Allow me to explain.
In Sri Lanka or mostly in the Western Province, social media is comprised of very small social circles where its members are interconnected by blood, work, education (high school mostly) or socio-economic status.
Social networks thrive on this activity because we all know no. of installs don’t matter if the no. of daily active users is low. Very similar to the fact that no. of Facebook likes don’t matter if your daily engagement is zero. I wish more brands in Sri Lanka understood this but hey, let’s bloat the no. of likes instead.
Social networks or apps thrive on engagement and daily activity. Of late, international brands and products thrive on ‘influencers.’
What is an influencer? Individuals who have the ability to influence the opinions or buying decisions of your target audience, largely thanks to their social media following.
Sri Lanka is pretty late to the game. We really don’t have any celebrities unless you count our English speaking, bilingually eloquent cricket stars as celebs or people in the music or film industry who have substantial social media clout.
Five years ago, it was easier to judge who your brands’ social media influencers are with websites such as Klout and Kred that calculate your social influence scores on a scale of 1–100. But they lost their popularity over the years with growing privacy concerns. How did they calculate your score? The more you post on different social networks, the higher your score is.
The recent trend in Sri Lanka to gather social media influencers are composed of two groups which social media managers or digital marketing professionals rely on.
1. Treasure Hunters
Treasure hunters are people on social media who only participate with brands to win prizes and perks. There’s a set that only participate or interact with FMCG, beauty, travel and consumer brands on Facebook and Instagram to win competitions. Some of them have fake profiles with 500 to 1000+ friends to rack up as many likes, invites and referrals to win a competition.
Once your competition is over, they randomly like or engage with posts. Very attractive to social media managers when they report using social media metrics such likes, comments and shares as ROI (return on investment) but not very useful for actual sales of a brand or product.
2. Freeloaders
On the Twitter front, we have small sets of people who are seen at most events. These are people/influencers with good social media clout via follower count and daily engagement, opinions valued by many on the network and consumer brands depend on these people to create a buzz mostly via a hashtag or trending topic on Twitter.
Basically, how marketing on Twitter works is, the more engaged you are with users as a brand, the more followers you gather. Thereby, increasing social media clout as a brand but the no. of followers don’t necessarily add to your bottom line unless you are an SME (small medium enterprise) like a home bakery, an FMCG brand like Milo or travel or beauty products that relies heavily on daily engagement to be relevant on Twitter. TL;DR, freeloaders generally work best with B2C brands (brand to customer).
Freeloaders generally work great for brands/companies to highlight their services and products. Eg. Educating people about Colombo Port City, Fonterra trying to educate people about how its product portfolio is produced, manufactured and packaged, Jetwing Travels trying to promote its latest hotel Jetwing Lake in Dambulla.
The reason being, print media such as newspapers, radio and TV are composed of people in the age group 40 and above who are generally not social media savvy but have more spending power. How does public relations generally work in Sri Lanka or elsewhere? If you want articles written about your brand or company, you invite journalists who at times, have no clue about how it works or operates but have biased views instead. Enter freeloaders.
These microcosms or pockets of people generally do create an online buzz in terms of views, shares, likes, comments and retweets. Call it circle jerking, call it filling in empty seats, call it buffet hoarders but their online word of mouth usually works to set social media engagement in motion. Example: YAMU.lk via its videography, articles and photos.
Influencers In US and Europe are generally paid to endorse brands and companies. Some companies have been known to pay up Kim up to $500,000 to share branded posts with her 95.1 million followers. According to Heller, Kim’s sisters Khloe (64.3 million followers) and Kourtney (54.5 million followers) can earn up to $250,000 per ad on Instagram.
In Sri Lanka, micro influencers are paid via attendance to select events, free tickets to a concert, hotel stay or via dinner soirées which usually include an unlimited buffet. Most influencers are limited to Twitter, Instagram or Facebook.
How do you become an influencer?
1. Content:
If customer is king, content is queen. Pick a topic or interest that you are highly skilled, talented or an expert at. Eg. styleinsrilanka on Instagram by British expat Alice Luker is a great influencer on travel and hotels in Sri Lanka and if you love food, Dihan De Silva’s Instagram is our island’s resident gourmand.
2. Followers/Engagement:
As per Joe Fernandez at Klout, these depend on two factors:
- Number of followers or friends
- Number of tweets or status updates (exception: when you are too noisy — this will cause your online influence to drop)
Hive mentality usually works when you have lot of followers willing to pollinate your opinions via shares and retweets. To increase your follower count, you can perhaps arrange giveaways. Mind you, there might be a drop in quality engagement but quantity wise, you will look great when a brand or company will approach you as an ‘influencer.’
There you have it. Why brands or companies depend on influencers, treasure hunters or freeloaders to reach dizzying engagement on social media networks.
