The Tribe of Influencers will honour the most popular bloggers in the country. Voting for the Zimbabwean Blog Awards commenced on the 1st of February 2018 and will close on the 21st of February. Voting is open to anyone and everyone, local and abroad. The public can vote as many times as they want and the poll is public.

“Bloggers will tell you that blog readers are the same circle. By allowing the public to vote as many times as they want, we are hoping to really get them engaged. After all, engagement is the currency of the online world in this attention economy and this gives an opportunity for our bloggers with high engagement with their audiences to shine through. It becomes less about how wide your reach is and more about how passionate and engaged your audience is, thus creating a more equal playing field for all our nominees,” said a Tribe of Influencers representative.

During the month of January the public was encouraged to nominate the blogs that they enjoy the most. All the blogs that were nominated were automatically entered into the running for the Zim Blog Awards.

“We entered all the blogs so that each and every one of them could be celebrated. We have provided the links to all the blogs so that the public can view them, get to know them and follow them. We kept the rules to a minimum as we wanted to maximise that engagement between the content creators and the public. This is still a growing industry,” explained Tribe of Influencers.

As you vote, the results are revealed to the voter. The voter can also see how many votes that category has so far and how many days it has been running for.

“The results are made public mainly for the sake of transparency. Awards are met with scepticism in Zimbabwe and we wanted to show everyone how the votes are ranked. It also serves to create a little healthy competition because you can tell on the poll if you need to pull up your socks. We are looking for the influencers who can harness the support of their followers.”

Shirishanu, a company that specialises in customer software development solutions, has come onboard as a partner for the Zim Blog Award by providing the social media voting platform. This allows voters to also vote for their favourites via the Tribe of Influencers’ Twitter and Facebook pages, as well as Facebook messenger.

Voting for the Zim Blog Awards can also be done via the website at www.tribeofinfluencers.com. The public vote will determine the finalists of each category, before a panel of judges determines the eventual winner. Winners will be announced at the awards and influencer cocktail event that will be held on the 9th of March at Moto Republik in Harare.