What is a Social media influencer and why you need one.

Have you ever tried posting something on Facebook and waiting, and all you see is tumbleweed and all you hear is crickets? If your answer is yes then you need a Social Media Influencer.

Sure, posting stuff is supposed to be branding, so you are not really expected to see an ROI (Return On Investment) immediately but even as branding you have a gut feeling you are talking to the trees.

Social media is changing fast, and the ‘Free in Facebook’ is hardly worth considering anymore, unless you have hundreds of thousands of ‘organically grown’ followers, in targeted groups like English Teaching Thailand and pages like Netmedia Bizfind. If you do you were probably very active on Facebook early on, seeing it as a valuable resource for your business for about ten years already.

Facebook and other prominent social media sites are businesses and have shareholders. If you ever watch movies about business and read books on how shareholders are always depicted as cash hungry and heartless bastards, who care not so much about the people they serve and the service offering of their businesses, you will see that they think most of their return on the cash investments and the growth of profits.

If you have a business page on Facebook you will, by now, have seen the ‘boost’ option after you made a post. The ‘Advertise your page to thousands more’ options they have been highlighting of late (which you may have even tried and got excited by the likes and engagement a post received) can work but how much direct business did you get from it? This is the question I often ask many disgruntled Business owners and the vast majority see it as more vanity than actually driving business to them.

Cue the Social Media Influencer.

To my mind there are two types of Influencers, the glamour influencer (a movie star, super model or celebrity who, through silicone enhanced breasts, vlogs or hair extensions, can help sell business to customer (B2C) products quickly through their social media reach).

Then there is the business influencer who relies more on written content, email marketing, online press releases and business videos to a wider community online.

There are people who have for the last decade been writing a blog or two each week, week in week out, and been altruistically sharing their blogs to their followers via their massive reach on social media.

‘Social Media Reach’, turning a lot of followers, likes and connections into hundreds of thousands, may be niche on one subject on one page or across many social media pages and groups, not just on Facebook but across Twitter, LinkedIn, and many other bookmarking sites and article sites like Quora and Mix, as well as writing for online magazines and not forgetting Online Press releases.

For most Influencers it was a calling. Who knew that we would become notable in business one day. We mostly wrote for ourselves and kept a roof over our head managing our own brands and just about paying the bills with the sales the leads that our own blogging provided us.

Now, however, the social media influencer is being called upon to help brand other businesses, to endorse products as they get to the people faster than the traditional method of write, publish and share to one’s own social media reach and pay a little to Facebook and or Google P.P.C. to drive the traffic in and hope there is a net profit at the end of the day.

Taking the lead from the Chinese model which is much more mature in the sense of business, mainly because their social media is paying off in monetary terms. A great amount of business is done through apps like WeChat and Weibo, which is where the influencing is done.

Payment is fast and instant as the Chinese reader sees what a K.O.L. (Key Opinion Leader) has endorsed on Weibo and can immediately go to WeChat and make purchases over the app. China is well advanced when it comes to paying via QR codes on phones even in person in shops, and transactions worth billions of Yuan are done every month. The West cannot ignore the success of this model and is looking at the way Tencent (the company behind WeChat) and Jack Ma (of Alibaba) have engineered the B2C and B2B landscape through social media and this will become to the western way of thinking sooner than you think.

These Key Opinion Leaders are earning huge sums to endorse products and services from large companies as they know potential buyers see more posts from KOLs than standard business posts direct from the company themselves, therefore the profit margin from sales is huge.

The social media influencers of tomorrow in the Western world will be the types of people who have been active on their own brand and stayed the course and never stopped believing that the was a point to all this charitable work. That’s how it felt for me, writing, vlogging and sharing to drive traffic back to our blogs and calls to actions.

We wrote consistently for our own blog websites and shared each time tenaciously including time spent growing social media pages and groups to a very respectable level whilst often struggling to meet the bills and telling our families ‘everything comes to those who work hard and have passion and most of all total faith in our dreams.

If you would like to meet the Top English speaking B2B social media influencer in Thailand to help you expand your brand message and ultimately sales?? Then click here