Should Community Managers Target and Recruit Influencers?

Community building is an essential aspect of a marketer's social strategy. Within these communities influencers are often the ones leading the conversations and encouraging new members to join. 

I recently stumbled upon this Tweet from Rosie Sherry at Orbit

"Create your own influencers in community. Transactional 'influencer' behavior isn't manageable for the long run." — @rosiesherry 

This is a very firm statement . Although I tend to agree with this point of view, there is clearly more to the topic than the “just don’t do it” type of attitude. There are many steps you should be taking to integrate influencers into your strategy. You also want to identify who and what an influencer is.

1. Influence is a capacity with multiple levels, not a status.

As soon as a community manager gets a decent number of people talking and connecting in their community, there are already influencers. Call them micro-influencers if you prefer (by contrast to celebrity influencers), but these influencers exist.

To respond to Rosie’s point, the community managers don’t “create” them, they can help them grow their influence or make the influence visible (with a leaderboard, badges, etc.) but the influence is built from the interactions within your community.

To illustrate this, here is a map of the followers of Rosie Sherry on Twitter (a community). As you can see, there are already clusters and pockets of influencers.

Zooming on the Yellow cluster, we identify a micro- influencer (actually a local influencer): Colin Lorentz. Most of the people in the yellow cluster are from Nevada & the Lake Tahoe area.

Even in an “unmanaged” community, influence exists and can be measured.

2. How do you measure the influence of a community member?

Members of a brand community do engage in the private platform but they also communicate elsewhere. This is something community managers often forget. 

Except for an extremely strong brand/community, most of the interactions between the community members takes place OUTSIDE the community, on social media. It is also where the community members develop relations and influence with people outside the branded community (i.e. non-members).

With this in mind, there are different ways to measure members activity/influence. They’re all good but don’t serve the same purpose:

• A) Activity: You can focus on the most “active” members within the brand community. That is a good metric if the goal is inward focus and the community purpose is peer support, retention.

• B) Internal Influence: Here you spot members who are the most influential over the rest of the community. This is something that can be measured inside and outside the brand community. This is good if you want to leverage these members to “promote” the community to their audience.  Good for organic growth.

• C) Influence: You can also map the larger ecosystem and discover influencers in your ecosystem. Engaging with these influencers is probably what Rosie calls “transactional”.  This is interesting for a growth hacking approach.

3. So should you even try to target micro-influencers? 

I like the parallel with team building. If you are building a team for growth, you need to bring in people with skills such as audience development, growth hacking, and content creation.

It is the same for community development: If your goal is growing your community, it is very valuable to recruit people that bring these skills, i.e. micro-influencers.

 In our view, the best approach is to do a mix of B (Internal Influence) and C (Influence): 

Community & Ecosystem

Start by looking at the existing community members and see if you already have people with significant influence in social media.

Then map your broader ecosystem and leverage your influential members to bring in their friends. This approach is closer to lobbying/recruitment and not a purely transactional approach. It does however, bring in high-value members.

Influencers can help social marketers engage with and build communities online, understanding how to attain those influencers can be the key to unlocking your community's full potential. Thanks for the read, please share your thoughts in the comments!

@dominiq