5 reasons to integrate influencers into your social media strategy. (Christine’s first blog article)

If you work in PR today, there is a chance that you have or at some point will require to manage the social media of your company. Even though not all organisations invest in using social media for their PR, companies are increasingly drawn to including SM tools into their strategies. This practice is also evolving: social media managers are getting increasingly better, using concrete strategies to adapt to different audiences through SM (Charest, Bouffard & Zajmovic, 2016).

An interesting trend in this evolution is the integration of influencers as a strategy. Although targeting influencers seems to be a common practice, surprisingly enough, not a lot of companies use influencers as integral components of their social media strategy. Influencers can be used as effective catalysts for audience interaction, and can greatly help companies to better adapt content to audience needs. As a recommendation, taken from recent findings (Charest & Bouffard, 2015) here are five characteristics of influencers which make them powerful assets in the effective management of PR on social media.

  PewdiePie is a major influencer in the world of Gaming on Youtube.

1. Personality

Linking a face and a human voice to your company can be powerful for its image and for establishing relationships with your public. Influencers provide the human and affective characteristics necessary for your audience to relate to your brand or product/service. An influencer can provide opinion content which reflects his/her own personality, which is good for the credibility of your company.

2. Omnipresence

Influencers are not just present in social media, they are present in other traditional media and as a physical person. As one of the faces of what your company represents, influencers can facilitate audience participation and allows interactivity in all modes and forms of communication.

3. Substansive Content

Influencers can create content whenever they want, and are not bound by the same professional constraints than social media managers. They can also create better content, which is more rigorous and diversified, and which encourages interaction, keeping the audience interested in the conversation.

4. Credibility

You can make your company look more trustworthy by investing in influencers. The expertise and trust they inspire to the audience will transfer to your company’s image, and the fact that it comes from outside will boost credibility even more.

5. Community

Influencers are components of a community of interests, content and practice which can be directly or indirectly linked to your brand or company. They can inspire different types of audience to be drawn to different conversations, all linked back to one theme of interest, creating a diverse ecosystem around your brand/company.

In sum, we need to stop settling with targeting influencers and start actively investing in them and implementing them in our social media strategies. This can allow us to get closer to practicing two-way communication with our audiences, and to move up a level in our strategic social media management for a better and more up-to-date PR practice.

Christine Schneider: Christine is a Master student in Corporate Communications and University of Amsterdam. She took interest in corporations after studying communication and media for her bachelor’s at Brunel university in London. She now aims to become a Public Relations practitioner or consultant.