Social Media Marketing For Dummies, 2nd Edition

Reaching the Referent Influencers

Referent influencers are not easy to reach. Most social platforms do not allow marketers to mine the social graphs of their users, so identifying these people and reaching them can be challenging. As a result, it can be difficult to identify these referent influencers and activate them.

But there’s good news too. Some enterprising advertising technology companies have been researching ways to reach these referent influencers without compromising the privacy of your customers or their circle of friends. Reaching the referent influencers through these methods is safe and reliable, although it does cost you money, with the amount depending on how many referent influencers you’re trying to reach. In the next few sections, I discuss how these companies help you reach the referent influencers.

Not all tactics for reaching referent influencers need to be paid for. Your company’s Facebook page can be a great place to build a community and encourage referent influencers to influence your customers by incentivizing them with competitions, coupons, and special offers. Your customers who like your Facebook page will probably bring their referent influencers to the page too if you give them incentives to do so.

Social graph analysis

Using database technologies, companies can crawl the major social networks in a similar fashion to the way the search engines crawl ...