Influencer marketing has quickly proven itself to be an essential tool for selling products and raising brand awareness online. Understanding how influencers and content creators think about marketing and the platforms on which they operate is essential for marketing teams and social media companies alike. However, the influencer audience is difficult to reach using traditional market research methods. Consequently, it’s a challenge to field a social media influencer survey to a 100% verified audience at scale.
Why is influencer marketing so important?
The content creator and influencer space is exploding. Activity and growth on platforms like TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitch has been exponential in the last 3 years. In 2021, the creator economy has seen $1.3 billion in investment, already three times that of 2020. Estimates place the total size of the creator economy at over $100 billion dollars.
Even a small-scale influencer can have access to a captive audience in the thousands. To their audience, an influencer adds explicit credibility to any product or service they feature or recommend in their content. Users feel emotionally connected to the influencers they follow. As a result, endorsements from influencers carry as much if not more weight than traditional celebrity endorsements.
Influencer marketing represents an exciting opportunity for marketers and social media companies. For marketers, it enables the granular marketing of products or services to the niche audiences of influencers. For social media companies, it offers an efficient and unique way to generate advertising revenue. To fully take advantage of the opportunity, marketers and social media companies alike need actionable insights about how influencers and content creators think about monetizing their content and the platforms they use. However, conducting a social media influencer survey is no easy task.
The challenge of finding the audience for a social media influencer survey
Influencers and content creators are scarce on panels and closed expert networks. Oftentimes, they also don’t have LinkedIn profiles. This creates an issue for market research companies that rely on traditional methods for recruiting survey respondents or interview subjects. Manually contacting influencers one-by-one through their social media profiles is time consuming, and likely to yield few responses.
Just as hard as reaching the influencer audience at scale is verifying the qualifications of the influencers themselves. According to The State of Influencer Marketing 2020: Benchmark Report, 68% of marketers experienced some form of influencer fraud in 2020. Imposter accounts with follower counts inflated by bots will pollute the results of an influencer survey. Vetting such accounts to guarantee 0% fraud is next to impossible for researchers who don’t know what to look for or lack the tools to do the looking in the first place.
NewtonX offers 100% verified influencers at scale
NewtonX is perfectly equipped to identify the exact influencers and content creators you need to complete a social media influencer survey. Our content creator database can search over 200 million content creators and influencers across major platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, YouTube, and TikTok.
The NewtonX Knowledge Graph, our proprietary, AI-driven search engine, makes this all possible. It allows us to build detailed searches for influencers based on platforms used, follower count, region, hashtags used, engagement rates, and more. As a result, we can deliver results by zeroing in on only your specific target group and study requirements. And because we’re able to target searches using criteria like engagement rates, we’re able to filter out faux-influencers with fake followers without having to manually vet each person individually. We also expand our reach for this hard-to-reach audience using dynamic channels. These include online ads, referrals, influencer marketing platforms, and social networking sites.
We’ve conducted content creator projects reaching thousands of creators across the globe, in categories including gaming, visual arts, culture, sustainability, fair trade, food and dining, skincare, and fashion. We’ve sourced influencers with 10k+, 25k+, and 100k+ followers, across mediums like digital media, vlogging, blogging, and podcasting. In one instance, we fielded a social media influencer survey to 400 verified content creators in just 25 days.
NewtonX isn’t bound to a panel or a closed network that’s reliant on tradaitional titles, profiles, or bios. We draw from our knowledge-based open network to find hard-to-find, high quality, and high profile content creators that you didn’t even know existed. As a result, we’re the only market research company that’s perfectly equipped to access the content creator and influencer audiences. Additionally, we can deliver the crucial insights your team needs to thrive in a fast-changing social media landscape.
