$ocial networking: Turning followers into dollars

The future of social media influencers

By CHANTE GOODGER, ARDAJAH JONES & JORDAN NOWASKEY 
Baltimore Watchdog Staff Writers

What this story covers
The popularity of social media allows a select few users with a large following to earn a living promoting brands. Influencer marketing takes up a large portion of companies’ marketing budgets. Social media influencers who are able to score enough brand deals are able to make substantial money.
Why it matters
Influencers are able to market themselves and essentially be their own brand. However, they are, to an extent, at the mercy of social media platforms. When these platforms change their algorithms or shut down, as some have, it means trouble for all but the most prominent influencers.

Carefully pushing her furniture to the side, Kerry Ingram picks up stray items and presses record on her Canon T5i . Ingram, 22, is recording a YouTube video for her beauty and fashion channel, which has more than 10,000 subscribers. Behind her is a well-lit pink bedroom that has been transformed into a makeshift studio.

Ingram is one of many social media influencers who make money by posting homemade videos or writing content on social platforms.

There are approximately 3.4 billion active social media users, with each having an average of 5.5 accounts that they spend an average of 116 minutes on each day, according to Brandwatch. According to a survey from the digital-media firm Defy Media, consumers age 13-24 watch 12.1 hours of video per week on YouTube, social media and other free online sources, and another 8.8 hours weekly on Netflix and other subscription-video services.

Social media is a driving force in society, connecting billions of people and allowing popular users to profit from their sizeable base of followers. Companies have used these so-called influencers to promote their products and services.

The digital space has created opportunities for people with social influence to earn a living — and in a few rare cases get rich. But how sustainable is the social media influencer business model? Will influencers continue to flourish, or will changes in how social media users spend their time and how the platforms determine which type of posts to prioritize make this a short-term fad?

For now, at least, the sector is booming, with influencers earning revenue in many cases through reviewing products and collaborating with brands (called brand endorsement deals). Many influencers have also become entrepreneurs themselves, creating their own brand of products to launch once they’ve established their reputation and a large following online.

Tim Hamilton, a marketing specialist and founder of Shiny Object LLC, is creator of The Maryland Crabs podcast. Hamilton said that marketers are looking for the “coveted” 18-34 demographic, “which is very hard to find generally.”

“But when it comes to social media, they are generally on Instagram, YouTube, and Snap[chat], even though Snap is starting to lose its luster among influencers,” Hamilton said.

He said that finding social media influencers among men ages 18–34 is “incredibly difficult” and that social media influencers tend to be female, targeting a female audience.

Hamilton said it is quite possible for social media influencers to make “tens of thousands” in revenue from marketers. For instance, he said, the viral sensation “cash me outside girl,” Danielle Bregoli, currently makes seven figures a year through her social media engagement, especially on YouTube.

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Some of the top influencers, such as Huda Kattan, the owner of Huda Beauty, and Jeffree Star, the owner of Jeffree Star Cosmetics, maintain makeup brands valued at billions of dollars.

Hamilton explained that users with the most followers are the ones making the most money. Influencers who have millions of followers are making substantially more than those who have a couple hundred thousand, and so forth.

“If an influencer flames out, or loses clout, they will make less money — it’s no different than advertising on TV or the internet,” Hamilton said. “You want either the most eyeballs possible on your product or you want a highly-targeted audience who is highly likely to purchase your product.”

But not all influencers are making the big bucks.

Jimmy Murrill, a 24-year-old influencer who made his name on Vine, points out that there’s a lingering misconception on social media that everyone who is an influencer is rich and making “thousands and thousands of dollars.”

Murrill said influencers who haven’t reached celebrity status with millions of followers aren’t making enough money to sustain their lifestyles with influencing alone.

“You’ll get money, like don’t get me wrong you’ll get a good amount of money, but you’ll still have to get a job, you won’t be able to live off of brand deals alone,” he said.

Top social media influencers have managers who try to find their clients a brand deal, and brands often have employees whose job it is to find influencers. All influencers with managers pay a certain percentage of their designated income to their manager.

Ingram, the beauty influencer, doesn’t have a manager and earns most of her revenue through Google AdSense, an advertising program where creators can monetize their videos.

After using a manager to gain brand deals for a while, Murrill moved away from contracted brand deals in 2018 and founded an individually owned clothing brand named FakeClothingCo. two years after the Vine app went under.

Murrill said that in order to earn a good living as an influencer, people need to create their own businesses and cultivate a significant following to promote it.

“If you wanna make money-money, you start a business,” Murrill said. “You become the business, you become the brand, you become the person who is calling the shots so you don’t have to split profits with anyone else.”

In order to reach a status that makes landing brand deals a possibility, influencers have to reach a critical mass of followers.

Hamilton said that once a person receives around 100,000 views, they can begin to share revenue with YouTube, a deal in which YouTube splits the profits with the user and incorporates ads in their content in return.

Gaining followers can be a massive chore in itself. Murrill said he has spent hours a day following Instagram accounts that would follow him back only if he was to follow all of their Instagram followers. This tactic, although time-consuming, slowly but surely gains user followers. The user must be willing to put in the time and effort in order to accumulate a substantial amount of followers.

The quickest ways to attract the most amount of followers in the shortest amount of time is posting material that has the potential to go viral or having another, more popular influencer/page give you a shoutout in order to attract their followers.

“I had one video that went super viral and from there it just kind of skyrocketed,” Murrill said. “I think I got over 100,000 followers in three days and then it kept growing until it hit 920,000 followers.”

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Although there are many social media apps, Hamilton said that “marketers love Instagram and YouTube.”

Hamilton said that marketers use Facebook for other demographics but that you won’t see many social media influencers on Facebook because of its “straight advertising.” He said Reddit attracts some advertisers as well but that they are just “boosted posts.”

“To be honest, there aren’t many platforms on which social media influencers are successful other than Instagram and YouTube..and maybe snap,” Hamilton said.

Additionally, platforms constantly update their algorithms, which affects the type of posts that users most often see in their feeds. For instance, Instagram recently adjusted its algorithm in a way that prioritizes more popular posts, with the most likes and user followers, making it harder for aspiring influencers to get noticed. This helps pages that are already thriving get more attention and the pages that have less traffic gets less attention.

This means that aspiring users on the app not only have to fight through the clutter and the other millions of users to get noticed, they now have an algorithm that favors already popular pages posts over the less popular.

Joie Gadsden, a 20-year-old make-up artist who uses both Twitter and Instagram to reach her followers, said she’s been affected by these changes.

“I have to pay very close attention now and know correct times and hashtags to use and move completely different than before. Trying to work with tricking algorithms literally is a hit or miss,” Gadsden said.

For Gadsden, the algorithm change on Instagram really made it hard to grow her business as a working makeup artist, because clients and supporters are unable to see her posts sometimes or not until days later.

“The people that run these social media platforms usually create algorithms trying to make it more convenient for the individual user to find things that they would like or people that they know,” Ingram said. “Every time that they change the algorithm it changes the way that bloggers work.”

Social media users are also concerned about the topic of authenticity and deception. Users want to know that the products these influencers are promoting are actually in their regimen or routine, not just a nice paycheck in their bank.

The Federal Trade Commission has issued guidelines reminding social media influencers and brands to clearly disclose their relationship. Otherwise, the lines can be blurred between paid advertising and authentic, free content.

“Social media has become inauthentic,” Hamilton said.

Social media platforms are experimenting with new ways to identify influencer content. Another issue facing influencers is migrating their content across social media when one platform becomes less popular — or even ceases to exist, like Vine, once an extremely popular video-posting/sharing app.

According to CNN Business, Vine was not able to keep up with their competitors and had an unclear path to mainstream success. With apps such as Snapchat and Instagram expanding their video offerings it only lured away users who might have created and consumed Vine videos.

Murrill had accumulated 920,000 followers on the Vine platform before the app went away, and he was not able to recover the influence he had obtained on Vine. Sometimes influencers can only be as relevant as their most connected platform.

“I think the clock is ticking on the concept of social media influencers,” Hamilton said. “I don’t think that they will be as valuable in the next 18 months or so, as old platforms fade and new ones come online.”

Influencers across all platforms, from Ingram to Murrill to Gadsden, have all expressed how time-consuming and demanding it is to keep up with the latest influencer competitors and the changing trends in social media platforms.

As long as social media flourishes and the masses continue to utilize it to find inspiration, fashion, advice, opinions, news, and interaction, influencers should continue to have an opportunity to earn revenue. How long it will last — and what platforms will be popular a year or five from now — is impossible to predict.