If you operate a small business with 100 Facebook (News - Alert) fans, identifying your top brand evangelists is easy. However, if you have millions of Facebook fans, targeting those influencers and forming authentic relationships with then can be difficult. SocialChorus seeks to change all that by identifying social media influencers for large companies and helping them to develop recurring contacts with those influencers.

“When I saw the Chorus platform, I didn’t even have to finish the presentation because I said I wanted it,” said Becky Brown, director of Social Media for Intel (News - Alert). “It really is the missing piece that we need, which is how do we connect, in an authentic way, to people who are influencers? How do we build those relationships, a deeper relationship with influencers, that we don’t have today?”

Lisa Barone of Small Business Trends identified five main types of influencers found on social media. First, the “social butterfly” is someone with an enormous contact list who is found on all of the social media platforms. Second, the “opinion leader” has a great deal of credibility when they evangelize a brand, tending to receive many comments on their posts or having their posts commonly retweeted.

“The discoverer” is someone who is always discovering the latest social platform and bringing others onboard. “The sharer/reporter” disseminates information through specialized webzines that then goes out to bloggers and journalists. Finally, “the user” is a regular customer who has a smaller but no less important network.

Ben Straley, CEO of Meteor Solutions, states that one percent of a website’s visitors drive 20 percent of traffic by sharing the brand’s content or site links with others. The key to success, Straley says, is to identify the one percent, find out what motivates them, find out what they like to share, and find out where they like to “hang out” online. Then, companies need to incentivize that one percent to continue sharing content and driving traffic to the company website.

SocialChorus finds influencers and “super fans” that matter to a company’s brand. Then, SocialChorus helps companies to connect with their influencers and to leverage the connection that they form with both the influencers and their audience.

SocialChorus integrates with any social media platform, providing both content automation and analytics. “And we do this,” says the company in a promotional video, “at a ridiculous scale.”

“As social activity explodes, brands and agencies have learned that manually managing influencer-marketing programs is time consuming, costly and not scalable,” says SocialChorus representative Joe Burton. “In automating the Influencer Relationship Marketing process, our platform frees marketers to focus on strategy, driving social actions, and creating mutually beneficial relationships with influencers. The IRM possibilities are now only limited by their creativity.”