Every retweet, favorite or like is not equal.
Content shared by even one person deemed influential by your target audience can outweigh dozens of shares by random individuals or automated bots.
Cultivating relationships with influencers, or aiding someone to become recognized as a thought leader, is key to making yourself and your content famous in digital marketing, says Lee Odden, CEO of the Minneapolis agency TopRank Marketing.
“If you identify someone as being an influencer, you’ll have a friend for a day. If you help someone become an influencer, they’ll be your friend for life,” says Odden, with apologies to whomever came up with that famous fishing proverb many moons ago.
Odden, speaking at Content Marketing World in Cleveland, described the instant success his “36 Content Marketers Who Rock” post achieved – 741,000 views in eight months, along with thousands of shares, 140 embeds of the accompanying Slideshare presentation and hundreds of referrals to a custom landing page.
While Odden came up with the original list of content marketing rock stars himself, illustrating each person with a photo he had taken personally, subsequent updates to the roster were crowd-sourced.
By allowing each content marketer named in his inaugural list to nominate professionals for the honor, Odden deepened his relationship with highly visible influencers, and they subsequently shared his list once it was published.
Among the influencer targeting and analysis tools and platforms Odden recommends are Traackr, BuzzSumo and FollowerWonk.
