Learn About Influencer Marketing from Connor McDavid

It took 3 games but Connor McDavid got his first career NHL goal against Kari Lehtonen of the Dallas Stars – a tip-in off a shot from the point by defenceman Andrej Sekera. Twitter exploded with its usual fury of conversation as the 18-year-old put up his first point in what’s sure to be a long and exciting career. What can we learn about influencer marketing from Connor McDavid? Let’s Find out

Using social media monitoring tool NUVI, Strong Coffee Marketing was able to pull a few interesting things out of the dog pile of tweets, comments, and reactions the young gun’s first goal created. We also looked at the social media reaction on opening night with the top 2 draft picks this year Connor McDavid and Jack Eichel and found a few cool things

Influencer Marketing: Track the Tweets

Firstly, we can see the key phrases that were most used. Expectedly, ‘connor mcdavid’ is well in the lead as the most used key phrase which is followed by ‘first nhl goal’, ‘first goal’, and ‘third game’. What’s a little more surprising is that the term ‘wayne’ – in reference to Wayne Gretzky – is present somewhere in the middle of the pack. Wayne Gretzky also scored his first NHL career goal during the third game of his NHL career and did it as an Edmonton Oiler as well.

Keywords or phrases are important when monitoring social media in terms of your brand or industry. They allow you to see where the conversation is headed, what topics most people are interested in and what’s worth your time when it comes to social monitoring and content creation. One of the most fascinating things about social media monitoring is the ability to clue into things that you never knew existed. We can pull ideas or go in directions we might have never thought relevant before and all it takes is a little research.

“Social media monitoring gives you the ability to clue into to conversations you never knew existed”

We are also able to see what URLs are shared the most and which tweets are getting the most retweets. In this spike analysis, we can see that a Vine video had been shared the most and that NHL and SportsCentre got the most retweets.

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Being able to pull data like this is invaluable to a brand aiming to manage its social media presence. With this type of information, we are able to see what people are talking about, what URLs are being shared, who’s sharing them and find the people who have the most influence. This may allow a brand to hop on a problem before it gets overblown or to hop on a positive trend to squeeze out its full potential.

Influencer marketing is another key to the social media game. Basically, influencers are those key individuals that spread and share your brand’s content and have some a large and engaged audience. We can see from the table above who the key influencers are when it comes to Connor McDavid and in turn hockey. There are some usual characters up there, ESPN and Sports Illustrated take the top 2 spots with a combined reach of 3.4 million. The concept of influencer marketing basically refers to getting your content, whether that’s a blog post or another type of marketing effort, in front of the people that have the most active followers on social media

You can see visually how far an influencer can reach and where exactly your marketing efforts are finding their return on investment. A tweet from SportsCentre, one of the top influencers on the Connor McDavid tag, creates an enormous amount of reaction and activity from a single tweet. While using the example of Connor McDavid we can see how a significant event like the kid’s first NHL goal can make quite a splash on Twitter, we can see how this might also be useful to brands or social media campaigns. Getting the right content in front of the right influencers can really help to spread your brand’s message and is the perfect situation to begin with some influencer marketing.

Influencer marketing is quickly becoming a mainstay in the online and social media marketing community. The influence or respect (for lack of a better term) that some individuals have on Twitter is astounding and when you can visually see the influence these accounts have it’s no wonder many are jumping on the growing trend.

If you’d like a little more information on how influencer marketing works and how it could help propel your social media marketing campaign you can contact us here.