Advisers: a new type of influencer

When you’re ready to book your holiday or order your latest iPhone, don’t you automatically go and see what other web users say?

If this is what you tend to do, then you have probably already been faced with the powerful influence of advisers. But who are they? How do we recognise them?

Alongside the traditional difference between micro and macro-influencers, new categories of digital influencers have appeared. The best known are advisers, in French “les conseillers”.

• These are “lambda” consumers, in other words simply Mr. and Mrs. Everybody. Advisers give their opinions on products and services that they have consumed and therefore potentially on your next purchase.

• Advisers generally find themselves on forums, blogs, social networks as well as on B2C and B2B sites that offer consumers increasing opportunities to evaluate and leave comments on their products and/or services.

• According to a study carried out by Adweek and Defy Media in 2017, advisers represented 30% of the active French population.

Advisers, more real and more discrete, do not belong to either the category of micro and macro influencers and even less to that of celebrities. Several characteristics distinguish them from conventional influencers:

• Far from the profile of the influencer, who works to develop a community and engage people around their content, advisers are simply those that influence through liking, commenting and sharing.
  Not having any particular community, they spread the word through forums, websites and social networks.

• Influencers are often considered as key players in advertising campaigns. Advisers, however, are the barometer. Unlike with influencers, brands don’t have any control over the recommendations of advisers.
  As consumers, they are the audience that need to be satisfied through good operations.

• As part of the Trust Economy, we give and receives advice on everything! More authentic than those of conventional influencers, the opinions of advisers only count when there are large numbers of them. Real influencers are therefore the only ones able to impact a campaign on an individual basis, and those able to effectively carry an influencer mareting message.

If influence becomes more accessible on this point, it’s because for several years now everything has been done to encourage web users to be influential. Exchanges on social networks are more effective than ever, to the extent that an unknown person can quickly create a buzz.

The proof with Carter Wilkerson, an American owner of a Twitter account followed by 138 people and who, with a simple tweet asking for free chicken nuggets, beat the retweet record (nearly 4 million)!

On the other hand, forums have developed so much that it is rare to find a product for sale that doesn’t have a rating or opinions on the internet, and this as soon as it comes out. Beyond macro-influencers, one would be tempted to believe that advisers are therefore often the first managers of a company’s e-reputation.

The significance of their judgement is clear when you analyse the profile of advisers, most being Millennials or Gen-Z. These generations, both the core target and ultra-connected, are the most sensitive to the opinions of their peers on the internet.

It is therefore necessary to pay particular attention to members of these generations in order to ensure that your brand has the right reputation.

Gone are the adverts that boast about the miracles done by a product, and instead we’re seeing subtler and better-thought-out advertising. Native advertising, ambassadors that make people dream, influencer-experts that display themselves with products and… advisers that validate it.