Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Roughly one third of U.S. social media users ages 16-34, or 25.5 million people, is a “social creator” or social influencer, according to a new study from Yahoo, Deep Focus, Shareablee and Ipsos, which breaks this huge group down into three sub-groups based on their level of experience and expertise.

Within the total population of social creators identified by Yahoo, 4.6 million or 18% are well-established influencers, termed “socialites” by Yahoo, while 15.5 million or 61% are “rising stars,” and 4.3 million or 17% are “newbies.” Socialites have 1,784 followers on average, while rising stars have 797 and newbies have 1,376.

As Yahoo notes, each influencer tier offers marketers different opportunities and challenges: for example, marketers can “get in on the ground floor” (my phrase) by helping an aspiring influencer build their creative approach to monetization, versus partnering with an established influencer to reach a large, devoted audience, but ceding them creative control as part of the bargain.

In the first group, socialites, 35% have already partnered with a brand online, with 40% of these working with an electronics or wireless tech brand. Overall, 66% of branded posts published by socialites actually featured brand integration. Other popular categories socialites would like to work with include fashion and beauty (33%), entertainment (30%), and travel (20%)....

Now to be honest, sometimes the resources they send are great, and from time to time I’ll even link to them.

But what would go SO much better would be if someone offered me something, anything related to what I’m working on.

So, in light of this movement towards depersonalization, I’m going to pitch you all on how you can engage with people BEFORE demanding something from them, as well as give you some ideas for what you can offer in that outreach email.

Here are 11 ways to build a relationship before asking for something in return.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past couple of years, it’s no big surprise that Twitter is one of the hottest platforms for sharing and absorbing information, specifically when it comes to content marketing and all of its related fields. However, finding the right people to follow in this roiling sea of tweets isn’t always the easiest of prospects, especially if you’re new to this portion of the “Twitterverse.”źz

With this in mind, here’s the 33 content marketing influencers you absolutely need to be following right now if you want to stay connected to the cutting edge of this industry....