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The blog post takes off! It gets tens of thousands of eyeballs, thousands of shares and becomes an authority source for months/years to come. We recently got a taste of this phenomenon with a recent DrumUp blog post.

Let me run through the events to show you how something like this happens, which in turn explains why influencer marketing is so appealing to marketers today. The DrumUp blog team decided to compile a list of 100 best reads on social media marketing, an extremely useful resource for social media marketers. We published the post on 11th June, and within a few hours of publishing the post, it had close to 500 shares and by the close of the next day almost a 1000. Now, a 1000 shares is no big deal for an established blog or publication, but for a 6-7 month old blog, which is slowly building readership, it’s quite a feat. To illustrate this, when we compare it to our current average shares per post, which is around 20, the impact becomes quite evident.

So how did it happen? Guy Kawasaki tweeted our post within a few hours of its publishing! His Twitter followers re-tweeted the post and several of them checked the blog post out and spread the word. This triggered a chain of people of sharing and liking the resource. The very next day, we also reached out authors of the books to help us increase the exposure for the useful resource, and quite a few of them responded by tweets and sharing the post on several social channels. This tied in beautifully to the initial kicker and the result was a viral post shared and liked by over 1300 people and counting. The effect trickled down to DrumUp app registrations too, which increased by almost by 600% and continued at the same rate for next 5 days.

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There were a few important learnings from the experience:

• Making influencers a partner in your blog posts can help you reach out to a larger audience. It’s a great way to kick-start your influencer marketing efforts and also make influencers take notice of you. Influencers very often are experts in their fields and quoting them or mentioning them in your post can not only lend credibility to your arguments but also involve them to share your posts with their followers.
• LinkedIn is a powerful network for B2B marketing. In the case of our post, to my surprise, LinkedIn turned out to the network of choice for most shares. LinkedIn is increasingly becoming one of the most important networks for B2B marketing. The discussion groups on LinkedIn are lively, promote high engagement and people are even consuming content over the platform. DrumUp has recently launched LinkedIn support and we already have several registrations on the platform, with users actively engaging and sharing on LinkedIn.
• Combining several outreach efforts to release at the same time can have a multiplicative effect on your reach. When the best social media marketing books post was published, we also debuted on ProductHunt, and a few other posts with DrumUp mention also went live. The result was phenomenal. We saw the highest number of registrations on DrumUp with the interest spiking suddenly six times over – it was perfect. Timing and replicating such events are difficult, but worth every try.
• Longer posts, which are useful resources and mention several experts and influencers do well. Long useful resources or actionable guides, which include opinions from others or mentions them have a greater chance at virality. The important thing is to make sure that you reach out to your post partners to inform them and request them to share the posts with their audience. Don’t expect them to discover their mentions on their own!

Influencer marketing goes beyond blogging and there a number of other ways you can reach out to and take assistance from influencers to increase the reach of your marketing or outreach efforts. Like with all marketing, experimentation is key to figuring out what will strike the best chord and give you a longer duration and wider reach.

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