I have always liked articles that start with a dictionary definition from a respectable source such as the Oxford English Dictionary. They always sound so sophisticated.
As I was trying to start my article in the same way by searching the definition of the word “influencer”, Google came back with the definition of the verb “to influence”, which is obviously the root of the word but not the business term I was looking for. Then I found what I wanted on businessdictionary.com, which defines influencers as “individuals who have the power to affect purchase decisions of others because of their (real or perceived) authority, knowledge, position, or relationship”.
I hope the importance of this specific phrase in this definition will be one of your key take outs from this whole article.
The word ‘influencer’ has gatecrashed every meeting, brief and conversation. They are sometimes used as a distribution channel and, on occasions, to create content, only to be confused with brand ambassadors.
Influencers promote all brands from beauty clinics to FMCG to luxury products, regardless of whether they are an actual fit for the industry, the brand profile, the tone, or whether they worked with competitor brands before. When the “movement” first started, influencers were happy to promote brands they liked in exchange for exclusive gift baskets or invites to events.
Lately, however, they stopped touching anything with a logo before receiving a prepayment. If my grandmother had known that these influencers get paid between $1,350 and $13,500 per post, she would have cursed the time she tried to convince me that engineering is a well-paid and respectable career. She would have yelled at me for not starting a blog and taking my @maherghazal Instagram page more seriously.
Influencers are ranked by the number of their followers, likes or subscriptions and by the engagement consumers have with their pages/profiles/blogs. While some influencers can be very effective and drive results, others — with just over 5,000 followers — became self-proclaimed divas, regardless of their actual power to affect purchase decisions.
This marketing craze has led companies to create influencer dashboards, influencer scores, influencer return on investment, influencer marketing programmes and even internal teams just to handle the newly created divas.
Influencers focus all their time and efforts on building their following on Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat and various blogs. But not on Facebook, the biggest social media platform of all.
The reason is that followers on these platforms other than Facebook see all posts on their timeline in a chronological order. When an influencer or a brand posts a video on these platforms, all their followers will see it, which in other words is free marketing.
On Facebook, however, the way in which posts appear on your timeline is dictated by its magical algorithm, which prioritises posts from the people you interact the most with. This makes sure that brands do not focus on building their page followers and then talk to them for free.
Facebook is a pay-to-play platform: if a brand posts a picture, only a
fraction of its followers will see it, forcing them to pay to promote their posts even if they only want to reach their page fans.
So why was your Instagram timeline flooded with images asking you to turn on their post notifications?
On March 15, Instagram issued a statement claiming that people miss 70 per cent of their feeds, as the growth of usage has made it hard for them to keep up with all the pictures and videos people post. Out of concern for you and “to improve your experience, your feed will soon be ordered to show the moments we believe you will care about”, the article read.
This caused a huge uproar online, pushing Instagramers to launch a petition to get things back to the way they were. They claimed that this change would affect small and medium businesses.
The petition gathered 310,000 signatures and was still growing strong when I last checked. So who would be affected the most by this change and why are influencers leading this charge?
Influencers make money on the size of their audience and/or their impact on business results, depending on the available data. If Instagram moves to an algorithm, the number of users that they are reaching will drop suddenly as well as, for some, the fake followers that do not actually interact with them, negatively affecting their viewability.
This would ultimately translate into lower interactions with posts and decreased business results. We still do not have benchmarks to estimate the eventual drop and we do not know how it would affect the better established influencers with followers who interact with them.
But if this algorithm is anything like the Facebook algorithm, this is not good news. Influencers could lose up to 90 per cent of their reach per post, which means that all the efforts they put into building their platform could soon disappear.
To start, strong influencers with good quality content will still get engagement, hence they will be featured in timelines and deliver business results. The upside could be that quality content from both influencers and brand will be rewarded and hence will have a higher share in timelines since non-engaging content was pushed out.
On the other hand, smaller influencers who are currently paid by brands but do not deliver results could potentially be pushed out of timelines, hence would stop getting business from brands. This will directly implicate the remuneration models of influencers as advertisers will no longer pay on superficial follower metrics that no longer mean anything.
Engagement and business results will be the only differentiators between an influencer of a large and small scale. However, if Instagram’s algorithm is as ruthless as Facebook’s, we might find that influencer content, be it engaging or not, will be delivered to only a fraction of the desired followers.
This would mean that influencers would no longer work as a distribution strategy. Influencers would then either have pay some of the money that they receive to promote the posts to their followers, like brands do, or do what they did when Facebook launched their algorithm, which is to find new platforms.
Twitter could be revived as a result of this migration from Instagram. While Twitter did introduce algorithmic timelines in February, this came with an opt-in/out option. Snapchat, on the other hand, has potential but since influencers cannot edit their content or run it by brands for approval it is proving to be difficult for some advertisers. Other smaller platforms have their own pros and cons.
In the meantime, if you haven’t done so yet, start setting both media engagement and business KPIs for your influencers and monitor the changes closely in order to adjust for any drop, either by pushing the content with paid media or by revising contracts of non-performing influencers.
One last piece of advice: do not turn on notifications, unless you are willing to have the people you follow constantly appear on the notification page on your phone.
The writer is a business unit director at OMD UAE.
