Instagram influencers are using hashtags about the devastating California wildfires to promote products (and it probably wasn’t a good idea)
Business Insider reports that Instagram influencers are using #malibufire and #malibulove in their promotions. For example, jaydenicole captioned “Malibu, we love you and we will heal 💙🌍 Wearing: @ymijeans Location: Malibu #californiagirl #malibulove #strongwomen” posing in a picture promoting a clothing company. @_earn_with_emily advertised bitcoin and threw in 19 hashtags about the fires. Business Insider attributes this to the phenomenon of “keyword squatting” – using popular words to increase the size of your audience. But in this instance, is this strategy really effective?
We will model this as a network diffusion. Let’s use the bitcoin promotor as the example. A group of people can either A: buy bitcoin or B: not buy bitcoin. The influencer has their “normal” audience – their followers that see their posts often. Then, the influencer uses #malibufire to try and extend their influence to a larger audience. The graphic below depicts the two clusters. Clearly, using #malibufire will greatly increase the number of views on the post.
However, will this strategy actually get more people to buy bitcoin? Market diffusion predicts that it won’t. The influencer’s normal audience is likely to be a group that is bitcoin/crypto interested, which makes it easier for an audience to adopt. The #malibufire audience is much more general, so therefore it is unlikely for many people to be interested in bitcoin. In fact, people who just lost their homes to a devastating fire are extremely unlikely to be looking into investing in bitcoin.
Therefore, someone in the #malibufire cluster will have many connections to other people who also have no intention of investing in bitcoin. A single rogue influencer who hijacks the malibufire hashtag is most likely not going to overcome the clustering coefficient for the malibufire cluster.
It seems that influencers should stick to their own target audiences, where each person in the audience has a mix of A and B, rather than trying to infiltrate a large cluster like #malibufire. Plus, it is in very poor taste to manipulate tragedies so the downside of this strategy greatly outweighs the little to no benefit. Most influencers have realized this, and on Business Insider’s report, almost all the posts they have linked have already been taken down by their influencers.