How brands are extending social influence and commanding cross-platform conversations

Brands have fully embraced social media content and are pushing the boundaries on Instagram, TikTok, Meta, YouTube and other platforms to drive engagement, mainly in the form of social actions. Influencer marketing has evolved from broad-based brand awareness efforts centered around an influencer’s network into a powerful tool for precision-targeted engagement and revenue generation. 

Yet with engaged audiences at the core, are brands missing an opportunity to harness this social magic and extend reach and engagement outside platforms? Marketers must develop strategies to maximize momentum from their influencer-driven social activity, integrating and extending across channels. Creative data applications that combine social behavior, purchase transactions and robust identity signals can be the engine to power a broader social-driven strategy revolution across channels. 

Social momentum doesn’t have to end on individual platforms

Strong influencer content delivers brand moments, sparking curiosity, emotion and influence. It creates impactful connections on the social platform. However, it can be fleeting unless brands identify and activate against the consumers engaging with the content. This is possible through social signal data captured compliantly from followers of accounts, hashtags, handles and more.

The world of social signal data is often activated on the platform where it originated. However, there are robust sources available in-market that aggregate social data in exciting ways, by category, specific brand, celebrity or influencer. Providers also look at followers, or those who engage with specific hashtags or trending topics. These insights can be delivered deterministically or modeled against, similar to the lookalike approach on platforms, to target like-minded consumers. These data sources can then be enriched outside of the platform with additional consumer behaviors, demographics and identity keys. The result is an audience that can mimic the composition of a social campaign, but with significantly broader reach. 

Consider how a leading coffee chain brand, partnering with an influencer for promotion of a new coffee drink product via content creation, can harness that creator’s audience and content on social platforms. For example, YouTube content created by a Gen Z influencer will be shared on their TikTok and Instagram pages, as well as the brand’s accounts. 

The deeper opportunity is to create audiences for additional targeting off those channel and creator followers, or even off similar influencer followers or competitive brand followers. This results in a variety of socially driven segments that can help a brand deliver messaging and creative from the influencer partnership across platforms like DV360, Netflix, Spotify or Amazon.  

This extension of social momentum through a data-driven approach opens up new ways for brands to connect with already engaged consumers across their media mix with additional touchpoints. These touchpoints reinforce the initial spark, building familiarity and trust through the power of channels like TV, digital, direct mail and more, delivering messaging until they’re ready to purchase.

This is full-funnel influence — inspired by social, delivered anywhere.

Influencing with greater control across touchpoints

To achieve real impact, marketers need to strike a balance: influence that scales and converts. That’s where the fusion of social and transactional data becomes a game changer. By combining engagement insights from social media with real-world purchase transaction data and demographic attributes, marketers can build nuanced target audiences that reflect both interest and a strong likelihood to purchase.

The coffee chain brand can identify audiences who are following and engaging with the influencer content, while also layering in attributes like those with coffee purchase propensities. It’s this precision that turns brand engagement and awareness into real action.

Acknowledging the need for this precision, Alliant has expanded its custom audience capabilities to help advertisers amplify the impact of influencer and social media campaigns across channels. By combining robust social engagement signals, transactional data and demographic attributes, marketers can accurately target high-value consumers with greater control and extend the influence of social campaigns and direct mail channels.

In addition to custom audiences, a syndicated set of social propensity audiences can enable advertisers to reach highly targeted consumers based on their activities, engagement and interests across YouTube, TikTok, Twitch, Instagram, X and LinkedIn. 

In an environment where consumers are harder to reach, inundated by content and searching for brand authenticity, a hybrid of smart social and smart data strategy is key. Social media data, when layered with transactional and first-party insights, offers an opportunity to connect with consumers on a more personal level — through the voices they trust, in the channels they frequent and with the products they care about. 

The future of influencer and social marketing is about more than popularity. It’s an audience-driven revolution that integrates genuine storytelling and powerful data-driven human connections — everywhere.

Sponsored by Alliant