How do marketing organizations measure or otherwise ‘know’ what the true influence is of social media influencers? The number of followers seems like an incredibly crude metric that may not get at actual influence…
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A lot of the time they don’t. However, influencers are pretty cheap compared to traditional advertising, so it’s worth the risk. Also, in the case of Youtubers, once they do a video, it stays up forever. Compared to TV, radio, newspaper, magazine ads, that disappear quickly.
The old quote about advertising is “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”
So you do a bunch of advertising, if sales go up, you keep doing that. Even if you don’t know 100% for sure that it’s the cause of the increased sales. If sales go down, you do something different.
The other option is to give influencers affiliate links, so anybody that purchases is linked back to the source. Google analytics etc can tell you where traffic is coming from.
The goal of advertising is no longer as direct as any sort of 1:1 advertisement to sale. The general goal of modern advertising is to increase the share of a product in your mind.
Assuming you are a guy you don’t use tampons for example. But if your girlfriend asked you to go buy her some I bet you would buy one of the major brands because that feels like the “default” and what is “normal” and so even though that is a product you might not ever personally need you have carved out a definition of what is acceptable in that space.
stuff like influencers are just meant to get good positive associations in your head. In some form that will someday translate to sales, but they don’t expect anything like you running out to buy the product right when you hear a youtube say it, they expect your list of options to narrow down a bit. So when you do need to buy a website your mental list of possibilities will have squarespace on it because you heard every single podcast in the last 5 years say it a trillion times. And like, wendy’s sassy twitter isn’t there to make you run out and buy cheeseburger, it’s there to make you like wendy’s and think of it sort of generally positively.
Sites like google know how many people click through ads directly from the influencers sites like Instagram. The influencers get offered brand deals which usually involve a custom url or code. And they can see the quality of their followers.
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