Sproutsocial Influencer marketing : everyone’s talking about it. It’s been a buzzword for a while now and mainstream media refers to it constantly. But what is influencer marketing, really? To understand what influencer marketing is and how it can be leveraged by your brand , we need to understand the concept of influencers . What is an influencer? One of the biggest misconceptions is that an influencer is someone with a l arge social media following . This thinking confuses influence with popularity. The act of influencing requires a specific result: a change in thinking or in behaviour . We can therefore define an influencer as being someone who has the power to influence the perception or behaviour of others , for example by affecting their purchasing decisions , often times based on authority, knowledge, position, or audience relationship. In more simple terms, an influencer is a person who can influence the opinions of other peopl e and get them to do s...