How do you measure the impact of social influencers in Singapore?

The Return on Investment (ROI) that your social influencers can have on your business in Singapore can be tracked in various ways. No matter what platform you use to build your network, it’s essential to measure the real effects of your social influencers and brand advocates.

There are some common-sense metrics that you can use such as:

Who are you star performers in Singapore? Which of your social influencers have shared your content and who has done it the most?

Who has created their own original content (inspired by yours) and made a real impact with it and who has just re-shared the content that you supplied them? In effect who is working harder for you and who is merely being reactive?

Who are you your most influential advocates in Singapore? The platform should have easy-to-display metrics that track all activity and give everyone a score that combines all factors in one. This will give you a simple snapshot of who your top 20% of influencers generating 80% of your engagement are. Any metric should clearly state how they relate to the marketing objectives that you are using the influencers for.

It’s also essential for your content marketing strategy that you measure what specific content generated by individual influencers about your brand is being shared the most. Which are the hot topics and which are the subjects that just didn’t catch on? What are people saying about your content? How are they sharing it?

There was the classic case recently of a Singapore Tourism Authority video aimed at the Philippines being shared for all the wrong reasons. It ended up having to be taken down but not before it went viral and people had shared it hundreds of thousands of times. This sent out the wrong message not only to those being targeted but also of the Tourism Authority itself. You want your content to be shared for the right reasons, not the wrong ones.

The sentiment of why your content was shared is therefore crucial. Any business needs to track exactly why its content was shared beyond quantities and measurements. What was it about the content that really caught the imagination? These insights are crucial for understanding how they can effect product development, marketing strategy, and a brand-focused content marketing strategy.

There is a make-up brand in Singapore who used the pre-release of a new product to test it with social influencers first before unleashing onto the public. The influencers came back and suggested that various parts of the product didn’t work as claimed and the company delayed the launch and changed the product. When it was then released later on it gained universal approval, thanks in part because of the feedback given by the influencers.

Which platforms were the most used and most effective? It may not always be Facebook; for some male brands it may be Google+; for business brands it may be LinkedIn; for retail or fashion brands Pinterest may be top; and for more visual youth-orientated brands it may be Instagram.

In Asia, for example, it may not yet be Twitter but as the network grows it may be in the future. This in turn helps you determine the nature and format of future content to be shared and which platform to use for greatest impact.

Also when it comes to countries such as China, it’s important to know which local social network was being used the most. Don’t assume it will be RenRen or WeChat or SinoWeibo.

Ultimately for the ROI to be justified, a measuring tool needs to be able to track the overall impact on purchase intent and actual purchases. A brand can track the impact of the conversations and shares initiated by your network of influencers on both purchase intent and actual sales.

The key here is to engage with the platform with the most appropriate content through your key social influencers that allows for a strong tie-in to your e-commerce platform that tracks online to offline sales and customer interaction.