Social Media Marketing For Dummies, 2nd Edition

Seeing Why All Consumers Are Not Created Equal

A chapter on competition wouldn’t be complete without addressing the fact that in discussions about social influence and social media marketing, all consumers aren’t created equal. Social influence doesn’t simply mean recognizing that every consumer may influence every other consumer; rather, in specific marketing contexts, specific consumers have an outsized influence on their peers around them. For example, on a social network, one of my friends posts more comments than anyone else. Just by virtue of his volume of postings, we take his opinion into account more than that of our other friends who aren’t commenting as much.

In this regard, three steps help you gain a marketing advantage from influential consumers:

1. Discover the influential consumers.

As you launch a social media marketing campaign and identify your consumers, pay extra attention to who is influencing your potential customers. Who are the consumers that are influencing your customers, and where is this influence taking place? (You can find out more about influencers in Chapter 14.)

2. Activate the influential consumers.

After you identify the influential consumers, whether they’re bloggers, forum leaders, or just conversationalists with lots of friends on the social networks, develop relationships with them, and find ways to activate them to do the marketing on your behalf. In later chapters, we discuss exactly how you can do this.

3. Turn customers into brand ...