Using influencers to maximize your social ROI | Social Media

The e-commerce retailer Revolve is on a hot streak. The company did roughly $400 million in sales last year and, this month, it got the business press buzzing with the announcement that it plans to go public.

A ton of ink has since been spilled about the secrets of Revolve’s success: its data-driven approach to everything from design to fulfillment; the development and success of its in-house fashion labels; and, most importantly for the marketing community, its innovative use of influencers as incentivized models and endorsers. As Marc Bain of the website Quartz pointed out, Revolve’s IPO filing mentions the word “influencer” 79 times.

For the past decade, Revolve has been swiping market share from so-called “youth culture” companies like Pink and Abercrombie, which still haven’t learned that youth culture is driven by influencers. Revolve, on the other hand, has built a self-sustaining marketing ecosystem by engaging thousands of influencers at once and giving those influencers the freedom to promote products as they see fit.