use that channel, ask someone who does.  The  most important thing is that you communicate through social media channels that are being used by your audience.