What’s With All The Interest In Influence?

An article by Buzz Internet Staff    No Comments

While doing the research to see what I was going to write about this week, I noticed that the recent buzz word among social media experts seems to be “Influence” but what does that mean in the internet marketing sector? And why does it matter?

Influence on the internet can be broken down into two basic categories: Broad Influence and Niche Influence.

Now, let’s take these different categories one by one and break them down to see what they mean, and which could be most important to your company.

Broad Influence

When I say Broad Influence, I’m talking about the sort of influence that reaches many tens of millions of people who are spread across every continent, race, religion and gender. For example, Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber currently have the two largest followings on Twitter respectively. If you were able to get them to retweet or even mention your company on their account, that tweet would be seen instantly by nearly 45 MILLION people! And that doesn’t include the people who don’t follow them but would see it on the Twitter home page or stumble across it some other way.

However, what you really need to consider is this: what percentage of Justin Bieber or Lady Gaga’s followers are going to be interested in your business, and is that number worth the time investment required to try to get them to mention you?

I’m about as far from an expert on Justin Bieber expert, but whenever I’ve seen him perform on TV the audience seems to be made up mostly of 10-15 year old girls, there are certain people there who fall outside of that group, but I think that covers the majority. I think you can see where I’m going with this, and if you have a clothing company that caters to that group, his endorsement is going to be worth any time investment a thousand times over, but if your company makes reproduction parts for muscle cars, you’re probably not going to see much return on your investment.

Niche Influence

This brings us to the type of influence online: Niche Influence. Niche Influence is what good marketing companies look for when we try to help you grow your business in the most efficient way possible. Sticking with my previous example, if we were hired to handle the online presence of the company making reproduction muscle car parts, we wouldn’t target Lady Gaga to promote our product, we’d focus more on things such as Jay Leno, Hot Rod Magazine and other places where the target audience is going to be a better approximation of your target demographic as well.

Let’s look at Jay Leno the same way we did at Justin Bieber, he also reaches a huge number of people from every conceivable race, religion and gender, but when you look at the audience of his shows you see a lot more adult men and women who I would put in the age range of 25-60. Leno probably isn’t going to reach 23 million people like Bieber would, but he’s known and respected as a car guy, and while a chunk of his audience couldn’t care less about classic cars, there’s a large portion who will hang on his every word and recommendation when it comes to anything car related.

As you can see, a large portion of a slightly smaller audience is going to lead to a better return for you than a very small portion of the larger one. This is the sort of thing that Buzz Internet Marketing Group specializes in, we’ll find the best way to optimize your online presence to make sure you get the most for your money and your time isn’t wasted on avenues that won’t get you a return on your investment.