Over the past few years, social media has gained immense popularity among the millennials — whether it is Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat or Musical.ly. As the number of social media users continues to grow, a new form of marketing has made its entry — influencer marketing. But before going into influencer marketing, let us know who an influencer is.

A social media influencer is someone who has a huge follower base — who is really good at its niche and shares its experience with its followers. Talking about influencer marketing, it is a type of marketing that focuses on influencers to drive a brand’s message to a larger audience.  Simply put, companies and brands pay influencers for shout outs. Some of the most popular platforms used in this space are Influential or AI Social Discovery for AI-powered influencer marketing.

How Artificial Intelligence Wended Its Way In Influencer Marketing

No matter how effective a type of marketing is, challenges are always there — challenges come as add-ons. If we take a closer at how influencer marketing works, we see a lot of hurdles in terms of authenticity, ROI, management, fake followers etc. To deal with all these challenges, artificial intelligence (AI) has become a perfect solution.  The use of AI in influencer marketing has gained traction in recent years and the process of working with influencers is gradually becoming more automated. Over the years, AI has become a buzzword and brands nowadays are adopting this amazing phenomenon to handle challenges when looking for the best influencers.

AI Can Help Brands Find Campaign/Brand Influencers

When we talk about discovering or choosing the best social media influencer for marketing campaigns, there are a number of parameters involved. For example, the number of followers the influencer has, post consistency, followers gained over a particular time frame, reach etc. This job seems a little tough for humans, so to make the job easy, AI comes into the play.

An AI-powered influencer discovery platform can help brands when choosing a social media influencer. By applying intelligent predictive analytics methods that will take a deep look at parameters, the platform will sort and suggest a number of influencers that marketers can choose from. This will not only help marketers identify potential influencers but will also help in measuring the interest of the influencers and their followers.

Understanding AI-powered Influencer Discovery Platforms

Let’s be honest, if you are a marketer who wants to run a campaign with a social media influencer, what will be the first factor you’ll look for? The number of followers, obviously! That’s the case with most of the marketers; they feel an influencer with a huge number of followers will help them spread their word to a greater audience, which is not effective all the time.

For example, suppose an influencer (let’s call it ‘Influencer A’) who has a follower base of 5M on Instagram and you being a brand (let’s call it ‘Brand A’) reach out to Influencer A, aiming to grow your follower base by 3M. But, do you think that those 5M followers that Influencer A has would be interested in your products? There are possibilities that only 1M are interested in your products and you might not be able to reach your goal of 3M followers. And this where AI comes into the play.

Instead of going for a human-based profile sorting, if a brand uses an AI-powered influencer discovery platform, the job will be done in less time. The platform will go through a number of profiles of influencers and will provide you with the best-suited profiles.

Again, for example, Brand A use AI-powered influencer discovery platforms and it suggests an influencer (let’s call it ‘Influencer B’) with 4M followers, which has fewer followers compared to Influencer A, however, the platform has found that among those 4M followers, 3.5M followers are interested in Brand A’s products. Therefore, Brand A gets a better deal that goes well with the campaign goal.

Advantages Of Using AI In Influencer Discovery

Apart from the main job that AI does in influencer discovery, there are few other benefits also that can’t be ignored. And one of them is fraud detection. An AI-powered influencer discovery platform is one of the best ways to detect and avoid fraud in influencer marketing, which includes influencer with artificially inflated follower numbers to increase their asking rate for engaging their audience. So, AI helps big time in this challenge as it helps in identifying influencers who have genuine followers.

Word to the wise: If you are not using any platform for detecting fraud influencer, then you can put in some effort and do that manually. Some of the things that you need to look out for when going through profile for fraud detection are:

• See if the profile has a sudden increase in followers
• A profile with many followers, but no high engagement
• Posts with a lot of comments but most of them make no sense
• Stock photos

Keeping these things in mind will help you recognize if the influencer is best suited for your campaign.

Outlook

There is no doubt that influencer marketing is one of the best marketing strategies and the future of this marketing is likely to take more scientific approaches. With all the advancements that are coming into influencer marketing, it is time that brands make better use of AI-powered influencer discovery platform to achieve higher ROI.