"King Roger" is the number one influencer

Around two years ago, the topic of influencer marketing rapidly gained momentum - now the majority of Swiss companies have budgets for influencer marketing as a fixed part of their annual marketing budget.

Influencers are people who regularly create publicly accessible content on social media that they use to influence the behavior of their followers. They are the opinion leaders of millennials and Generation Z. Current number one in Switzerland: Roger Federer.

Algorithms capture over 10`000 Swiss influencers

In order to identify the top influencers, the communications agency Jung von Matt/Limmat, the influencer marketing platform Reachbird and the University of St. Gallen conducted a Ranking which analyzes popular social media presences according to the following seven criteria.Average engagement rate (Ratio of number of comments/likes to number of followers)Comments / Like Ratio (Ratio of number of comments to number of likes)Followers / Followed Ratio (ratio of the number of followers to the number of accounts followed by the influencer)Mentions (how often the influencer has been tagged by other profiles)Ad / No-Ad Ratio (Ratio of the number of posts with ads to the number of posts without ads. Few ads are positive for the ranking)Follower growth rate (Change in number of followers within one month)Sentiment of the comments (Analysis of the mood using emoji evaluation in the comments)

Success is not determined by follower numbers alone

The central concern of all those involved was that the ranking should not be based solely on the number of followers of the influencers, but that seven indicators should determine the evaluation algorithm. Martin Faltl, research associate at the University of St. Gallen, explains: "Many other rankings are based purely on the number of followers of the accounts or attribute great importance to this value. With our ranking, we offer an alternative that approaches the actual influence. That we have succeeded in doing so is shown by the fact that the top 10 includes both very large accounts like Roger Federer, but also much smaller influential accounts." Thus, despite having half as many followers as Ivan Rakitic, Roger Federer is ahead of the FC Barcelona footballer in the ranking.