Page 30 - Social Media Marketing for Dummies

Considering the types of influencers

When discussing social media marketing, people often ask us whether this means
that they should add product review features to e-commerce websites or advertise
on social networks. Yes, product reviews and advertising are important, but
there’s more to social influence than those two things. When you think about
social influence in the context of your marketing objectives, you must separate
social influencers online into three types: referent, expert, and positional. These cat-
egories come from thinking that social psychologists John French and Bertram
Raven pioneered in 1959.

As a marketer seeking to deploy social media marketing techniques, the first
question to answer is this: Which social influencers sway your consumers as they
make purchasing decisions about your product? After you identify those social
influencers, you can determine the best ways to market to them.

Any major brand affinity or purchasing decision has referent, expert, and posi-
tional social influencers all playing distinct and important roles. Which one is most
important may vary slightly based on the purchase, but the fact remains that you
need to account for these three distinct types of social influencers in your market-
ing campaigns. If you’re a marketer trying to positively affect a purchasing deci-
sion, you must market not just to the consumer, but also to these influencers.

Referent influencers

A referent influencer is someone who participates on the social platforms. These
users are typically in a consumer’s social graph and influence brand affinity and
purchasing decisions through consumer reviews, by updating their own status
and Twitter feeds, and by commenting on blogs and forums. In some cases, the
social influencers know the consumers personally. Social graph is a term popular-
ized by Marc Zuckerburg of Facebook and is used to describe the relationships that
people may have on a social network and how they connect to one another.

Because the consumers know and trust their referent influencers, they feel confi-
dent that their advisers are also careful and punctilious. Because they’re people
they trust, they value their advice and guidance over most other people. Referent
influencers influence purchasing decisions more than anyone else at the consid-
eration phase of the marketing funnel, according to various studies.

For example, if Shiv decides to make a high-consideration purchase such as a car,
he might start by going online and discussing different cars with a few friends on
Facebook or via Twitter. And then that weekend, he might meet those friends over
coffee and carry on that discussion in person. They tell him about the cars they
like, their own purchasing experiences, and which dealerships they’ve had

14 PART 1 Getting Started with Social Media Marketing