Which social media channels are best for my influencer marketing campaign?
So you’re convinced! Influencer marketing is worth testing.
Your first decision is now to choose which social media channels you want to sponsor content on — and, without sugar coating, it’s going to define your whole campaign.
Why?
Because not only does each channel convey a different feeling for users, which will envelop your marketing, but also because the channels you pick are going to be the basis for determining what ROIs you can expect.
In a nutshell your choice of channels will depend on your brand industry and whether your campaign is highly sales driven or if it is more geared towards branding.
In this article we discuss the pros and cons of the most popular channels for influencer marketing campaigns.
Read them all below or jump straight to the section on YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter, Specialist Industry Channels or Multi-Channel Campaigns.
Social Media Channels’ Potential (reach vs # of influencers)
YouTube
Pros
- Great for engagement and sales
- Good ROIs possible immediately — and results are easily measured
- Your target market is almost definitely watching (particularly 16–30 year olds)
- Especially good for gaming, fashion, beauty, entertainment
Cons
- Not content you’ll want to reuse in other advertising campaigns
YouTube is a great all-round channel for influencer marketing.
Videos tend to generate more engagements (likes, comments, shares) and clicks than static posts because the viewers’ attention is held for a longer period of time.
The channel is more authentic than some other channels too as the content focuses on being ‘real’ and reflective of the influencer’s true opinion.
Although this usually makes them relatively low in cinematic quality and it might not be content you want to reuse in other advertising campaigns.
YouTube also lets you see more demographics of the influencer’s audience than other channels — what country his viewers are in, what proportion are male/female, the age range — enabling you to more accurately get an influencer with reach into your target market.
And you can track exactly how successful your campaign has been by incorporating a unique tracking link in the video description — you can see the precise number of people that came to your website after watching the video.
In addition you know how many people really watched your video, rather than trying to estimate based on the number of subscribers the YouTuber has, as you would have to for Instagram for example.
Pros
- Great for engagement and branding
- Your target market is almost definitely on here (particularly 16–30 year olds)
- (With permission) you can reuse the images
- Especially good for lifestyle, fitness, beauty, fashion, food
Cons
- Not good for immediate sales — and no analytics
Instagram is probably the best channel for branding.
While you most likely will not get good ROIs immediately (as is possible with YouTube), you are getting very high quality images — which you can reuse in future advertising campaigns.
The channel has a more luxury and expensive feel to it.
But Instagram doesn’t allow the influencer to share any of the analytics with anyone external.
Which means you will only see the public data — likes and comments.
However, for brands it has the draw back of not being able to include a call to action or even a link with the post, so you will not be able to see how many people come to your website after having seen it — making it very difficult to measure your ROI.
Snapchat
Pros
- Great for branding
- Young people — up to 20 years old — are on here (a lot of them!)
Cons
- Not good for sales or engagement as nothing viewer can click
Snapchat is arguably the fastest growing social media channel — and this is likely to be the case for the foreseeable future, especially after the closure of Vine last week.
A staggering 99 per cent of young people in the US are on Snapchat every day — so it’s super powerful within this age group.
In fact, if you are targeting young people, you are more likely to reach them on Snapchat than Facebook these days.
It’s a fun, user-centric channel for creating and sharing personal video/photo logs.
Snapchat has the advantage of being very simple and the story feature lends itself well to influencer marketing.
Another interesting campaign idea gaining popularity is for brands to hand over their Snapchat account to an influencer for a week and allow them to post their stories on the brand account.
It’s called a takeover and so far it’s proving an effective way of rapidly increasing followers and impressions, of course it comes with an element of risk, but this risk is mitigated if the influencer is chosen wisely.
However, there is nothing clickable on a Snapchat post, which again makes it hard to foster engagements, generate sales or measure ROIs.
Although Snapchat influencers can report back to brands the number of views and screenshots.
Read the rest of this article on Sponsokit’s blog The Insider: Influencer Marketing Explained
