Influencer marketing has now grabbed a large piece of the marketing mix. Unfortunately, it has an inherent credibility problem: how can you accurately track true influencer ROI? Due to dodgy partnerships, fake social followers and fake engagement, influencer marketing can be a crapshoot.

Blockchain can solve these issues by:

• Helping verify an influencer’s performance and legitimacy, by accurately tracking engagement with their posts.
• Introducing smart contracts into the influencer ecosystem. This could allow for scenarios where influencers only get paid after they’ve hit a marketer’s target number.

Companies like Patron and indaHash have started using blockchain to help brands verify influencer value, while others like Socialmediamarket offer an Ethereum-based platform that adds dispute-resolution to influencer engagements.

SEO’s biggest challenge is keyword tracking. However, keyword tracking has long suffered from inconsistencies that can make perfecting SEO a major challenge.

For starters, Google algorithms aren’t static. This means marketers must continuously course-correct their SEO approach. Another stumbling block is the fact that most people have and use multiple devices, making it a challenge to track keywords, not to mention distinguishing between local and national searches.

• Blockchain is showing great promise in tracking keywords and generating precise, device and location-agnostic statistics. This is a major leg up for marketers when creating strategies and campaigns.
• Blockchains can also power search engines themselves. A great example is, Presearch, a platform built on a blockchain that pays people to search on it.

These days, it can feel like there’s a huge data leak practically every week. When we hear about them, we ask ourselves, “Has my identity or financial information been compromised?” and “Should I give my personal information to this company?”

Unfortunately, data security is a growing issue, resulting in personal uncertainty and low levels of trust for marketers and consumers alike. Here again, blockchain offers some solutions.

• Blockchain can provide new layers of accuracy and data security acquisition.
• Blockchain can also let consumers charge money for their data—ensuring only companies they want to give it to, can access it.

While this may sound like a new barrier to data for marketers to overcome, it means that instead of wasting money on dirty data, fake profiles and uninterested consumers, companies will get targeted, accurate information from people who are actually interested in their goods and services.

For more than 15 years now, people have been posting, sharing and accessing content through centralized social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Twitter. While this has its social benefits, it also has its warts. The list is long: data breaches, misinformation, bots and fake profiles, privacy issues, account hacking ransomware, ad fraud, you name it. The associated headaches are heavy duty.

Blockchain can offer “decentralized” social media to alleviate the issues by providing a more secure environment. It can also give content creators the ability to directly benefit from the value they generate.

Some blockchain-based social media examples:

• Minds: Offers all of Facebook’s features with no centralized surveillance
• Bitclout: Mixes speculation and social media by allowing users to ‘buy into’ other users’ value via cryptocurrency
• SoMee: A gamified network with multiple monetization options via “gravitational pull”, a proprietary algorithm
• Diaspora: A highly secure node-based network
• SocialX – A platform that rewards users by paying for engagement and quality content

While it’s highly unlikely any of the above will ever pose a real threat to Facebook’s dominance, they and others like them will alter the social media landscape simply by showing users how social media can, and should operate.