Social Media Influencers, Diffusion and Popularity
There is no denying that the entire landscape of social media has changed in just the past few years beyond what most people could have ever imagined. Social media was once just considered to be for small interactions between friends. It consisted of updating your status on twitter for your 100 followers or posting a family picture on Facebook for your friends and relatives to see. That era is over, and social media has become what would have been unthinkable in the early 2000’s — a job. Social media influencers do not just make pocket change; the astronomical rise in the popularity of social media has allowed many influencers to make more money than many “traditional” jobs. A big part of what has allowed influencers to make such good money is brand deals. A BBC News article talks about what kind of money can be made on platforms such as Instagram, and the answer is astounding. The article finds that the average price of a sponsored photo on Instagram was a whopping $1,642 in 2019. That’s over $1,500 for one post. Not for a set of posts, not for a bunch of videos, but for one sponsored photo. For comparison, the average price of a sponsored Instagram photo in 2014 was $134. The article also found that a sponsored YouTube video required the highest payment from companies, with the average price of a sponsored video being $6,700. So, with many influencers across multiple platforms to choose from, it is no wonder that brands are willing to shell out huge amounts of money to pay for endorsements by influencers. What may be surprising, though, is that the same brand will be willing to sponsor content both by large creators and by small ones. For example, the brand Good American sells women’s activewear and denim. An article in rivet talks about how one of the co-founders of the brand is Khloe Kardashian, who has an incredible 123 million followers on Instagram. With such a famous celebrity who has such a powerful network that can help promote the brand, one would think that the sponsored posts on social media about the brand would be limited to influencers with millions of followers. However, if you peruse Instagram, you’ll find that there are many sponsored posts featuring Good American Apparel by influencers with a range of followers, some with as small as 5,000 followers. How could this be a good business model for the brand?
While this may be initially surprising, it makes sense in the context of diffusion that we learned about. As discussed in class, some products spread and just keep spreading like wildfire, while others may initially spread but die out fairly soon. As we discovered, what happens with a product all comes down to how the network it is being spread in is structured. Since people’s choices are also dependent on and influenced by what their friends and those around them do, clusters of people that are tightly connected can be a big problem when it comes to the adoption of new products. Indeed, we can think of many of the people who would be influenced by sponsored posts on Instagram as belonging to certain different clusters. Khloe Kardashian’s followers are typically younger and are in their 20’s and 30’s. Searching through Instagram, I found a sponsored Good American post by a suburban mom in her 50’s who has less than 10,000 followers. Looking through her content, it appears that most of her followers are around her age. So here we have two very different demographics — Khloe Kardashian marketing her brand to her hundreds of millions of followers in their 20’s and 30’s, and this suburban mom helping market Good American to her less than 10,000 followers mainly in their 40’s and 50’s. The key to understanding this dynamic is that these different clusters are likely very dense; those in their 20’s and 30’s are quite likely not looking to those in their 40’s and 50’s for fashion advice and wardrobe inspiration, and vice versa. But that leaves Good American at a crossroads, because they want to be able to market their products to everyone. If they just had Khloe Kardashian and her famous friends market the clothing, the brand would likely not be able to penetrate into the cluster that this suburban mom is a part of. That’s why they are willing to sponsor someone with relatively so few followers, because they aren’t able to reach these people solely through influencers like Khloe. So, they are willing to spend the money and sponsor creators that are a part of clusters that they are not likely to reach through their typical “high profile” influencers. The suburban mom I found was just one of many examples of influencers with relatively few followers that Good American has sponsored the posts of, and the reasoning behind this practice makes perfect sense when analyzing it through the lens of dense clusters.
This phenomenon isn’t just a “Hollywood” sort of thing; brands have begun to recruit seemingly average people to help promote their products. I actually have a friend who was contacted by Tinder to be an ambassador for their relatively new feature, Tinder U. Tinder U is similar to the regular version of the app in most respects, the difference being that Tinder U requires users to be college students, and matches between people on Tinder U are limited to people on the same campus. When my friend told me that she was going to be a brand ambassador I was shocked because I didn’t understand why she would be the type of “influencer” that they are looking for. She doesn’t have this huge social media following; she has around 1,000 followers on Instagram and it is mainly her friends. She did not seem to me like the type of person that could really help Tinder grow their brand. After learning about diffusion and clusters, though, it now makes perfect sense to me. Much of my friend’s life revolves around her sorority. She is constantly posting pictures of her sorority events and her sorority sisters on Instagram. A sorority is very much a cluster, as it is a group of people that often quite literally does everything together. They all live in the same house, go to a lot of the same events, are friends with a lot of the same people, etc. Since Tinder was trying to gain more traction on college campuses, it makes sense that they would try to find ambassadors that have both big and dense clusters, and my friend certainly fits the bill, as she is part of a big sorority that spends most of their free time together. So, it is really quite logical that Tinder would think that getting a foothold in a sorority would allow their product to diffuse throughout a college. Indeed, it turns out that my friend is not an exception but is in fact part of the rule. Going through the Tinder U hashtag on Instagram reveals many brand ambassadors who have just a few thousand followers, but are in sororities and clearly have a strong connection with the rest of the members of their sorority. This attempt by Tinder appears to be working, as a Youth Marketing case study found that there has been 912 million social media impressions for Tinder U through posts by their influencers.
While these strategies by brands to infiltrate clusters in an effort to have their products gain popularity can be quite effective, caution is certainly warranted throughout the entire process. Specifically, brands need to be extremely careful about which influencers they have promote their products. Our focus in class was about the positive side of this marketing, when things work well and the product is able to move throughout a network with a cascade of adoption. We stopped at that point, but this entire process certainly continues, and I think that what happens after adoption might ultimately be even more important to the brand than the adoption itself. After a cluster adopts a product, I don’t believe that the cluster simply forgets who influenced them to buy that product. I can say personally that whenever I’m induced by someone to buy a product, whether it be a friend or a celebrity, I remember who influenced me to buy it, and I somewhat associate the product with that person. I think the same is often true generally; when someone buys a product, they often associate the product with the person who influenced them to buy it, whether consciously or not. That is precisely why I say that brands have to be very careful about who they use as influencers, because if the influencer gets into trouble, that influencer is tied to the brand and people may begin to resent the brand in addition to the influencer. When we learned about popularity in class, we discussed the idea that essentially celebrities become famous for being famous. Since individual people don’t make independent choices, there tends to be extreme distributions of popularity. The danger with the internet, though, is that a person’s popularity seems to be able to fall as quickly as it rises. Take Charli D’Amelio, for example. Charli is the most followed person on the app TikTok, with now over 100 million followers. However, when she was at around 99.8 million followers, she had her first real “scandal”. In a video eating dinner with her parents, Charli essentially said that it would be really cool to reach 100 million followers on the one-year anniversary of her joining TikTok. While that seems innocent enough a statement (it does sound pretty cool to me!), somehow when that clip made its way to TikTok, her fans were upset and said that she only sees them as numbers and not as followers. At first, Charli began to lose a couple thousand followers every few hours, but after around half a day, the pace picked up and she started to lose hundreds of thousands of followers almost instantaneously. Over the course of two days she lost around 1.5 million followers. What was interesting, though, was not just that she lost followers, but how it appeared that she started to lose followers just because she was already losing followers, and not even because of what actually prompted the “scandal” to begin with. It became a spectacle and people were seemingly unfollowing her just because it is what their friends were doing. This certainly characterizes popularity on the internet and just how fragile it can be. While Charli did end up recovering those followers and crossing the 100 million threshold a few days later, I’m sure some of the brands she is an ambassador for (such as Hollister) were very concerned and were thinking about how to address what was happening, since they certainly don’t want their product to be associated with any kind of a scandal. In fact, brands are increasingly beginning to incorporate clauses into their contracts with influencers to safeguard the brand should the influencer get into hot water. For example, influencer marketing agency SEEN Connects includes a morality and break clause in their contracts that allow companies to halt business with influencers that are in any kind of bad PR situation. So, while diffusion and breaking into clusters is key for brands to improve their product popularity, they also have to be extremely careful with who they entrust as their influencers, since popularity on the internet can be a very tricky game to get correct, and bad PR for the influencer may cause their brand reputation to tank as well.
- https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-50418807
- https://sourcingjournal.com/denim/denim-brands/how-social-media-helped-build-good-american-into-an-it-brand-148943/
- https://youthmarketing.com/case-study/tinder/
- http://seenconnects.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Whitepaper-Morality-Clause-33.pdf