1-2: The Mercedes-Benz Take The Wheel campaign.
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 categories 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.
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 popularized 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 confident 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 consideration 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 experience with. This influence is considered referent influence because these friends sway him by the strength of their charisma and interpersonal skills, and they have this sway because he respects them. What’s worth pointing out, though, is that the friends whom he knows to be most informed about cars will probably influence him more than the others.
Expert influencers
A consumer who’s mulling over a high-consideration purchase might also consult an expert influencer. An expert influencer is an authority on the product that the consumer is considering purchasing. Also called key influencers, they typically have their own blogs and huge Twitter followings, and rarely know their audiences personally.
When considering buying a car, suppose Shiv doesn’t turn just to friends for advice, but also visits some car review websites like Edmunds (www.edmunds.com, shown in Figure 1-3). On these review websites, experts rate, rank, and pass judgment on cars. Because they put the cars through various tests and know the cars inside and out, their opinions matter. They’re the expert social influencers — people whom Shiv may not know personally but are recognized as authorities in a certain field. Their influence is derived from the skills or expertise that they — or broadly speaking, their organization — possess based on training.
FIGURE 1-3: The Edmunds car view website.
Positional influencers
A positional influencer is closest to both the purchasing decision and to the consumer. Called peer influencers sometimes, they are typically family members or part of the consumer’s inner circle. They influence purchasing decisions most directly at the point of purchase and have to live with the results of their family member’s or friend’s decision as well.
As Shiv says, “I know that I can’t make a high-consideration purchase like a car purchase without discussing it with my wife. Invariably, she’ll drive the car, too, and sit in it as much as I will. It is as much her purchase as it is mine. Her opinion matters more than anyone else’s in this case. After all, I need to discuss with her the relative pricing of the cars available and whether one is more suitable for our family versus another.” This person derives her influence from her relative position and duties in relation to the actual consumer. She’s closest to the purchasing decision and to the consumer and, therefore, has the most social influence.
Influencing on digital platforms
As we discuss earlier in the chapter, social influence impacts every purchasing decision and always has in some form or other. Each time people make purchasing decisions, they ask each other for advice. Sometimes they depend upon an expert’s guidance, and in other cases, that advice comes from people they know.
So why is influence such a big deal today? This is because Internet consumption, and social media consumption specifically, have hit the mainstream. For example, as of June 2019, the social network platform Facebook had 2.41 billion users worldwide, giving it a population larger than any single country in the world, including China and India. That’s a lot of people talking about a lot of things (including products) to a lot of people! But there’s more to it than that. Social media traffic referrals have risen dramatically in the last few years. Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, and Twitter have 18 percent, 7.5 percent, 0.73 percent, and 0.73 percent, respectively, of global referrals per Shareaholic (February 2018). These numbers show how much people are also acting on the influence of others — they’re visiting the websites that they’re being told to visit.
People are making more and more purchasing decisions online every day. It’s as natural to buy a product online as it is to go into a physical store. People buy clothes and shoes online, not to mention high-consideration items such as computers, cars (yes, cars), and jewelry. But that’s not all. Not only are consumers buying online, but thanks to social media, they’re also conversing, socializing, and influencing
