This is a guest post by Iva Grigorova.

The role of influencers has become key in brand communication.

Social media opened the world of communication because it connects people. Digital media giants like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube have been transforming the communication industry for years.

People spend most of their time online where they consume content.

Zenith’s Global Intelligence report for Q3 2018 says Facebook has 15.5 billion users per day with global reach 53.6%; Google and YouTube mobile search has 75.6% global reach; and, Twitter has 335 million monthly users and +11% grow of daily users, meaning existing users have become more active.

In addition to the growth of social media, let's take a look at the six key reasons why you need influencers to help you grow your business: 

I cover Edelman's Trust Barometer every year. 

This year's results came out last week and they did surprise me. Positively.

Trust has changed profoundly in the past year. People have been losing faith in traditional authority figures and institutions to help them navigate a turbulent world and more recently, they are losing confidence in the social platforms that fostered peer-to-peer trust because of fake news or false information being used as a weapon. 

We have shifted our trust to the relationships within our control and most notably our employers. 

People are now bringing their call for change to the workplace where they have a trusted relationship.

Employees are ready and willing to trust their employers, but the trust must be earned through more than “business as usual" and not simply operational excellence or decisions that would impact jobs. An organisation’s contributions to society, its values and its vision for the future all outweigh operational decisions in terms of earning trust.

Video is no longer an awareness play, left to big businesses with big agencies and big budgets. 

Video is now everywhere and anyone with a smartphone can play. 

Many brands are jumping on video marketing as they recognise the need for it but are still struggling to create the type of engaging videos that their audience can connect to or be interested in watching until the end. 

Social networks too are placing video at the very front - Facebook launched a whole section that surfaces personalised videos to your interests and past activity, Instagram Live is booming, YouTube is at an all-time high when it comes to usage. 

But creating videos that are personalised and authentic is hard. Sometimes it works, other times it doesn't. And everyone has a different opinion.

Take the latest Gillette ad campaign "We Believe" - it sparked a lot of controversy, some loved it, others really hated it. 

Did you know that by 2020, IoT technology will be in 95% of new electronics?

That's just a year away, yes.

We thought that online and social channels were disruptive but how about innovations such as 3D printing, electric cars, the internet of things (IoT), virtual reality and artificial intelligence (AI)?

These new technologies are completely reinventing how we do pretty much everything in our personal and professional lives. 

And we will all require new skills to be able to do our jobs. In fact, in their research, Accenture Interactive predicts that more than half of the workforce will have to learn new skills within the next five years due to human-machine collaboration.

No wonder then that one-third of companies are planning to increase their innovation-related investments by more than 50% as worldwide spending on technology and services to enable digital transformation (DX) is going to reach nearly $2 trillion by 2022.

But what are some of those investments going to be? 

With the new year, the Inbound PR methodology deserved an update.

Last autumn, we introduced the HubSpot flywheel and to align with the flywheel we updated the inbound methodology from attract -> convert -> close -> delight in a linear fashion to attract -> engage -> delight in a circle. 

We define inbound as a method of attracting, engaging and delighting people to grow a business that provides value and builds trust.

Traditionally, inbound focused on the customer - your buyer persona and how you attract prospects and customers to your website and blog through relevant and helpful content, then engage with them using conversational tools like email and chat, and finally, delighting them by continuing to act as an empathetic advisor and expert. 

At The Heart of Inbound PR is Your Stakeholder Persona

What's unique about PR unlike any other industry is that it tackles multiple personas - customers, media people, employees etc.