If you say so...

Everywhere I look, every article I read, seems to hammer home the fact that peer influence marketing is becoming the most effective method of selling a brand.
Word of mouth marketing has always been a reliable way to do business. Why? Because brands know that consumers would rather hear it from someone they know and trust. In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell describes the three characters needed to start an epidemic. Connectors, mavens, and salesmen. While these ingredients haven’t changed for centuries, the marketplace has become more competitive. Word-of-mouth no longer stretches far enough and as a result, brands have had to find creative and effective ways of getting their message out to a wide spectrum of people.
But the internet opened up the entire world to marketing departments and advertising agencies, and social media has brought back the relevance of word-of-mouth.
Groundswell’s research found 2 types of influence:

1. Influence impressions: these are the “mass connectors” of social media word-of-mouth marketing. They link, like, and recommend products and services from platforms such as facebook, twitter, and myspace. Research indicates that in the US there are 256 billion influence impressions per year, 62% of which come from facebook.

2. Influence posts: these are the “mass mavens” of social media word-of-mouth marketing. Blog posts and comments that are written by experts and tried and tested users. The same study found that there are 1.64 billion influence posts per year in the States, and if each one is read by an average of 150 people that means that added together there are 500 billion impressions about products and services per year! Now that’s good word-of-mouth marketing!

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