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Thursday 21st November 2019

Influencer marketing: online conversations plummet 42%

Influencer marketing conversations drop but searches via Google continue to climb along with budgets.

Online conversations around influencer marketing have dropped by 42% year on year according to a new report.

Talkwalker, a media analysis firm and software company Hubspot have joined forces to publish: Social Media Trends for 2020.

The eBook discusses trends for next year including artificial intelligence, social media wellness, virtual, augmented reality, and the professionalising of influencer marketing.

The report relied on data identified using Talkwalker Analytics and Quick Search between September 2018 and June 2019. It shows a major difference in the way we surface information and discuss topics online.

My own Google trends analysis for the same period shows a different story. Here “influencer marketing” continues to climb in popularity of search as a topic. This is particularly pertinent against other related topics: content marketing, branded content, and social media marketing. You can see the graph below.



New ideas, innovations and channels will often garner more Google search traffic than well-known terms. Our interest is piqued by the new and shiny. We actively lookout for ways with which to master the subject.

Influencer marketing budgets on rise

The decline in social media mentions of influencer marketing has not dented budgets, however. 61% of marketers increased influencer marketing spend in 2019 according to the report’s data. However, 38.5% of marketers say they still don’t have a framework for measuring influencer campaign success. It’s easy to burn money without a tangible ROI.

The influencer marketing industry is over-indexing earlier forecasts. New projections put the channel’s worth at up to $15 billion by 2022. This marks a rise from as much as $8 billion in 2019, according to Business Insider Intelligence estimates, based on Mediakix data.

Measurement is becoming more sophisticated, too. A positive impact of influencer fraud has been to nudge marketers away from measuring influencer marketing campaign success against vanity metrics. The move has been towards intent and, better yet, impact metrics.

Companies like Australian start-up Q-83 offers brands the ability to gain direct access to their collaborating influencers’ metrics. These include likes, but also impressions saved posts and Stories and real reach.

About the report

Talkwalker and HubSpot gathered industry experts, PR professionals, social media gurus (their words not mine) from the US, Europe, MEA, India, APAC, and the rest of the world to define the marketing trends for 2020. For the first time ever, Talkwalker included its own trend-data analysis. It combined its social listening insights and industry expertise.

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Photo by Austin Neill on Unsplash