It’s no accident that thriving businesses and organizations invest heavily on marketing. The leading companies know they need their brand in front of consumers eyes as often as possible. A brilliantly conceived product or topnotch service will never be recognized unless people are talking about it.

Television, billboards, and celebrity endorsements were once the surefire methods to increasing sales and creating product demand. Today, with social media dominating the realms of the internet, a new form of marketing has emerged. Say hello to Influencer Marketing!

Defining Social Media Influence

Anyone online can be a social media influencer - from YouTubers to bloggers to Instagram’s most popular. Unlike traditional advertising methods like aggressive sales pitches or using every penny in your business to buy TV airtime, influencer marketing shifts the focus to the general public -- the consumers themselves, rather than a select few like celebrities acting as brand ambassadors. By giving consumers a voice via various social media channels, new influencers have come to life.

How does one become a social media influencer? Generally speaking, social media influence is an individual’s ability to affect others’ perception and opinions within a community. Existing tools to measure social media influence are numerous. However, they all take into account the following common attributes of online influence:

• Relevance - An individual’s ability to create content which is relevant to the brand or service being provided.
• Reach - A person’s ability to reach a brand’s target demographic.
• Resonance - The ability to engage the target demographic with the relevant content the individual creates.

The Science Behind Social Media Influence

The science behind social media influence covers a broad range of theories, ranging from the amplification hypothesis (persuasion by aligning your projected attitude with the other party) to the conversion theory (effectively endorsing or promoting to create conversion).

Measuring social media influence is as broad and evolving as the theories behind it. Here’s what Andrew Krill, former CEO of Kred emphasized in an interview: “In 2009 it was about how many followers you had on Twitter, in 2010 it was how many followers and how many people are engaging with you. In 2011 it was what are people and what are your friends saying about you. In 2012 we need to take a different approach. It's not just about the number of followers and number of people that retweet you, it's - are you actually engaging with real people, in real communities in real locations?”

Three years after Krill pointed out that social media influence is generally concerned with how an individual engages with real people in real life, Augure’s 2014 Influencer Marketing Status Report revealed that 82 percent of the agencies and 72 percent of the companies that were surveyed felt that influencers play a critical role in their product launching strategies. The survey was carried out among marketers in the UK, France, and Spain.

The Social Media Influencer Archetypes

Before we delve into the names and profiles of the top social media influencers for the past three years, let’s take a closer look of the different archetypes identified by the folks at the Social Content Marketing blog.

1. Educators, also known as the Analytical Pundits. These individuals are often the first to interpret recent industry developments or make predictions concerning new tools and strategies. Danah Boyd and David Meerman Scott, known for their unique insights, are perfect examples of this archetype.
2. Mentors, also known as the Coaches. While the analytical pundits are revered for their deep intellectual opinions on what’s going on in social media, mentors display genuine concern and dedication to their fans and followers. Their social media channels often have a high level of dialogue, comprised mainly of tips and hacks.
3. Motivators, also known as the Entertainers. These influencers are the light versions of the scholarly educators and coaches. Often, motivators would employ entertaining methods such as staged performances, lively chats, and use of alter-ego accounts to attract fans and followers. Andrea Vahl, co-author of Facebook Marketing All-in-One for Dummies falls exactly in this archetype as she makes use of her improv comedy skills as a social media edutainer through her alter ego Grandma Mary.
4. Evangelists, also known as the Inspiration Providers. Top influencers such as Guy Kawasaki and Robert Scoble succinctly embody what a social evangelist is like -- inspire first and teach later.

Forbes List of Top Social Media Influencers, 2012-2014

Cat gifs aside, the Internet also loves lists! Therefore, it’s no surprise when Forbes, via contributor and enterprise innovation expert Haydn Shaughnessy, began to feature the Top 50 Social Media Influencers in 2012. The list, released annually since then, is based on a social pull metric variable measured by PeekYou. On its first year, the social pull metric measures the number of individuals in your second degree network who are equally active and identifiable.

Bestselling book author and business advisor Chris Brogan, president of Human Works at the time the 2012 list was released, led the top 50 influencers that year with an adjusted social pull of 3,019. He was closely followed by Ann Handley who had an adjusted pull of 2,962. Guy Kawasaki, Gary Vaynerchuk, and Scott Stratten completed the top 5.

In the 2013 edition, the previous year’s number 1, Chris Brogan, went down to #21! The same thing happened to the rest of the top 3 in 2012; #2 Ann Handley went down to #20 and #3 Gary Varneychuk found his way down to #22. This surprising trend, according to the Forbes article, had to do with a change in how the PeekYou analytics tool assessed influencers with a real following - “real in the sense of real people and not just bots, real also in the sense that the following is active in social media and not just a passive consumer.”

With majority of the previous year’s top 5 relegated to ranks outside of the top 20, a new set of influencers emerged in the top 5. Sean Gardner, co-founder of the Huffington Post’s “Twitter Powerhouses Series” led the pack of top influencers that year. The rest of the top 5 were dominated by women - Ann Tran, Jessica Northey, and Mari Smith. Aaron Lee completed the top 5 in 2013.

It is also interesting to note that majority of the top 10 in 2013 were self-starters who talked about how to make social media as a business while the previous year’s top 10 were primarily composed of individuals who were employed in companies or organizations as social media strategists.

On its third year, Mr. Shaughnessy and PeekYou (rebranded as StatSocial in 2014) released the list of Top 100 Social Media influencers via the StatSocial website. According to folks at StatSocial, the top influencers were determined by “how much interest their followers have in the following aspects -- social media, marketing, advertising, technology, and business leaders.”

“Now we are able to determine the makeup and depth of a follower group (StatSocial counts the real people among someone’s followers, but also how many people are following those followers in turn). We are also able identify the affinities and interests of these followers down to a surprising level of detail,” StatSocial further emphasized in their third edition of top influencers.

With a slightly revised primary metric of comparison in 2014, evangelist Guy Kawasaki reigned the list. 2012’s #1 Chris Brogan was back in #3 and RackSpace’s Futurist Robert Scoble occupied the #2 spot. Mari Smith and Brian Solis completed the Top 5.

Australians Jeff Bullas and Darren Rowse (ProBlogger) have consistently stayed in the list for the past three years. In the most recent edition, Jeff ranked 7th while Rowse occupied the #15 spot.

Criticism of Mr. Shaughnessy and StatSocial’s List

Top marketing blogger Mark Schaefer ( #35 in the 2014 Top Influencers list by StatSocial) argued in this 2013 blog post that “Shaughnessy’s List of Influencers does not have the same ring of authority to it, so it has become the “Forbes list, even though the magazine is simply the pot that is carrying the piss.” He further stipulated that the list cannot be relied upon because “it is 1) created by an individual, not a publishing company; 2) based on Twitter, not “social media;” and 3) admittedly not a measure of personal influence.” Schaefer came up with his own list and had Charlene Li, Avinash Kuashik, Brian Solis,Mike Stelzner and Lee Olden in the top five.

In a nutshell, there’s no arguing that social media influencers play a pivotal role in online marketing. No matter who’s on the top 10, 50 or 100 list of influencers, what’s more important is finding out who exactly is utilizing their influence in increasing conversions ( e.g. turning Facebook likes to an increase in sales). /

Do you have your own list of top social media influencers? We’d love to hear about them too!

About the Author

 

About Kyjean Tomboc

Kyjean likes to think of herself as an online content machine but her love for all things feline makes her human after all! She writes mainly about health, science, social media, and online content marketing. If she’s not writing, she’s either scaling mountains or taming tardigrades. Follow her tardigrade taming attempts at Twitter - @autodidactikai