If you want to be an influencer, you need to know how to earn and build Trust. With Responsibility.

05 DEC 2023

Trust is the main indicator valued by Romanians in the BAR study - Barometer of Influence in Romania - created and developed together with our strategic research partners from Cult Research.

The BAR study, launched in 2021, is our joint initiative - GRF+ Cult Research of R&D. A multidisciplinary research project with national relevance that evaluates for the first time the mechanisms of influence formation in social media. According to BAR, there are four main indicators that build Influence: Trust, Responsibility, Enjoyment (the ability to be enjoyable), and Power of Persuasion.

BAR analyzed a mix of qualitative data from local and international experts in influencer marketing, marcom, content creators and academia - and nationally representative quantitative data from over 1000 respondents - people active in the online environment belonging to generations X, Y, Z.

Here are some of the conclusions of the Study:

• Trust matters the most for social media communities;
• Responsibility and Power have different weights of importance, depending on the field of interest;
• 90% of respondents believe that social media influencers should be informed, honest, and transparent in their relationship with their followers;
• The purchase decision following the recommendations of social media influencers is much higher among teenagers.
• The most followed field of interest in social media is Parenting;
• Men prefer YouTube, women prefer Facebook;
• Digital natives (members of Generation Z) are the most willing to purchase products recommended by an influencer they follow on Youtube, Instagram and TikTok (48%), while members of Generation X are slightly more skeptical to opt for such recommendations (35%), but they are not indifferent to them.
• The Barometer of Influence analyzed five categories, Cooking, Parenting, Tech, Fashion & Beauty and Teenfluencers (influencers targeting teenagers). According to the BAR results, the most followed domains in social media are: parenting 69%, fashion & beauty 65%, tech 60% and cooking 55%.

 

We started working on BAR based on some very specific needs:

To know what attributes influence is made up of and how they vary depending on the generations of followers. And to be able to measure the weights of these attributes depending on their differences from one business category to another.

In essence, our goal was to understand the functionality of Influence - not to create a ranking. And in the context of a relatively young global industry, with billions of dollars in growth year-over-year, and in the context of fake followers, campaigns in which brands don't match influencers, and questionable results - a tool for measuring how influence is built online can only help to strengthen trust in our industry.

"One of the most interesting conclusions of the BAR is that, depending on the field of interest and the age of the followers, trust is built and means something different. Thus, while for generations X and Y active in the parenting area, trust means transparency, expertise in the field, stability and consistency over time, for the communities of generation Z followers, trust means the ability to be approachable and to create original content" said my namesake, Paul Acatrini, Research Director and Managing Partner Cult.

Bonus - if you've read this far, I'll also tell you about the BAR’s strength indicator: Selling Power. The selling power that we can calculate for each influencer evaluated. If you want to know more about BAR and Selling Power or other BAR metrics – contact me.

paul.kasprovschi@grf.plus