Who're Social media Influencers?

Before defining the term “Social media influencer,” Let’s break it down into two terms:

1. Social Media.
2. Influencer.

1) Social Media:

According to Tech Target,

Social media is the collective of online communications channels dedicated to community-based input, interaction, content-sharing and collaboration.

Websites and applications dedicated to forums, microblogging, social networking, social bookmarking, social curation, and wikis are among the different types of social media.

2) Influencer:

According to Influencer Analysis,

An influencer is an individual who has above-average impact on a specific niche process.

Influencers are ordinary people, who are often connected to the central roles of media outlets, consumer groups, industry associations or community tribes.  Influencers may or may not be aware of your company, but represent control of an audience segment that is relevant to your business.

Such individuals are not merely marketing tools, but social relationship assets. They may be the person responsible for affecting key contracts, supporting new product releases, or part of a resource pool that increases market awareness and industry shifts before they happen.

In the end, influencers are a key type of evangelist for your company.




Combining terms ‘Social Media’ and ‘Influencer’ gives us the definition of ‘Social media influencer.’

Social media influencers:

Source

The people/individuals who have a big following on trending and highly used social media platforms in a particular niche are Social media influencers.

These are the people who often get paid for the endorsement.

For, eg.

Cristiano Ronaldo’s contract with a famous brand. In 2016 alone, he has generated $500M in value for Nike.

Ronaldo posted 1,703 times overall on social media in 2016. Those posts generated 2.25 billion social interactions (likes, comments, shares, retweets and views on videos), per Hookit. Nike was referenced or its logo visible in a photo or video in 347 of the posts, which had 477 million interactions. Hookit’s methodology looks at promotion type and quality, as well as interactions and market-driven rates. The result: $499.6 million for Nike in media value from Ronaldo’s posts. (source)

 Source: http://socialmediadominates.com/social-media-influencers-2017/#why