Influencer Marketing on Twitter (a conversation starter)

I think everyone knows (or at least SHOULD know) that brands should be doing targeted influencer marketing on Twitter. At the same time, it seems like no-one knows HOW to do this (or we could say that few if any are doing it WELL).

In a conversation with a good friend, I came up with the following model as an illustration for how you might go about doing influencer marketing using twitter. This (of course) is not only purely illustrative - but should really be treated as a thought experiment and conversation starter rather than something prescriptive.

GET all twitter_followers OF brand_twitter # 'brand_twitter' is of course the twitter account of your brand

FOR EACH follower FROM twitter_followers

GET klout_score # klout.net gives you a (rough) scoring model for influence

IF klout_score > X # tune X to be whatever you want the cut off for "large network influencer" to be. Minimum should probably be 30 and maximum should probably be 70

ADD TO @persona_list

ELSE IF klout_score > Y # tune Y to be the cut off for "small network influencer" to be Minimum should probably be 20

ADD TO @connector_list

FOR EACH persona FROM @persona_list

SEND offer_1

FOR EACH connector FROM @connector_list

SEND offer_2

WHERE

offer_1 == DM something like "for each retweeted mention by you of BRAND get one PRODUCT at 10% discount"

AND

offer_2 == DM something like "for each new follower referred by you get one PRODUCT at 20% discount"

The idea is to identify influential follows of your brand and then market to them based on their type of influence. In this case you're looking at differentiating Acquisition Marketing from Awareness Marketing by the type of influencer.

This could obviously be far more sophisticated by modeling the KINDS of things these influencers tweet, how many links they send, traffic driven from these links, retweets of their tweets, if they have blogs, etc.

But... I think this is at the very least an interesting starting point that illustrates why this is a powerful medium - and why twitter really is important.

Update. In addition you can see an interesting business model angle for Twitter in this (a sort of modified hybrid lead gen / CPC model.

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