Last month I was asked to give a short presentation at our client event which focused on how to find influencers using Brandwatch. Following positive feedback, I thought it’d be a good idea to get it in writing.
To begin with, it’s important to highlight the Brandwatch Impact Score. I will be referring to it throughout the post so first, here’s a refresher on how it works.
The Impact score is invaluable, in no small part because it takes all metrics into consideration, regardless of the type of thing you’re looking at. You can see the impact for any author, site or mention.
Finding influencers for a fashion brand like Forever 21 (for those of you who don’t know, Forever 21 is high street fashion brand which has presence in the US and UK) would be simple.
Forever 21 could use Brandwatch to quickly identify influencers who are talking about their brand, competitors, or the fashion industry as a whole.
Finding influencers on Twitter
The first task might be to find the most influential tweeter for Forever21, so focusing on someone who tweets a lot about not only the brand, but also fashion in general, is a sensible idea.
The easiest way to find this sort of author in the Brandwatch platform is to open a default dashboard, click on the Authors tab and scroll down to the Tweeters component.
You will see a whole range of metrics: number of tweets, number of followers, Kred score, sentiment and more.
In this case I used Impact Score because it looks at all these metrics and provides one overall number.
In this example, the results show that Forever21’s top tweeter is @laura_mccallum. Taking a closer look at Laura reveals that she doesn’t have the highest number of followers or tweets about the Brand, so how can we ensure she is who we’re looking for?
Well, she’s tweeting a lot about fashion (great) and other highstreet brands like Topshop (a competitor). She is also linking to her own fashion blog.
These key factors mean that she is likely to be the type of person that we’re looking for when deciding who the influential tweeters are.
Finding influential bloggers
Finding key bloggers is much the same. The simplest way to do this is by using the Authors tab in the Brandwatch dashboard.
Scrolling down will reveal the Authors component, which can then be filtered by “blogs” and ranked by Impact Score.
It might have been a reasonable expectation to find the top tweeter @laura_mccallum‘s blog listed in here, but that is not the case.
A quick bit further investigation within Brandwatch shows that though Laura is influential in her tweeting, her blog actually lacks any written text – it’s all image based.
This, however, might present a chance for Forever 21 to contact Laura and suggest that she uses links on her blog to promote the brand.
Finding influencers on Facebook
Finding the right kind of influential people on Facebook is bit more challenging than the previous two examples.
The primary reason that this throws up some issues is that there are a number of restrictions and privacy laws to contend with. The best way to do it with Brandwatch is with one of our newest features: Channels.
Channels allow you to not only track your own Facebook fans but your competitor’s pages too.
In fact, you can track any (public) Facebook page you want; all you need is the URL. It’s a great way to do a competitor comparison and benchmark your brand against the rest of the market.
So, to find the influencers we’re interested in for the Forever21 use case, we can open the “Audience Activity” section of a Channel for that brand.
Here it shows all the Facebook users engaging with the Forever21 account, including the number of comments and likes each owned post has received.
So, as before, either rank by one of those metrics or use that trusty Impact Score to find the most influential posters.
My final tip is that when doing this type of analysis, it’s really wise to compile an Author List. If you start adding these influencers to a list as you go you can filter all sorts of other components, such as charting, later on, allowing you to perform further analysis of those influencers.
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