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Is social influence measured by followers, likes, and fans? What is social influence? What makes someone an influencer? What is the real focus of social influence? Let’s talk about that with Devin Thorpe in today’s episode on influence. Tune in!
Well, welcome back. We’ve got a fun topic today. You know I like to talk a lot about influence. So we’ve got Devin Thorpe here to talk all about social influence. What it is and why it’s important? Alright. Welcome, Devin. It’s so excited to have you here. Been actually wanting to have you on my channel for quite a long time. Devin Thorpe talks a lot about social entrepreneurship and he’s done a lot of great things on Twitter. We’re going to talk about that in another episode. But talking about social influence. Let’s just talk about what is social influence, first of all? -Well, you know I think for me, one of the first things to point out is what it isn’t. Certainly don’t measure it in followers or fans and likes. -So, it’s not important. -Not irrelevant. -But that isn’t the way to focus, right? The… In my mind, when I think about social, I’m thinking about social goods, social impact. And so, I’m thinking about how am i changing lives? How am i making someone’s life better? -So, if you have a big number, that might not be an indicator if you’ve done that or not? -Yeah. And those are easy to manipulate. It’s easy to manipulate them and then believe that you have achieved something. I mean, it’s so… It’s… Yeah, the focus should be on you know, are you changing lives? And that can come from a variety of ways, right? From the simple enabling someone to do something with a how-to video. To the profound motivating someone to go from focusing on petty, small, things to changing the world. In some meaningful way. And suddenly… It, you know, that. You know, moving someone from one to the other. -Mmhmm. -You know, that’s a profound change. You’ve helped someone make and you… You know, had a huge ripple. But all of those are forms of social impact. It’s a little social influence. -So I like a lot of things that you said. They’re really resonate with me. The type of channels that I create. I’m about to to start filming on our tenth daily YouTube channel. -Wow. -In the coming not next week with the week after. We create a lot of content, right? And there’s a big temptation to create the cute kitten video or something like that. Because they’ll get so many views. You know, that can be helpful in a certain way. But as far as really making difference, really making an influence, not so much. You get the big numbers but I love, you know, all my clients are influencers. And we’ll make those how to style videos where you can answer a question. And it brings to mind a story that the Paul Jenkins shared. he made a video on parenting and he got a comment and he gets these all the time. and I’m thinking of one specifically was from a lady in India that thanked him for the advice that he shared on on parenting that it helps so much. something that she was struggling with and he just you know, it’s kind of the first one of the first comments he got like that that really hit him. It’s like, “Wow! I I just helped a mother on the other side of the planet.” -Right. -And that’s… That really is the power of of what I see on YouTube. Is this real, real ability to build that influence and to to really do it in a meaningful way to really impact for good.
-Yeah. -So, I like that. So, a question I have for you is kind of what’s… I know that you talk a lot about social entrepreneurship. How does social entrepreneurship relate to social influence? -Social entrepreneurship in is in essence is a form of social influence, right? Using business. Entrepreneurship to have a social impact. To make a difference in the world. And in a way, I am a social entrepreneur. You know, my business, it looks similar to yours in some ways, right? I have a YouTube channel and I annoy people on social media all the time. So, I have a presence. But every social entrepreneur finds a way to build a business that is creating some sort of baked-in-designed good in some way. You know, some famous examples are like Warby Parker with the eyeglasses where they sell them not only cheap to everyone but they give away a pair to someone can’t afford to buy a pair. TOMS shoes giving away shoes. One-for-one. They kind of created the one-for-one model. But there are all kinds of examples of people and social entrepreneurship out there changing the world with a business model. Not necessarily for profit. We… Most of us in the social entrepreneurship world will include people who are running nonprofits. Especially if they run launch a new nonprofit with an innovative approach to solving a social problem. -Okay. So I like that. I like that connection. It’s… It takes the social influence component but it matches it with the business side of things too and nonprofit side of things. Okay. So, a back to influence and using social media, we talk a lot here definitely about YouTube. So, what are some other… Other ways that you can really make an impact or influence others and other social platforms? -Well, I think regardless of the platform, the key is to figure out how to communicate with your audience. And it’s always tricky, right? Because all of the social media platforms are constantly tweaking the algorithm. So, what works on LinkedIn one week may not work two weeks ago or you know two weeks later. You know there… There was a fairly significant algorithm change in the last year on LinkedIn. And for a while, you know, a really authentic 300 word story as a post would just crush it. And thousands and thousands of people would get to see it. Six months later, that same content didn’t generate nearly the same number of use. The algorithm had changed. And in fact, I remember at the peak of that frenzy, people were starting to mock the fact that this style of post was getting so much attention and then it… -Got you. -…it you know, link didn’t got rid of that algorithm or whatever it was. But yeah, you’ve constantly got to be figuring out how to connect with your audience and that’s partly a game of working the algorithms and partly an authentic quest to deliver value to your audience and to connect with them in meaningful ways. And you know, that’s tricky. That’s tricky. But that’s… That’s the quest. -Well, so it’s interesting that you mentioned that about LinkedIn. The reason I was at a YouTube conference, I presented there you know, sharing my expertise on in my areas of YouTube. But I I Network twith a lady who’s done some amazing things in the last 6 or 8 months on LinkedIn through video. So I wonder if that was a big part of the change is going away from written content. A little bit more towards video. -Yeah. -Because that with the type of content we create for YouTube. A lot of its in the b2b space and so, I think LinkedIn is… LinkedIn is one of the places that I’m… -I was pretty stunned. I posted a video. First time I posted a native video in a long time on LinkedIn rather than just sharing a YouTube video which I’ve done a few thousand times. We got a surprising number of views on LinkedIn. Of course, it’s tough to know from their data. They don’t provide a lot of data. Whether that’s a lot of three second views and what, you know, how many people watched a minute. How many people watched the whole two minute video. You know, it’s tough to know sometimes. -So we… We understand that the numbers are just kind of steps to try and help us gauge if we are really making the influence that we want. YouTube…. YouTube, it has great analytics. And so we look at an issue. “Ohh! this one’s got a million views or this one only got a hundred views.” You know, and but it’s… When we have a video that’s really impactful, really has a message that… That the world needs to hear and it gets a million views and then we can go back and see, “Oh, this is the demographics, this is the geography, this is where the traffic came from.” Really helpful. So you’re saying LinkedIn doesn’t quite provide you that those things… -Not great. Not great analytics, no. And so that’s a trick, right? To measure you know, what kind of impact you’re getting. One sign that… That in a way, supersedes all the analytics for me is real feedback, right? Because if a person tells you something about the video, especially something if they pull a comment right from the video, “I loved this observation about or I’m going to try that.” Or you know, if they’re being specific about the content then clearly, they watched it. That is really helpful. That… That’s probably in a way more meaningful than any of the analytics. It means you’re reaching at least some people. And I’ll give you an example. I… Forbes contributor as you know. And so, I wrote a Forbes piece a couple of weeks ago. Well, just this week. Interesting thing. Almost no one read it on… On Forbes. And you know, so I think… Literally, like 200 people. Which for me is really, really, bad. -Yeah. -But the interesting thing was when I shared it on Facebook, people started sharing it and talking about it. So even though very few people read it, what was interesting is a lot of people in my circle read it. The… You know, the people closest to me we’re really interested in that particular content and really kind of devoured it even while people who didn’t know me didn’t care. It was… It was really an interesting phenomenon. But… But you can have influence, impact, make a difference sometimes without big numbers. Anyway, it was an interesting observation. -Well then I… So comments on YouTube. That… That’s a great, great, feature. The thing that I… That I don’t like about it though is they can become pretty vile on YouTube because it’s not really a good social network. People really don’t create a profile there and poke publish who they are. They just create their… Their YouTube name and they can comment. And …And I know that LinkedIn is… Is a much better social… Social network, social platform. And so, as you post a comment there, a lot of that garbage is probably filtered out but it’s it’s a lot more engaging as well. I’m sure you’re going to get a lot more share. You can’t share if you’re on YouTube. You can’t share. It’s like, how do you share a YouTube video? You text it to somebody or you email it or you post it on a different social platform. So, that’s one big disadvantage.
So, I’m excited to… To kind of test an experiment with the same type of content we’re creating on YouTube for Linedln. Now, question for you in your experience on LinkedIn. Have you seen videos as square in shape versus the wide, you know, landscape? That’s just a question that I’m… -Yeah, I am… What have I seen? I don’t know. What I’m doing is the traditional. -The traditional, okay. I’ll have to I’ve got to look into that because I… The lady that I talked to, she was doing square videos I’m like, “Hmm, I wonder if that’s just her style or if that’s a….” -Yeah. -Okay. -And I think I’m playing now to experiment with Twitter. I have… My biggest following is on Twitter. But I struggle a little bit with engagement there even though it’s my biggest audience. And so I’m… I’m… But you have to have to upload videos there. I think they have to be less than 45 seconds. -Now, that one I having a struggle catching. I understand the strengths of it in terms of communication and networking and especially communicating with… With a large audience but… I haven’t figured that one out yet. -Yeah. -The last one that I want to bring up is podcasts. Tell me, are you a small time podcast? You’ve been podcasting a long time? -Yeah. I have been podcasting a long time. I’ve done about a thousand episodes of my show. And the first 300 were only on YouTube. After 300 episodes, I thought you know, all these have an audio track. I’m going to start publishing them on my podcast. -And if you have you’ve gotten some of those, not necessarily the stats of how many downloads. But have you’ve gotten feedback from podcast listeners that show that that’s a good platform for influence? -Yes. And what really humbles me about that is most often, when I run into someone I really respect who mentions my content. It’s the podcast they’re listening to. That’s the most common among the people I really respect the most. I don’t mean to insult the people who watch the YouTube stuff. But a lot of the YouTube Watchers are not people who are following my every episode. there’re people who are interested in one. Or interested in two. But the podcast listeners are different. They subscribe and they listen to most of the episodes. They may skip through one or two but they’re you know, they’re subscribing, they’re listening. -That’s a big deal. So, if you didn’t catch the Golden Nugget he just shared there, at least the part of it that the Golden Nugget for me is the people that I might really want to hear this message or really want to have an impact on that they’re more likely actually to be listening on a podcast and through watching a YouTube episode. -I think so. -Which I’ve seen that as I’ve recently listened to several audiobooks about podcasting and any exploring ways of doing that, that same thing. So… Well thanks Devin so much. As we wrap up this video, I’ll… Be sure to subscribe. Now, if they want to check you out, how do they find you on YouTube? youtube.com/ DevinThorpe. D-E-V-I-N-T-H-O-R-P-E. -So, we’ll put that link in our description below or somewhere on the screen here so you can do that. And be sure to watch our next video. We’ll see you tomorrow.