According to Proctor (2000), there is an increasing number of on-line purchases made everyday as social media consumption hits the mainstream. Consumers are sharing more of themselves, discussing new products they bought and influencing each other on-line. This shift in people 's web behaviour induces marketers to engage with their customers across whole new social media platforms such as twitter, facebook and LinkedIn. Brand can not push itself any longer and traditional marketing is losing its glory. All these changes give rise to a whole new form of marketing called social influence marketing which is seeing great potential in this world where actions speak louder than advertising. This report will give a brief introduction of what the social influence marketing and social influencers are about, then explaining how markers use this new marketing method to develop their businesses, and finally discuss the benefits of social influence marketing after comparing with more traditional marketing.
2.0 Definitions
2.1 What is social influence marketing?
"Social influence marketing is a technique that employs social media and social influencers to achieve an organization 's marketing and business needs" (Singh, 2009, p.10) Social media is the content created by people using web-based technologies such as microblogs, social networks, or podcasts. Influencers are everyday people with greater peer influence depending on how much content they share on the Internet. In conclusion, social influence marketing is about recognizing, accounting, explore the fact that potential customer is being affected by various circles of people around him via conversation with them on-line, when he or she is making a buying decision. (ibid.)
2.2 What are the social influencers?
According to Singh (2009, p.13-14), social influencers can be divided into three categories: referent influencers, expert influencers and peer influencers.
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