In a world of Instagram and YouTube we usually don’t pay that much attention on whether what we see is business or pure entertainment. Analyzing this behavior marketers have rapidly developed a whole new marketing platform that will be so veiled behind the fun we all face in the social media that it won’t even be easily distinguished and identified.
The Internet is rapidly socializing, and this is the main trend of the modern online environment. Today there are tens of thousands of various social networks and services: communication, news, professional, graphic, blogging, video, and many others. Nevertheless, every day new projects appear in this niche. The total audience of social sites exceeds a billion users and according to some estimates will soon overtake the audience of search engines. The activity shown by people in various platforms of social media is striking, in the most popular projects the average user views up to one hundred pages per day. This is something that all Internet projects have been striving for many years but it was social networks that managed to do this. Psychologists are already seriously talking about the so-called Facebook addicted syndrome — an individual’s painful attachment to what he does and what happens to him on social media.
There is a great number of people who go online only to communicate on social networks. And this is a unique auditorium that cannot be found anywhere else – either on thematic portals or in search engines. For such users their favorite social network has become an absolute synonym for the Internet: here they communicate, meet each other, watch videos, listen to music, search for information, make purchases, read news and articles.
Non-network media, recognizing the size of this audience, quickly introduced their businesses in social networks – integrated their websites with Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and other popular websites of a similar kind.
The task of marketing is to be where the audience is. And of course, such a large and active environment could not help but attract the attention of marketers. Therefore, soon after the appearance of the first social networks and services advertising campaigns were launched on these platforms.
Initially, these actions were of a classical media character – limited to the placement of a posters and text ads. However, it gradually became obvious that the marketing potential of social networks was much wider.
Being able to scope all types of people in all countries through the actual representatives of clients was a chance to disguise the usual annoying advertisements we see on TV or on the streets and turn it into recommendations. People tend to follow those figures they visually are attracted to, but it doesn’t only need to be about their appearance, whether it’s the inspiring ideas, jet-setting lifestyle, flawless style or an example of a perfect family that amuses the audience, it would work. This way launching a marketing campaign on various social media including at least one representative of each interest could give a brand a chance to not limit their target audience anymore. A campaign didn’t have to be targeted at a specific segment of a population with consideration of their age, gender, occupation or lifestyle; instead each influencer would present the service or a product in their unique manner for their audience. As a result, more people are interested to the built authority of the influencer they like and the trust they have when it comes to given recommendations, and hence the sales boosted.
I think this contemporary marketing technic is great in its diversity, however the one big problem behind all of this success is the unfairness. The large commissions the influencers receive from promoting goods or services make the audience skeptical and, in many cases, confused. The influencer marketing business has destroyed the life-long belief that if an individual has great wealth it means he if she worked hard on it or we at least used to categorize rich people as smart, while nowadays if a woman or a man is wealthy it doesn’t mean he or she has spent sleepless nights working, maybe they just made a fortune mentioning a lip-gloss on their YouTube channel or posting a photo with a certain watch on their Instagram page.
Summers, A. (2011, May). Facebook Addiction Disorder — The 6 Symptoms of F.A.D. Retrieved from: https://www.adweek.com/digital/facebook-addiction-disorder-the-6-symptoms-of-f-a-d/
GfK Consortium. (2018). BEHAVIOURAL STUDY ON ADVERTISING AND MARKETING PRACTICES IN ONLINE SOCIAL MEDIA, Annex 1.5 Legal assessment of problematic practices.(Study No. 2015 85 01). B-1049 Brussels: European Commission. Retrieved from: https://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/info/files/annex-1-5-legal-assessment-of-problematic-practices_en.pdf
Wijestinghe, D. (2017, January). Why Influencer Marketing Trumps Influencer Advertising. Retrieved from:https://marketingland.com/influencer-marketing-trumps-influencer-advertising-200822
Influencer Marketing Strategies 
Neat blog, great content! I really enjoyed the current events, especially the post about the Fyre Festival–an interesting take on the underlying problems with influencer advertising and whether or not they can actually be trusted. I agree that this new field of business is new and confusing for consumers and it is becoming a controversial topic on whether this is even a real job. Over all I love your blog considering how relatable it is to us millennial now a days, it is almost impossible to avoid being exposed to their (influencers) marketing.
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Natalia,
You’ve chosen a very interesting and relevant topic. Nowadays, companies are more focused on influencers than the regular target audience. While those strategies could be profitable, there’s always the flip side of the coin. And the main point is that influencers have a certain amount of respect and trust from their subscribers, so the audience blindly follows every single step and “suggestion” of a product, without fully realizing that those things were actually paid by companies just to be advertised. And you did a great job highlighting not only this subject but also the lack of integrity in influencer marketing, and educating those who were unfamiliar with it.
Great job! It was really thought-provoking.
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