Homophily: The Key to Influencer Marketing.
Fyre Festival, the greatest music festival that wasn’t, sold over $3.5 million in tickets and VIP packages primarily through a largely successful influencer campaign. In this Forbes article on influencer marketing, Gerardo Dada, says that the three key factors that influencers must have to be successful are reach, contextual credibility, and persuasion. Traditional influencers are people who can reach the highest number of people which is usually measured in the number of followers. A category previously only occupied by celebrities, social media has given rise to a new crop of macro-influencers. These influencer’s ability to impact purchasing decisions is best illustrated by Fyre Fest’s exceptional ticket sales. This blog post explains how the friendship paradox could be responsible for the large buy-in as, it seemed that for people online, most of the people in their network were talking about the festival and they didn’t want to be left out.
However, even the most successful campaigns have their shortcomings. The goal of influencer marketing is authentic advocacy such that influencers’ recommendations are not only financially motivated but also stem from a genuine interest and belief in the product (1). Fyre Festival’s influencer campaign shut out micro-influencers by focusing too heavily on celebrities which this article believes lead to an inauthentic campaign.
Micro-influencers are “ordinary, everyday” people with a small but dedicated following. They are often experts or have a strong interest in a topic which they engage with followers on frequently. Micro-influencers tend to have more engaged followers (4) than macro-influencers due to homophily and strong ties. Homophily is the tendency for people to be friends with or associated with people similar to themselves. Macro-influencers’ follower bases consist of many subnetworks connected by weak ties. Their followers have a plethora of reasons for following them which means that possibly none of the posts will appeal to the entire network. Evidently, this one influencer fits all approach does not take the dynamics of the network into account. Micro-influencer follower bases, on the other hand, are composed of people with one, strong interest and tend to have strong ties across the network as a result of triadic closures. Focusing on a niche subject gives micro-influencers credibility and their position of power in the network (everyone has strong ties to them) makes them more persuasive. For these reasons, more brands than ever are partnering with micro-influencers for high engagement through an intimate relationship with users.
While I agree that Fyre Festival could have benefitted from micro-influencers, I doubt that they could have made the campaign more authentic because the festival was a scam. Nonetheless, I think that credibility in one subject should not make macro-influencers’ opinions on everything else qualified as it can have detrimental effects: I don’t want to buy something from someone who doesn’t know what they are talking about.
links:
- https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescommunicationscouncil/2017/11/14/what-is-influencer-marketing-and-how-can-marketers-use-it-effectively/#6cdc6ca423d1
- web.stanford.edu/…/when-theres-smoke-theres-fyre
- https://www.marketingdive.com/news/4-biggest-influencer-marketing-mistakes-from-fyre-festival/444035/
- https://learn.g2crowd.com/micro-influencers
