
Instagram influencers: Have we stopped believing? - pseudolus
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-49450655
======
hiven
There was a shop that said to influencers they could get a discount only after
30 people used their specific influencer promo code. None of them did (or
could do) it.

It’s highly ineffective and for the most part it’s just some entitled person
with an inflated ego demanding freebies. Madness to think businesses can
really believe they are of any real substance or significance.

Instagram more and more has become a cesspool of materialism and advertising.
It’s hauntingly shallow to witness, and the impact on the younger generation
who are trying to “keep up” for their own mental sanity are instead being
dragged further and further into it. Instagram isn’t the only offender
obviously but I think it is the antithesis of the issue.

Having already deleted Facebook, I completely changed up my instagram to show
photography photos and things relating to my hobbies, and removed my friends
and other “lifestyle” feeds. I can honestly say it felt like an immediate lift
of mental clarity and happiness. I kept my friendships and have nothing to
prove about the way I choose I live my life. No more scrutiny, no more pining
after validation, and most of all, a bit of well deserved privacy.

Bringing up a child in this vapid and self obsessed culture must be like
navigating a minefield.

Apologises for the rant. I’m only 29 but I sound like I am 90.

~~~
wcunning
I hesitate to defend a Facebook property, but here goes anyway...

My Instagram feed is 100% welding, machining and a small smattering of
woodworking. Literally any project I post gets universally positive feedback,
with the occasional constructive suggestion. If I ask for help on a project, I
get advice in at most a few hours from someone with 40 years more experience
than I have. Contrast this to the forum community for the same thing that has
a disturbing tendency to flame out and generally mock newbies.

What I take away from this is that Instagram, like all metaphorical tools, is
what you make of it. If you only follow beautiful people, you may only get
shallow content. If you follow interesting people who share interesting
things, you'll get interesting content.

~~~
hiven
Completely agree. I do however think the way the instagram app works you are
guided down a path littered with product sales pages, advertising and general
mundane materialism. I think at its core this culture is good for their
business model.

~~~
asdff
Somehow I've grown blind to the ads on instagram. I know they are there, if I
actively look for them I will find them, but if I close my eyes cannot picture
the contents of any ad I've seen lately on on Instagram.

When I scroll through the feed it's like I've subconsciously trained myself to
immediately scroll past and ignore sponsored posts, and immediately click past
sponsored stories. I can't be the only one in this boat.

------
memset
I have experimented with influencers for a notebook that I sell. It has been a
mixed bag, but mostly unprofitable. My target audience is musicians - not
lifestyle bloggers - so the people I've tried to work with don't quite have
the following as the person in this article. Also, I have never experienced an
"entitled influencer", though I have come close.

Here was my process:

1\. Email 20 people with > n followers asking if I could send them a free
book, and if they like it, if they'd be willing to post about it to their
followers.

2\. 10 of them email me back saying "sure! here's my shipping address."

3\. _sends 10 books_

4\. 3 people actually post. Of those: 1 person: for $100 I will post in an IG
story. I try this, as they have 90k followers, so even a story mention must be
good, right! This results in 1 sale. 2nd person: posts a beautiful picture on
their IG. Land a couple of sales. 3rd person: doesn't think of themselves as
an influencer, just really likes the product, and mentions it to her viewers,
and this results in $300 worth of sales. Awesome!

I think the trick, then, is to find people who don't self-identify as
influencers, and who aren't already doing lots of advertising on their
channel. Rather than trying to craft a genuine portrayal of life, find people
who are actually genuine!

(If anyone on HN has tips, always interested in advice!)

~~~
mysterydip
Sounds like genuine interest is worth more than number of followers. The
question is, how do you discover users who would have genuine interest and
would share with like-minded friends? hashtag searches?

~~~
vageli
> Sounds like genuine interest is worth more than number of followers. The
> question is, how do you discover users who would have genuine interest and
> would share with like-minded friends? hashtag searches?

Analyze follower of followers once you've identified a few users who seem like
potential fits for your space. I've seen this strategy work well in other
social channels as well like twitter.

~~~
yumaikas
Would you be willing to explain this a little bit more?

~~~
dumbfoundded
Step 1: Read the comments of their post. Get an idea of the nature of the
interaction.

Step 2: Look at who actually follows them. Are they real people? Are they
bots?

Step 3: Look at how many products they promote through all their products. The
more the worse.

------
hugh4life
The whole Instagram influencer phenomenon can be obnoxious and sometimes kind
of sad... but it's been a kind of godsend to athletes from niche sports that
can gather a sizable Instagram audience but make very little money. And the
main athletes I have in mind are figure skaters. Even if they win Olympics or
the World Championships they can't make much money. But they can gather a
sizable Instagram audience which make them attractive to brands. I'm sure this
applies to a lot of Olympic sports where fame is fleeting.

------
sverige
> Influencers also get a harder time than celebrities in terms of their
> credibility, Ms Tasker says.

> "I think there's an unfair sense that influencers have no talent beyond
> content creation, so we hold them to much higher standards in their work.

> "In my experience, celebs are far worse for disclosing brand partnerships
> and misleading audiences, but aren't held to account by their followers in
> the same way."

I just realized that this has always been the basis of my inability to
understand why 'influencers' are even a thing.

It's like deciding to buy a car based on which car show model is most
appealing, and then making other decisions based on which brand of water they
drink or which bandages they use to cover their scraped knee after they've
fallen down while jogging. Seriously, what other talent is involved? And why
would I make a decision based on that?

As for celebrities, at least some of them have some level of skill in acting
or music or sports. I guess this is just the disruption of the celebrity print
magazine market, like People or Tiger Beat.

~~~
matwood
You're thinking of it from the wrong direction. It's not about talent, but
just another advertising channel. Why people follow an influencer can be for
all sorts of reasons, but those are not important.

An ad on IG on a popular apparel keyword might be ~$1-$3 per click for a high
cost demo (the exact demo who follows influencers). Apparel is notoriously
inexpensive to create, so a shoe company could send out free pairs to a bunch
of small (10k-20k followers) influencers and likely come out ahead.

This trick of using influencers to bypass the high cost CPC of IG proper is
why IG keeps changing the algorithm to bury ad like posts and force either the
brands to advertise directly or the influencers to pay to boost their posts.

------
thiscatis
Just a mirror for the attention craving 24h breaking news cycle society where
the biggest fear for most teenagers and adults is irrelevance and being
normal.

~~~
hutzlibu
Yet, most of them are pretty scared to actually do something not normal.

It is mostly about looking interesting and individual, not beeing individual.

------
leftyted
It doesn't really matter if the accident was staged or not. Profiting from a
real accident is worse than staging a fake one. More broadly, it simply isn't
possible to publicly document events like this (even if they're happy events)
without cheapening them. This is the fundamental problem with instagram (and
other social media) and my sense is that people are becoming increasingly
aware of it. By publicizing yourself (and your life), you are lying. The only
way to truly reveal yourself to other people is through action (words and
deeds).

So I agree with the article that we're in the midst of a backlash against the
whole "influencer" thing. As usual with these things, that backlash has
already occurred in the weird, unclean corners of the internet and now it's
spreading into the mainstream. I don't know where things will end up, but it
will be interesting to see.

I suspect that there are healthy ways to use social media but they will
require a self-awareness that the first generations of social media users
lacked.

------
MuffinFlavored
I'll believe we've stopped believing when there aren't hoards of vapid
swimsuit/skimpy athletic wear "models" with 1m-10m followers.

I know of one brand that charges you a monthly fee to sell you a monthly PDF
aimed towards physical, mental, and spiritual wellness. Let's just say that...
the group behind that isn't starving because enough people are buying it up.

How did that business get started? Why... skimpy bathing suit photos, of
course. :)

~~~
asdff
Probably 95% of followers on large accounts are bots. And I can tell you of my
friends who follow models on instagram, they sure as hell aren't looking at
the product placement.

------
coldcode
Instagram influencers is a fancy new word for advertising. You pay someone to
shill your product or service; the only new angle is where you find it.

------
s_Hogg
I really hope we have.

There was some clown a while back that tried to sell a clothing line and did
basically no promotion, so her supplier cancelled because on launch day she
didn't manage to put together 30 orders for shirts.

I think there need to be a lot more cases like that before this really goes by
the board though, unfortunately.

~~~
agrippanux
Seems to me that is poor product-market fit; clowns rarely need shirts, as
they typically wear blouses and other loose fitting tops that exaggerate their
antics.

------
rungekuttarob
To me, it looks like she really did have an accident, discover she would be ok
then asked someone to take photos for Instagram. Which is a lot worse than
staging it IMHO.

~~~
pas
Why? She likes sharing, documenting, capturing, photographing her life. This
is her life. She had a crash/accident, here are the photos.

The problem is that people can't handle this, thus the demand and response is
exaggerated.

~~~
rungekuttarob
I was just imagining myself in her shoes and thinking that taking photos would
be the last thing on my mind. I don't do blogging for a living so can't relate
to her. I'm sure you're right. This is her life and she documents everything.

------
skybrian
Apparently people don't know how to "stop believing" properly? That would be
admitting you don't know what really happened and being comfortable with the
uncertainty.

To conclude it was staged is to trade one belief about someone you don't know
for another.

------
mancerayder
I believe a huge fraction of Tinder profiles are in fact Instagram models
attempting to attract followers so they can become influencers. I bet if you
use a bot w/ their API and change your location around, say "I'm never on
here, lol, IG me at __, lol <kiss emoji>" \-- and you look like a model --
then you can gain hundreds, or perhaps thousands of followers easily.

------
astura
She obviously didn't crash her bike.

-Bike appears undamaged (mirrors would be smashed at minimum)

-She says she injured her left side of her body, yet left side of he body appears dirty yet completely intact in photos despite the fact her skin was uncovered. Road rash destroys skin - I've seen pretty severe road rash from a fall from a skateboard.

-"Wounds" were bandaged by ambulance, yet, once again - what wounds?

------
jokull
Founder of the biggest UK platform here (also active in Germany and US).
Influencers have been talked down for the whole four years we’ve been active.

Don’t forget what we’re comparing this to. Banner ads! Instagram influencers
who are thoughtful and authentic are great. If you don’t like it you can
unfollow the influencer. Same cannot be said of banner ads where the end user
has little control and you get chased between platforms with units that often
have little relavance to your interests.

~~~
wildrhythms
>Founder of the biggest UK platform here (also active in Germany and US).

I sincerely have no idea what this statement means. What is a platform in this
context?

~~~
omarchowdhury
Influencer advertising platform, I suppose.

------
nostrebored
My problem with outrage at situations like this is that positive or neutral
occurrences in our life are seen as normal to share while negative experiences
are seen as too precious or manipulative. Bad things happen and people should
be able to talk about them or treat them as other major events.

------
tjpnz
Never believed in shilling to begin with.

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sankalp210691
It is just sad when you see that humans are losing their humanity!

