Advertising on social media that has always been around, but
I feel that recently it is has become more prominent than ever. I’ve noticed
that Instagram has become riddled with ads that we pretty much instinctively
scroll past, or even ads that they think you would like to see. Snapchat even seems
to have also amped up the ads and inserts them into any time slot they can find.
Aside from the direct ads that we see, what seems to be the most effective form
of advertising through social media today is “influencers”. Influencers are the
public figures that we follow online that are paid to influence their followers
to purchase a certain product or brand.
An article from TIME titled ‘How Teens
Actually Feel About Social Media Ads’ discusses a high schoolers thoughts
on the amount of ads they see. There were many things that I found interesting
about this article such as the student explaining that she is aware that these people
on social media are being paid absurd amounts of money to influence what she buys.
I relate to this when I consider the amount of times I have thought about the fact
that the influencer may not even actually use the things they are promoting but
I still connect the brand to the person. I think that we all pretty much know
that we are viewing ads, but it is easy to forget.Another aspect of this article that I found interesting was that
YouTube has so many popular vloggers that they branched into creating ‘micro-influencers’
who help to influence a smaller portion of the site’s users. I find that mind
boggling that there are so many influencers on YouTube alone, and if we take
into consideration all of the influencers on other social media sites, it’s a little
overwhelming to say the least.
Being an influencer doesn't always have a lucrative pay stub at the end! My friend does Instagram as a side hustle. She does influencing for multiple different brands but she only gets paid when someone uses her discount code. Sometimes for some brands that she already loves and promotes without a code, when she is able to give a code she earns a good amount of money. For newer brands that she is branching into it's usually just free product. Which she doesn't mind all the time! She also puts in a good amount of her own money to continue her platform. She uses a service that enhances her page with custom and targeted hashtags for her followers and the service automatically finds her new followers that are searching for similar content to what she posts. She pays about 20$ a month for that. She seems to break even most of the time!
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