As with any data study, it always helps to read the fine print. This is how they measure engagement rate: "The firm measures engagement with a like follower ratio or the average number of likes on each Instagram post compared to the number of followers."
Thus engagement rate could be decreasing, but that doesn't say anything about the total average engagement of Instagram posts, which might be increasing. Possible reasons engagement rate is decreasing (but overall engagement rising):
1) The people who followed your brand in the early stages are your most enthusiastic fans and most likely to engage with your posts. Followers that hop on the bandwagon are less likely to engage, thus lowering your engagement rate. In effect, over time, your follower count will increase, but new followers will increase the denominator (number of followers) but won't increase the numerator (engagement).
2) Perhaps, there's been a rise in automated followers. Thus, your follower count has been increasing but most of it are bots, thus your engagement rate is decreasing.
3) Perhaps Instagram might be pushing more people to follow brands they don't want to engage with. Whether it's through algorithmic recommendations, or more ads that tell you to follow a brand.
What drives people to like a commercial instagram post in the first place?
If it's my cousin with a fish, of course I'll like the photo. That's me saying, "I saw that fish, good work, keep it up," and my cousin takes my like the same way.
If it's a big account, what's the point of being like #14532143, or even upvoting top page reddit/hn posts for that matter? Is it just cathartic or something? I don't get the point.
It's possibly the same reason people wear clothing with a large brand-name printed across the back/front. People often associate brands with their "tribe", and liking posts could be another way to signal that they are part of the in-group.
Disclaimer: I possibly don't know what I am talking about as I don't really know Instagram mechanics at all, but I am guessing they are similar to Facebook's.
Does Instagram broadcast a notification to your friends / followers when you like something? I don't use it, but I think it'd need something like that for a signaling theory to make sense.
There is no broadcast, but when you are scrolling your feed you will see a selection of friends who have liked each post.
Also if you view the activity feed (in a different corner of the app) you can see what your friends have been up to. This is where you will see more explicitly "Sally, Sue, John and Dave liked a post by Mr. Famous" (and similar activity).
The "likes/comment" notification is still chronological.
And if you follow around more than 300 accounts, then it's quite difficult to spy.
But if you follow only selected few people(say <50), then yes, it is much easier to spy.
I like things so I will see more like it. This works because of my follows liking similar things and thus those appearing in my feed, and I’m part of the network effect doing that for my followers.
This doesn’t apply to “sponsored” posts, which show up in my feed regardless of what I like (and are almost always about plane tickets or cell phone plans). They are so uncharacteristic as to be easy to spot, and if they were engaging, the brand wouldn’t have paid to distribute them.
Instagram is an interesting place. I don't feel this way, but my wife has told me that her activity feed is as important as her own post feed. So for her, liking posts of items or people that she likes are very important.
The longer I am on a platform the more I tend to follow (because I don’t unfollow much) but my engagement remains the same. I imagine most people are the same.
Right! There's a diffusion of attention which makes the value of a follower decrease over time.
It's just one example, but I tried to measure this once by graphing clicks on tweets by Tim O'Reilly. He's got a nice history since he was early on Twitter and mostly uses Bit.ly so click data is publicly available.
What I found was that in 2010 he had about 500k followers and was getting 800 clicks per link on average. But by 2018, he was only getting 400 clicks despite his follower count having grown to 2M.
So, from Tim's perspective, the value of a follower dropped by a factor of 8. I think that's interesting even if we don't know exactly why the drop because it highlights the vanity of follower counts. Rather than feeling like his audience grew on Twitter, he should feel like it shrunk in half.
It's hard to draw definitive conclusions on why the drop. Was it diffusion? People who worked at Twitter tell me it was a cultural change too where people stopped using Twitter as a feed reader. So maybe that's part of it too.
I wonder if theres a correlation between the freshness of a follower and their value. I wonder if you're more likely to engage with something shortly after you follow.
I've definitely done it myself. I follow because I'm really interested, so I interact with the posts on the new thing, and gradually I get less interested as the content becomes less novel. Just as an example, I got really interested in the CNCF and followed them, but after a time, my interest in updated from them waned. I went from wanting to see everything they were doing, to only caring about major updates to software, to really only caring when something new joins the CNCF.
Twitter has probably changed the algorithm to decrease unpaid reach. Facebook has done this since earlier. Things don't go viral in the same way as they used to. There are some negative feedback for limiting post reach in Facebook now.
Also, as his followers over time follows more people, their feed will get saturated with tweets.
To enhance point #1, you don't even need to have churn rates that change over time.
Consider a very simple model where the probability of "disengaging" in a given year is 50%, at which point the follower doesn't engage any more with your content (but they don't unfollow you). It doesn't matter what churn rate you pick, you still witness the same effect. And then assume that your follower count grows linearly by 1000 each year.
Time 0 1 2
Engage 1000 1500 1750
Follow 1000 2000 3000
Ratio 1 0.750 0.583
In fact, if you have a flat disengagement rate, as long as even a single person disengages without unfollowing, you will see this downward trend in engagement rates. Same assumptions as before, but this time, of the people that churn, 99% unfollow.
4) Instagram Stories are changing users’ behavior.
I don’t have any data to support this claim, but I’ve seen people posting more stories than regular posts, my wife usually closes the app after she’s done watching her latest stories.
So, maybe likes are losing importance in instagram?
I've had the same experience. Stories seem to have overtaken the normal posts as the more common content.
I think it's because users regard stories as acceptable for mundane, kind of boring, every day life content. Whereas singular posts come with greater expectations of quality or exceptionalism.
Seems like this should result in more likes on your average post (which should now be above average, since the weaker content has been moved to stories).
My guess is that Instagram users on average probably follow more people than they did one or two years ago but probably give out about the same total number of likes.
I think stories took the best aspect of Snapchat in that people can post more engaging, expressive (video vs image), ephemeral content more frequently in a more forgiving, candid form of a curated daily snapshot of their lives.
Most stories typically aren't worthy of being memorialized in a main profile page and since people are posting so frequently it seems natural it would drive engagement through the roof if you want to keep up with your friends socially. Thoughts?
Dunno about anyone else, but I, for one, only like things from people I actually know, regardless how much I appreciate or enjoy the content posted in an ad, by an influencer, or by a company.
Engagements could also be a zero sum game. People (followers) are most likely following more and more accounts every year, yet could be engaging with the same number of posts.
Would be curious to see results of "private engagements" e.g. engagements on stories. Some of the top Twitter accounts I follow continuously tweet about the increase of DMs / private conversations on public posts. This would play into Mark Zuckerberg's vision of transitioning some of social media from the "town square" to the "living room". [1]
I think #3 is really interesting. As an advertiser with a lot of hands-on experience in ad platforms, FB from the start has tried to make the experience as simplistic as possible to manage. This has the side-effect of also getting less-savvy advertisers to spend lots of money on things that may be less effective for them, but may help FB's bottom line in terms of total advertiser spend and RPM's on their inventory by giving them greater control of where and to whom they fill a given impression in the auction.
Depending on how things are working behind the scenes, I could see your third scenario being related to what I've observed.
To be fair to them it's a tough Product situation. The majority of their advertisers are not savvy technical marketers who know the ins and outs of Ad Manager, have attribution solutions, etc. So in a sense, they need to overly simplify. But when you oversimplify things, require less technical setup of things like conversion tracking, etc., you tend to move further upstream from revenue-driving activity in the funnel, which can get very wasteful very quickly.
My wife has about 10k followers and over the past month or so total engagement (number of likes and follows) has dropped considerably, and most of the time her photos don't show up in any hashtags. Her "impressioned" engagement rate (percentage of people that saw the post that then liked or commented) hasn't really changed noticeably.
Instagram just shows her photos to fewer people (and often never shows them to anyone but existing followers - no considerable Explore or Hashtag views).
I've clicked around many "influencers" photos recently and followed their hashtags and often their photos don't show there. Fun anecdote: the less clothes the person (man or woman) is wearing the less likely the photo is to appear in the hashtag feed.
My conspiracy theory: Instagram is favoring personal relationship and smaller accounts, or maybe trying to encourage small accounts to become "addicted to engagement" in order to pull more wannabe influencers into the platform.
None of my findings are by any means thoroughly researched or done in a scientific manner. Just casual and curious browsing.
I'm curious if anyone else has seen any odd hashtag behavior lately. It's possible Instagram just tailors my version of a hashtag's "Recent" feed to me.
I don't think you need any conspiracy theory to explain anything. The 'influencer market is becoming saturated. With low barriers of entry, you have millions of people joining and trying to squeeze out every penny of value.
This is the end result of 'perfect competition' or 'long tail' - depending on what your dance is.
If you aren't seeing your posts show up in the hashtag's 'recent' section then you are likely shadow-banned from that hashtag due to a lack of engagement / relevance
Could be. But it's not "that hashtag". It's any and all hashtags used on the post.
That's what I was thinking at first, but it's not just my wife's posts. It looks like lots of others have this issue, too.
I've only reached out to one "influencer" (a photographer) with 60k+ followers and he didn't care and said he doesn't ever check on these things. And one bikini brand (55k+ followers) who did notice; their own brand's hashtag often won't "work".
I operate a larger instagram account (125k followers), and while I would rather die than apply the word "influencer" to it, I can confirm that it's very unlikely that this has to do with the content of the feeds. We have extremely regular content: 2 posts per day of artworks currently on view around the world. Sometimes we add thousands of followers a week, and our posts rack up tons of likes. Sometimes it takes weeks to add a thousand followers. There's no change in the number of people mentioning us, no outside source for the influxes. It really feels like we hit some threshold in the algorithm and then everything changes for a while. We've been pinned at 125k for a few weeks now after a period of fast growth. Nothing about our content or our natural audience has changed.
I've got a smaller account(33k) and have noticed similar issues lately. It makes no sense as to why visibility fluctuates when my behavior hasn't changed. I have a feeling it's Instagram trying to push us to use their ad system.
This is my fear too. Instagram’s addictive neuroengineering has crowded out attention to our website, so it’s a platform where we need to be in order to reach our constituency. But we are a tiny non-profit and can’t afford to pay to play.
I think so, yes. I have encountered this with Facebook pages, too. Either you go straight viral and get a constant stream of followers each day/week/month, or you flat out.
For one project 700 likes was the end. I collected those in a few months due to natural growth and then it suddenly stopped. With 700 likes to the page there were only around 150-200 impressions per post (no matter time or day or post content) and Facebook _heavily_ offered me to use their ads to push my views.
Tell me what you want, this is about monetization of their platforms, nothing else.
Sounds like something out of the Yelp playbook I've experienced personally w.r.t. their shady sponsored advertising services and their review filtering and business search sorting algorithms.
Is your question tailored to anecdotes or towards industry data?
1. I can name a handful of products that I've bought because <insert some triathlete / olympian> uses them. Out of 6 or so products I've bought I've only had bad experiences with 1 of them, otherwise they all were
2. Sales tactics are basically tried and true throughout time. It's no coincidence the most effective e-commerce techniques are scarcity and social proof[0]. Genuine influencers have the ability to affect social proof on a massive scale.
3. I loathe FashionNova, but they are a grade A example of how effective influencer marking can be if done correctly at scale[1]
4. Scaling influencer marketing is a delicate balance. It's just not programatic (and never will be) like placing ads on Facebook or Google.
> 2. Sales tactics are basically tried and true throughout time. It's no coincidence the most effective e-commerce techniques are scarcity and social proof[0]. Genuine influencers have the ability to affect social proof on a massive scale.
I wonder if 'social proof' is easier to fake/generate on social media with Sybil attacks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack) as well as payment to real individuals to vouch for something they don't actually use
I wonder if people will/are starting not trust these measures of social proof
Which makes a lot of sense since a lot of that has happened behind the scenes in a way that may have limited their visibility or limited their margins.
I watch the Super Bowl for the (american) football, but the TV commercials are still effective. Much of advertising is just reminder that the product exists. Effective not because I buy what Tom Brady buys. "Influencers" are just "content providers" to get the views.
Anecdotally, influencing can work in certain product categories (clothes, makeup) where you would want some authoritative source to demonstrate that something looks as good as advertised.
I try to follow attractive people at times on there, but I quickly end up unfollowing them once I find that the misleading fame has gone to their head... Most of these "influencers" only post selfies or product promos and it gets really boring after 3-4 images. :(
Well, they must be influencing some people, since companies have seen returns for their efforts in that space. Despite the viral stories of how 'X influencer sold only 30-40 products despite having hundreds of thousands of followers', there are quite a few more examples of it working out:
That said, I do kind of wonder about some of this myself. What percentage of an influencer's fans would already be planning to buy the product regardless of said influencer's marketing efforts?
I mean, your average gaming/TV show/music focused social media account/channel is already likely targeting people with an interest in those areas. And the more niche ones likely only appeal to the people who already bought said products anyway. The average Ceave Gaming viewer already probably owns Super Mario Maker 1 and 2, and the average TWD98 viewer is probably an avid Mario Kart fan. Wonder how many other influencers and successful channel owners have fanbases made up of existing customers/people who've already made up their mind on a product/service?
Some do. My girlfriend has purchased clothing after seeing an influencer's post on Instagram. Granted, she has to REALLY like the piece of clothing to buy it.
Regardless, it's infuriating to read hotels, airlines, clothing companies and others throwing money and freebies at people just because they have a high follower count. It's also sad to watch people from my hometown become walking advertisements -- one girl recently started shilling for Disney -- and try pushing their "brand."
I think the Fyre Festival fiasco is pretty strong evidence for the efficacy of "influencers."
In that case there was no real product to buy, the _only_ reason to try to buy the product was its advertising, more than 4,000 people did, and its advertising was almost exclusively via social media / influencers.
Absolutely they do. Not all of them, and it's officially an overcrowded market. There's a large range of what an influencer is, what he/she does, who his/her audience is, and, most importantly, how he/she is promoting your thing. But to assume that the average human being does not do things because others do them, doesn't desire to be someone different, and is in full control of his/her mind, is nothing short of foolish.
Yes. My GF and I have both purchased items that an influencer is 'marketing'. It's not so much that I've been deceived, it's more about the exposure. Some items I'm interested in and the influencer simply put it on my radar.
Exactly this. I follow a bunch of accounts that I rely on to do "cool hunting" for me, and I'm happy to purchase stuff through their affiliate links or whatever. Win-win.
That's just the basic of marketing tactics : supposedly, more you are shown a product or a brand, and more you will accept it in your life. It works any where you can display a picture, from toilet papers to Instagram stories. Influencers are only one more channel to capture people's attention
Like a lot of marketing and ad spend in general. Influencers (or any other media) are simply other channels to put product in front of people who no longer watch TV or read magazines.
The Efficient Market Hypothesis gets a little fuzzy when it comes to advertising. More than a hundred years ago Wanamaker remarked that "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half", and despite all the advances brought about by the internet the situation hasn't changed all that much. It's still completely plausible that Instagram influencers can make money despite being totally useless.
Lots of brands seek exposure so direct sales from an ad may not be likely. You might not be wanting to buy something in the moment but next you are looking for something you'll associate that brand.
It's quite hard to track though some progress has been made through tracking you online on longer time scales. Most people dislike this type of tracking across channels cause we really don't get much out of it besides being bombarded with ads from the same company.
That is a valid point, but also those products are available just about everywhere. Most ads I see on Instagram are some sort of subscription box-a-month club, or some fly by night t-shirt/hat company.
Remember folks: when a product's advertisement is showing emotion rather than aspects of the product, the product is probably poison/toxic/unhealthy/cheap crap.
You're talking about brand advertising, as distinct from product advertising. It's not so much about shopping for "something" as it's about instilling an affinity, a nudge, when the choice is between your brand and something else (a competitive brand, a cheaper store brand, etc.). That is, between items that are otherwise equal(ish).
I d really like to see a serious study on the effectiveness of advertising. Businesses have been spending the same % of their profits for advertising for a century. I wonder if that means the effectiveness has essentially not changed.
Surely, but if the effectiveness of advertising had improved , businesses would increase their reliance and their spend on it over time. While defense has no reason to , once you 've outgunned your enemies.
It could be like the great recession. Perhaps there are so many levels of indirection between the influencer sponsorships and actual sales that everyone assumes it's working when it's really not.
The mega scale influencers like the Kardashian family definitely influence, and have created billion-dollar brands like Kylie Cosmetics.
The regular level influencers are complete nonentities. I remember a story here a while back where an "influencer" with 2 million "followers" couldn't sell 36 T-shirts.
I do not use social media myself, but I saw that story as it was posted here. I get the feeling that there was some bad behaviour in that particular case (while Kardashian at least has some humans).
The t-shirt account can't get past 200 comments with 2.6 million followers? Sub-0.001% engagement screams purchased followers - you typically get more than that in spam comments or shoutout-begging alone most of the time I've seen if they are humans...
I am also inclined to believe this even more so due to scrolling through the follower list for under a minute, based off usernames. Another thing is that while scrolling through, some hypermajority appear to be either India, Middle Eastern, or CIS countries, while she has never written a description in any of those - possibly the vendor was also difficult to order from or ship outside of the US or her home country otherwise.
how long before AI powered "engagement" bot nets get good enough to pass the extremely low Turing test bar required of IG follower comments?
I suspect AI wouldn't even be needed, just harvest real comments from existing high engage feeds and dump them with minor word swaps on to low engage feeds. this alone would probably take a couple years for countermeasures to respond to, assuming there is even an incentive basis to respond at all.
You might not know how good the cosmetics are until you buy them. But whether a t-shirt fits your style is plainly visible (unless they were selling plain tees). Very different product categories
a cursory glance at her revenue ($300M in 2016) shows that it probably is. And this is cosmetics so, mostly profit. There are SV startups losing more than that and worth many many billions.
I feel that it is more than just the terminology. It is also their ideology. It doesn't matter what they are called it will still elicit a negative reaction from me.
I am interested in this phenomenon of hating influencers. Do you feel the same way about this same phenomenon with athletes / other celebrities? Wheaties has been doing influencer marketing since 1934 [1]. Does the fact that pretty much every successful athlete makes most of their money from influencer marketing illicit a negative reaction from you as well? If so, then you can stop reading.
If not, do you mind explaining why it's different? Also, what do you mean by "their ideology"?
Personally I don't like the idea of idolizing celebrities and the wealthy just because. Someone being recognized for actual talent or doing something real is much better to me, but I still don't care at all about the personal lives of others that in no way impact my life. I recognize their talents and contributions to society, but that doesn't mean I care what they have for breakfast or what their political stances are.
The whole point of an "influencer" is to become as popular as possible on the internet to make themselves feel self important and to make money. I can't fathom how this is enviable or why people desire to give them money.
> Personally I don't like the idea of idolizing celebrities and the wealthy just because.
That's fair, me neither.
> The whole point of an "influencer" is to become as popular as possible on the internet to make themselves feel self important and to make money.
I think that might be the goal of crappy influencers, but most of them are just trying to monetize the content they create so they can continue to create that content. Yes, there are some whose success does not seem correlated with the quality of their content or the effort they put into it. That might be part of the reason they draw so much ire.
>I can't fathom how this is enviable or why people desire to give them money.
Technology democratizes the ability to publish content and measure traffic. Now everyone can quantify how many eyeballs they are commanding, and they can sell access to those eyeballs.
> most of them are just trying to monetize the content they create so they can continue to create that content
...is something I don't really understand.
Why must they believe they need to get money to make such content (whatever "content" is?)
I mean, at one time I had a personal blog at my personal domain, hosted on a shared server (right now it is dormant - I really need to get something back online). I coded the CMS myself in PHP, made code updates as needed, then created content using that CMS, and published it for public viewing. I did all of this for free.
Now, one could argue:
"You spent time, and time is money, so you paid something to do that. You deserve that money back."
I can't fault that argument, other than to say that I put my site up to give out information to others on the internet, because I had consumed so much of others free information that they had put out on the internet. In effect, I didn't see my content as product to be compensated for, but rather as my own form of compensation for consuming others content.
But it seems today that a lot of people don't see it that way. They want their cake to eat it, too. They want and almost demand that they get paid for their content. Sometimes they go to extreme stupid lengths to achieve this. Most of time they just nag and complain.
For certain content, I can perhaps understand - but at the same time I would feel kinda "used" paying for it - however that payment occurred. For instance, those IG peddlers who take great photos of beautiful places in the world. I'm not sure what they sell - some are obviously selling clothing, or at least the clothing brand. Others are shilling for other products. The only ones I can really get behind are those photographers selling the photography itself in the form of books or other media.
Even so, it still feels like I am paying someone to have a great vacation while they take photos from around the world.
Or am I the fool? Have I been "leaving money on the table" by not monetizing my content? I'm not sure how I would monetize my content (my site was mainly about hobby robotics and similar) - but having seen other sites with similar content which was monetized in some fashion, I could see how I could do it. I'm not sure I would make much money at it, but it could be done, I suppose...
To your point, i think there is no comparison. Famous athletes/artists have earned the public's trust due to being very talented and working hard. I don't think most social media promoters have earned the same kind of recognition and thus trust, especially when it is obvious from the get-go that they are going after monetization ASAP, they are not in it for the fun of it. It's not equally inspiring
It's not accurate to say influencers don't work very hard. Some of them are also genuinely talented. It's just that they're talented at and work hard at something people here don't value: popularity. The illusion that popularity is just a byproduct of important work matters to the credibility of being famous. Influencers just throw that away.
When I asked my sister why she just called a girl at her school "famous" she said because she has 100k+ followers. So she is famous for being famous.
> It's just that they're talented at and work hard at something people here don't value: popularity.
Rightly so. It is easy to gain popularity by appealing to people's lower insticts or by being ridiculous. Maybe the top 10 "famous for being famous" persons really did put extraordinary effort , but i think it's much less true for everyone else, otherwise they would be famous for something else. And even if it is true, it's not the kind of work that ppl value a lot. It's one thing to be famous as a Kardashian, another to be famous as Maria Callas or Madonna
As devil's advocate, think of how many women have sex tapes out there, and think of how many of them built a billion dollar empire on it. What is being one more pop star in comparison?
There are types of great effort which produce zero value and are only judged subjectively. I really respect the guy putting Doom on his microwave, but to most people that is a completely pointless exercise. I suspect popularity is like that. I laugh at the girls taking 400 selfies standing in front of a bridge, to post just one on Instagram, but I can't deny there is some effort and skill going on there.
It still comes down to an influencer is someone who makes content, shows it to an audience, and sells access to that audience. Some content is cheaper and more engaging than other types, thus leading to some people with a large amount of influence proportional to how hard they have worked.
You might be surprised at how hard these people are working though. The field is pretty crowded, everyone successful has likely worked extremely hard to get where they are.
> Famous athletes/artists have earned the public's trust due to being very talented and working hard.
This is true, but is also crazy. Just because you can throw a ball or put some paint on a canvas better than anyone else — even if it took a ton of work to learn to do that — that says absolutely zero about any other worthwhile aspects of your character. Self-discipline does not directly lead to morality, kindness, empathy, charity, etc.
You don't know how hard some people work. Some athletes drink all night, do drugs, skip practice, and show up to work the next day and score a goal. Is that working hard?
Some "influencers" spend 20 hours per day/7 days per week working on their business. Is that working hard?
With athletes and movie stars etc there was a much clearer delineation between when they were performing and when they were advertising. A few things blurred the line, like being paid to wear certain things, but when an athlete is on the field you know they're performing and when they're in a wheaties ad you know they're being paid to sell it.
Influencers are much more insidious, you can't tell when they're being themselves and when they're being an influencer. You can't tell what is an honest opinion and what is an ad. A consequence is that that the value of everyone's opinions goes down because you can't trust anything, things like small time blogs used to be a good source of decent information, you'd get valuable real feedback from someone with no money in the game, but now they're an influencer that goes out the window. This is even worse when it bleeds into the real world.
As for their ideology, it's the sheer willingness to prostitute their "soul".
Following an influencer is basically the same as reading a magazine like GQ. They show off a lifestyle you find aesthetically pleasing, and the advertisements are part of the enjoyment. People just dislike them because hating young people’s habits is the norm.
People dislike them because it sucks being blatantly advertised to. I don’t think that’s likely to vary with age but with something else—culture, I think.
Sorry for stalking, but so was your very first submission! It's probably standard reading here on YCombinator, but it was my first of Paul Graham's essay on "Why Nerds are Unpopular", and it just speaks to me on so many levels...
Considering the main topic is about influencers, and that their "currency" is popularity, it's not even that off-topic to repost it here:
http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html
Personal plug, I'm exploring a "microinfluencer" (1k-1000k followers) management platform, initially focused on the fashion industry in NYC. This article is somewhat encouraging, actually.
Per HN's policy of commenting substantively, I will say these influencer deals are amateurish and lacking paperwork.
Currently an engineer at Big4, and exploring the seed/angel investment landscape. I'd love to get in touch to get advice and pick your brain on how to do further market research.
It works both ways though. A few days ago on /r/smallbusiness, someone was complaining that he gave away a lot of product and money to "influencers" and didn't get a penny in return. The responses were overwhelmingly telling him that he can't just hand out stuff, he has to tell them what to do with it, where to show it off, how many times to do that, etc.
A platform that provided a more structured agreement between the influencers and their clients would go a long way to fixing this, and would help both parties. It's perfectly reasonable to take a fee for doing that.
Yes, it would skin the top off their take-home Venmo payments that is currently lacking in legal paperwork.
In addition, they wouldn’t have to orchestrate these deals over direct message and email exchanges.
This criticism is akin to saying Stripe or Visa or any broker platform not adding value. It’s a fallacy of smaller pie slice in a larger pie. These are economic activities not being pursued because of barriers to entry for brands, and the overhead of orchestrating many smaller influencers versus 1 legitimate big contract with a
more established influencer.
And yes, they would get 30% less, because they have to pay taxes now.
I lived in Seattle for half my life, and I see where this question stems from.
It’s unbelievable to people in the Northwest that people in NYC, London, and other fashion hubs spend $1K on an article of clothing. This is the norm, not the exception here. Brands like Supreme barely want to sell their $600 t-shirt to paying customers, much less give them away.
Point being, it’s a strawman to compare the target demographic of free tech swag to up-and-coming models getting free designer clothing. Still, it seems the fashion industry is adverse to paperwork and the formality. They’d love it if they didn’t have to deal with paperwork, and can get a tax incentive to give out more (which can potentially be abused, but that’s a separate discussion).
> it’s a strawman to compare the target demographic of free tech swag to up-and-coming models getting free designer clothing
Au contraire! I was actually specifically referring to some jokingly overpriced Balenciaga or Supreme shirt, almost certainly purchased by someone who is somehow shocked (shocked!) that they can't afford rent.
EDIT: Ah I see the confusion. When I said "free t-shirt," I meant, "t-shirt given to the influencer to promote for free," not "free tech t-shirt usually worn to a gym."
Sure. But the Balenciaga or Supreme shirt is a good point. This in some ways supports the hypothesis that people buy brands based on social influence. Value on the West Coast tend to coincide with utility, but this isn't the case with these fashion brands. Balenciaga revenue broke over a billion in revenue, and Supreme has been rumored to be a unicorn.
On the back of this article, I thought the "influencer-incubator" model may be worth a look, however I vaguely disagree with the entire "industry" on a macro-moral level, so let the thought pass.
On the back of all of the comments here, I'd be wary of instagram's power over your business model.
I think this is a smart lifestyle business with potential for some scaling. That term is a little misleading, as I recall a "lifestyle business" being a business that sells everyday brands. I guess it's the new term for "side business".
If your business model works you will have absolutely zero trouble getting investments, right? Likewise, shouldn’t doing market research already be one of your core competencies for this business to succeed?
What was hateful about the question? I run my own business. I deal with questions far harsher than that on a routine basis. (And I hasten to say I didn’t mean to be harsh.)
Alright alright, you worded it well enough, but your questions seemed to be a little sharp given that the guy is just asking for some help. More people should do that generally speaking, instead of not... everyone is better off, as long as people perceive that as someone trying to grow and not a weakness.
I'm focused specifically on fashion for this reason. It's cronyism, for lack of a better word. The fashion industry is still very insular, and averse to change, especially streamlining their processes. This is true for smaller to medium sized brand, whereas the LVMH conglomerate are enterprise enough. To me, this isn't so much an engineering problem, but a sales problem, and educating the brands the benefits. Engineers are always looking for ways to improve logistical processes, but creative people leading fashion brands do not prioritize this.
Where was the ability to directly link a product you are promoting in your post? How many times have you seen people say, link is in my profile?
They could be facilitating the sale of promoted products directly and offer brands and individuals services to make it easy to go from click to sale. Additionally make sure people stay on the correct side of the law and disclosing that they are being paid. Maybe even require such payments to go via Instagram.
Key:
> The engagement rate for Instagram influencers with at least 10,000 followers is steady at about 3.6% worldwide. Influencers with 5,000 to 10,000 followers have an engagement rate of 6.3% and those with a following of 1,000 to 5,000 have the highest rate at 8.8%, per InfluencerDB.
This makes it pretty obvious that the growth of influencers is concentrated in the long tail, where engagement is lower and sponsored posts less valuable.
> The engagement rate for sponsored posts fell to 2.4% in Q1 2019 from 4% three years earlier, while the rate for non-sponsored posts slid to 1.9% from 4.5% for the comparable periods.
So their sponsored posts get more engagement than non-sponsored posts? Does that mean people basically follow them for their product placements?
This article doesn’t address the power law of influencers. Audiences are engaging with a smaller number of super mega influencers such as the Bucket List Family (1.8M followers).
I actually don’t think it’s clear at all that IG influencers make money at all. I imagine that it’s similar to Twitch or Youtube - you have a very small 0.1% minority at the top making most of the income and everyone else scrapes by.
I think a lot of the lower-tier influencers look at influencing as a source of freebies rather than an actual job. They don't make much of an income, but they're perfectly happy just with the free things they're given to promote.
Not Instagram, but I know someone who is a food scene/restaurant blogger on the side. She likes going it (and does a good job). She gets some trips and probably money/benefits here and there but it's definitely more of a hobby with some perks than what a lot of people here think of as a side-gig much less a significant employment stream.
I know someone else who does hiking equipment reviews who I expect is in a somewhat similar boat.
Thus engagement rate could be decreasing, but that doesn't say anything about the total average engagement of Instagram posts, which might be increasing. Possible reasons engagement rate is decreasing (but overall engagement rising):
1) The people who followed your brand in the early stages are your most enthusiastic fans and most likely to engage with your posts. Followers that hop on the bandwagon are less likely to engage, thus lowering your engagement rate. In effect, over time, your follower count will increase, but new followers will increase the denominator (number of followers) but won't increase the numerator (engagement).
2) Perhaps, there's been a rise in automated followers. Thus, your follower count has been increasing but most of it are bots, thus your engagement rate is decreasing.
3) Perhaps Instagram might be pushing more people to follow brands they don't want to engage with. Whether it's through algorithmic recommendations, or more ads that tell you to follow a brand.