Will the new Instagram require influencers to have an organic audience?
In case you’re not aware the new Instagram is very different from the old one. How does Instagram work for influencers? For starters, it’s all about the likes and engagement you get but now the new Instagram has removed likes, or rather you as the audience can no longer see the likes but the owner of the platform can see how many likes he/she has. So from your end all you can see is “other’s likes” but not the number of likes. They did this as an attempt to reduce the obsession with likes as a way of focusing on the quality of content instead. How would this affect an influencer though?
The influencer marketing industry has become over-saturated and is filled with enough fake profile celebrities who actually lack quality content. People are obsessed with the number of followers people have, some influencers even buy followers for the sake of marketing. This obsession with likes and followers has led to lack of trust between consumers and brand promoters which in this case are the influencers, people no longer trust what influencers say online when it comes to their opinions of brands. Since trust is essential to establishing credibility, which is foundational to cultivating influence, you can see why there is cause for alarm.
Are influencers that influential?
Apparently, while influencers actually promote brands online they are actually far from the most influential people online. Studies have also reported that the more followers you have the lower the average number of engagement rates tend to be. What this means for this industry is that it will favour micro-influencers who actually have an organic audience basically an audience that has not been bought and are loyal.
Who are organic influencers?
These are people who don’t do everything for money, they actually like the brands they promote and they genuinely create content about the things they actually like. They may have 5,000 Instagram followers, or they may have 50, but the size of their social followings aren’t as important as their passion, authenticity and collective influence. You see organic influencers are not paid for their content, they mostly do what they do because they love it. Brands however, push influencers into a tight spot, the fact that content has been so commercialized most influencers throw away their authenticity to obviously make money.
For example, you could ask your organic influencers to post some winter-themed images in advance of a holiday campaign you may be preparing to launch. Want them to feature a specific product or take a selfie vs a scenic shot? Just ask, and provide examples of the types of images you want. We should promote more work from organic influencers than simply commercial ones, why? Because they post content that they care about, if Instagram took away the ability to promote certain content then we would be able to control the number of influencers we currently have because most would end up getting out of the game anyways.
