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Influencer match-making platform The Social Club focuses on Snapchat, pens partnership with Mish Guru

The founders of The Social Club, a two-way market place where influencers can login to view brands and brands can login to view influencers was launched late last year and according to its founders, recently penned a partnership with Mish Guru to improve its offering for brands and influencers alike.

The Social Club was created in response to the need to connect influencers and brands. 

When we last caught up with The Social Club in early March, the platform had 400 registrations from influencers on its database. It now has 1,000 influencers from New Zealand and Australia, has partnered up with Mish Guru and is looking at expanding globally.

  • See our previous story on The Social Club here

“We are exclusively running influencer campaigns through the Mish Guru platform,” says Motion Sickness Studio creative director and co-founder of The Social Club Sam Stuchbury.

“It means that we can use all the benefits of Mish’s software on our influencer campaign so we have all our content pre-approved and pull the full analytics and run campaigns with user-generated content as well.”

The Social Club co-founder and brand community developer Justin Clark says it’s had awesome returns from its Snapchat campaigns to date, of which there have been 10 so far. The Social Club has run around 35 campaigns in total over the past four months, engaging nearly 200 influencers within those, according to Clark.

“The Snapchat influencer space is one that’s been difficult to engage with due to account discoverability being relatively poor on the platform.”

Stuchbury says though the deal has only very recently been officially signed, the businesses have been working closely together since The Social Club was launched. “We see Snapchat as a space which is going to be enormous with influencers in the next couple of years based on what we are seeing overseas and in consumption trends in New Zealand … So we jumped onto Mish Guru really early and [we’ve been] experimenting with these campaigns.”

Clark says a lot of brands want to try Snapchat marketing but are cautious around ROI and measurability. “So having the ability to pre-approve content and accurately measure Snapchat results will certainly help attract marketers to the space. Alongside Mish Guru we’ll be offering some of the more advanced reporting in the market.”

While it’s well known influencers can charge some pretty exorbitant fees Clark says The Social Club has a mix of influencers, some with higher fees and some with lower.

There are some inflated prices in the market, he admits. “But that’s generally the result of key New Zealand-based influencers being contacted by too many brands and agencies, often with products that aren’t particularly well aligned. This has resulted in certain influencers charging a premium in an attempt to protect their own personal brand and authenticity.”

He says while some of the top influencers charge higher fees there are also lower level influencers, which The Social Club team calls micro-influencers, who have smaller followings. “But by engaging a large number of these micro-influencers you can still generate significant reach, often with much higher levels of engagement”, Clark says.

By making a range of influencers available, he says the platform is more accessible to all brands.

The Social Club is working hard on creating a genuine influencer marketplace in New Zealand, he says. “With brands having access to so many more options, influencers are having to play fairer and that trend will continue going but we are also conscious of creatives being looked after for their time and effort. We’re working towards a fair middle ground and that’s probably not too far away.”

Mish Guru founder Tom Harding says working with The Social Club for the past few months has been a real eye opener.

“Their ability to mobilise entire crowds of content creators to share authentic brand stories has been producing results on a whole other level. They’ve taken what has previously been a long and manual process and turned it into a platform that provides real benefits to both the content creators and brands.”

He says with the growth of Snapchat and the amount of consumer attention it’s commanding (Snapchat users on average spend 30 minutes in the app every day), it seemed a very natural extension to see content creators shift their attention to the space.

“What maybe isn’t so obvious though, is how difficult it is to identify these people. Snapchat has a very limited set of account discovery options and so when The Social Club approached us about working together, we jumped on it.”

He says Snapchat’s strength lies in its ability to tell complex narratives. “And with the power of the Mish platform we were able to push the boundaries with some of these influencers while still providing brands the ability to moderate the content before going live.”

He says he hadn’t anticipated how eager the influencers’ fans would be to participate in the stories. “We were seeing a crazy amount of user-generated content coming back at us and after testing it out, found that including that content in the branded story pushed a crazy amount of engagement.”

Harding says the ten campaigns it’s worked on so far with The Social Club have been averaging close to 25 million views on each of the 24-hour campaigns and saw one account push 65 million hits.

So what about competition? One would think talent agencies would be The Social Club’s main competition but Clark says it works with quite a few talent agencies.

“We are creating a hub for influencers and we’re looking to give marketers access to as many of these influencers as possible, allowing them to find the right alignments for their brand.”

The Social Club plans to run a few events in the coming months for brands and separate events for influencers to educate them on new industry trends and how to collaborate most effectively with the one another.

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