Influencer Marketing & Brand Partnerships Survey:  General Overview

Hollywood Branded's Influencer Marketing Survey 2018

Influencer marketing continues to evolve, making it important for brands to keep up and better understand just how the landscape is changing and how they can most effectively engage with social influencers and their audiences.  Influencers are more and more becoming part of every brand's marketing landscape, and their experiences of what has worked in past campaigns, and what they believe are essential components of future brand campaigns makes their feedback invaluable.  

Hollywood Branded interviewed over 650 influencers to discover what they believe are best practices, and to learn how brands can find higher campaign success in the partnerships they form together.   In this blog, Hollywood Branded provides a general overview of our 2018 Influencer Marketing & Brand Partnerships Report, infographic takeaway and a guide for brand and agency marketers for the years to come. 

An Introduction To The Survey Report

Influencer marketing provides brands an opportunity to have these hyper connected content producers promote their products in a meaningful way, helping the brand to stand out, build awareness and grow. Yet brands considering influencer partnerships need to be prepared, as it is very easy to make missteps along the way. From finding the right influencers, managing communication to ensure the end goal result is obtained, making sure the messaging is authentic and on point to a targeted audience, to negotiating compensation, measuring campaign success, and building long term partnerships, brands and their agencies risk losing considerable money and investment if they don’t have the right knowledge to make success happen.

The influencer feedback and comments in Hollywood Branded's Influencer Marketing & Brand Partnerships 2018 Report offers a detailed understanding of the industry and additionally provides over 300 tips and insider advice on how brand marketers can better partner with social media influencers to create impactful campaigns which will resonate with consumers.

General Overview

Over 660 influencers across various specialty niches and social media platforms responded to our survey, providing us with valuable insights into the current landscape of influencer marketing and how they operate within it. Most of our respondents were US-based with just 12% coming from elsewhere. The other countries which respondents came from included Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, United Arab Emirates and Australia. It is also interesting to note that 87% of respondents were female, aligning to the fact that most social influencers are female.   

Social Media Reach By Platform

It comes as no surprise that Instagram is the most popular social media platform for influencers with 92% of respondents having an Instagram account. Facebook was close behind with 90% of respondents actively using the platform while Twitter users accounted for 88% of respondents.

Newer platforms do seem to be lagging behind with only 36% of respondents using Snapchat, which does make sense considering the platform has not been as friendly for marketing as others. Pinterest was another popular platform to a lesser extent with almost 20% using the service. Other platforms used by some of the respondents included Google+ and YouTube. And of course, self-run blogs, which the majority of influencers had.

A majority of respondents can be identified as micro influencers with a majority having up to 25,000 followers. 81% of those on Twitter had up to 25,000 followers, while 18% had 25,000 to 500,000 followers. Facebook had a higher percentage of respondents with below 25,000 followers at 87%, with 2% enjoying over 500,000 followers.

Instagram, as one might expect, had the greatest amount of respondents with between 25,000 and 500,000 followers at 20%. Bloggers tended to have more of a follower base which makes sense considering that blogging has existed for much longer than the other social media platforms. Just over 56% of bloggers had under 25,000 followers, while over 40% had between 25,000 and 500,000 and 3% had over 500,000, almost double that of the other platforms.

Social Media Engagement

While influencers with a high follower base may be seen as desirable to brands, all followers do not necessarily have a high engagement level. For example, even if a user had a high reach they may struggle to get even 10% of followers to actively engage with their content. Just under 50% of the respondents placed their engagement levels at below 10% with 28% claiming to have an engagement level of above 10%. Over 22% were unaware of their exact engagement level, as they did not know how to calculate it prior to the survey.  Aligning to what is a recognized fact about micro influencers, the amount of respondents with engagements above 10% was heavily reported by those respondents with a percentage base of less than 25,000.  Micro influencers typically have higher engagement than other influencer types. 

Popular Topics For Influencers

With so many categories that an influencer can write about it is difficult to figure out just what topic is most popular. Some of the most popular topics among influencers included fashion, food, lifestyle and travel.

This comes as no surprise since they are some of the most relatable topics out there with most people being interested in them at some capacity, as well as categories ripe with brand partnership opportunities.  The other topics which proved popular included DIY, Fitness, Home Design & Decor, Life hacks, Parenting and Technology. Topics which, again, have a strong built-in followers base.

Money

Hollywood Branded's Influencer Marketing & Brand Partnerships report is an in-depth report for brands and their agencies. This report is chock full of statistics, graphs, analytics, insights and over 300 bite sized direct influencer suggestions for brands to make campaigns run better.  Get it now!!