Become an influencer Read online

  I realised that I was relieved to be done with the business of being a bride and happy to move on to telling other kinds of stories. In fact, it was only a few months later that I leapt into the sports broadcasting industry and, by the end of that same year, I found myself in New Zealand covering the 2011 Rugby World Cup. I was breaking the rules and challenging convention again.

  Grab the chalk and draw your outline

  Something that might serve you in this process of defining who you essentially are is the awareness that no one expects you to come up with it all on your own. If you are stuck and none of the above has led you to an aha! moment of self-discovery yet, relax. A lot of people who have been on this influencer roundabout for years are still figuring it out. They’re often the ones who are battling to grow or battling to create real engagement. An alternative and very useful approach is to start with defining what you are definitely not.

  In crime movies they usually draw a chalk outline of a body to mark the exact position in which it was found, before the corpse is moved and the forensic processing of the crime scene can start. Now imagine your influencer identity – your brand – as a chalk outline. You might not know exactly what happens inside the lines just yet, but you can start by filling in the areas around it.

  I had a really interesting chat with the YouTube vlogger and influencer Katinka Oosthuizen, also known as Katinka die Kat, about this very topic. She started building her audience when she was still a teenager, attending high school in the beachside town of Mossel Bay. Besides building an enviable audience on YouTube and Instagram before she left school, at the age of 19 she also became the youngest ever contestant on Survivor South Africa. These days she also works as a presenter, video producer, editor and entrepreneur.

  You just need to be yourself [Katinka says]. The niche will emerge without you even often noticing it. I never sat down and decided this for myself; I just knew what I was not. In the beginning I tried my hand at a variety of things, but I quickly realised what I didn’t want to do more of and that it isn’t necessary. Loads of things just didn’t work on my channel, because it wasn’t me. And then you often just don’t have the inspiration required to really pull it off.

  Revlon once sent me [a pack of] 20 lipsticks and I just sat staring at it. I didn’t know what to do with it because it didn’t inspire me. And that’s fine; they obviously found people that did feel inspired by it. Brands might think you’re the same as a bunch of other people, but you need to know that you’re not. Everyone is different, you are different. I think you can 100% choose who you want to be on social media, but ask yourself this: How long can you remain in a fake friendship? How long can you pretend to like something? I could probably choose to become a beauty influencer, but it will take so much energy to get into that mindset that I just won’t ever get anything meaningful done. Never. That’s why it just won’t happen.

  In my case, I knew very early on in my career – before Instagram even existed – that I didn’t want to build my personal brand on pictures of myself in bikinis. I learnt this through dabbling in a bit of modelling while I earned my degree.

  In the modelling industry, you build what they call a portfolio and a Z-card. Basically, these are photo albums featuring examples of your work and they are regularly updated so that you have something to show prospective clients. You want to give them an idea of how well you pull off a certain look or trend when you attend a casting. If you want to land toothpaste adverts, for example, you ensure that you have loads of photos showcasing your fantastic smile early on in your portfolio. If you’re really into fitness and have very defined muscles, this would feature heavily in your portfolio.

  Models, like influencers, can choose to actively position themselves in the market. Alternatively, you can leave it up to the industry to choose where they think you fit in, and then you will have to accept what you get. But I’ve never been a “take-what-you-get” girl.

  For me, modelling was a shortcut to help me pay my university fees, but I quickly realised that I felt uncomfortable doing work that I would not still want to do in a decade or two. I wanted to build a business for myself that could be sustainable, and modelling was never the goal – it was a means to an end. I wanted to be able to look back at the work I had done when I was 20 years old and not cringe too much.

  Then, when I graduated to working as a music TV presenter and radio DJ at 5FM in my early 20s, magazines like Sports Illustrated and FHM (For Him Monthly) featured the most prominent young actresses, models, musicians and TV presenters as cover girls. In a world before Instagram, I cannot overstate how important it used to be to feature in a magazine. Of course, these publications mostly featured cover girls clad in bikinis or lingerie. It was part of the deal. It was a case of “we give you a great big magazine cover to be on, and you show us what you’ve got”.

  While I didn’t take any issue with my peers who successfully leveraged this platform to launch themselves into greater and more lucrative opportunities (and no, you don’t get paid for appearing on a magazine cover), it simply wasn’t something I was interested in doing. I was asked by both the music and the sports channels for whom I worked to consider doing features like this because they would yield good exposure for them. But I always replied that I wanted people to hear what I was saying and be less concerned with how I look. I’ve always been a total nerd in this way and I’m sure some might say that it was short-sighted. Either way, it’s my body and the decisions I took then serve me well today. I wouldn’t change a thing.

  For Bouwer Bosch, his unique position has always been a focus on reconciliation through his work.

  My true passion is reconciliation ... I try to be the Afrikaner in the entertainment industry who also cares about things that don’t only concern entertainment ... I need to be able to leave here and do business with everyone – not only Afrikaners. I cannot hide out in this Voortrekker laager. I was walking around Melville in one of my Steve Biko “Dis hoe dit is met Steve” T-shirts the other day. [Dis Hoe Dit Is Met Steve was a talk show hosted by Steve Hofmeyr, which ran for a decade from 2001 on the Afrikaans-language, pay-TV channel, kykNET.] Two black guys stopped me and started chatting to me about the message, the meaning of the Afrikaans words, the reference to Steve Biko, and it was great. I’m sure some Afrikaans people don’t appreciate what I’m doing, I’ll probably take a hit for it, but when I die one day this is the kind of work I want to be remembered for. For the fact that not many people had these difficult and important conversations.

  The thing with being an influencer is that the Internet never forgets. Yes, people probably won’t scroll back to what you posted five years ago – no one cares that much, and if they do, they’re weirdos. (Block the weirdos!) However, your audience will notice if you try to sell them a version of yourself that doesn’t echo your true values or that switches according to what is trendy. People will call you out on it or, even worse, they’ll leave. You don’t need to be everything to everybody. In fact, it’s better not to be – that’s just bland. Make a list, draw that outline and list the stuff outside it. Check yourself against this and evaluate why you feel this way. The space that is left over might crystallise into a bit more brand awareness.

  But what if I have chosen the wrong thing – or I change?

  Take heart in the knowledge that nothing is set in stone. Pay real attention when selecting your niche, your topic, in determining who you want to be and who you want to reach. But take the same care in consistently re-evaluating that decision.

  You are always going to grow and develop and so will your audience – this is actually the only thing we know for sure. Change is the only thing you can really bank on. Some of your tribe will migrate with you, others will not. If you’re not completely immersed or inspired any longer, if you realise that you have been climbing that ladder with all you have, but it’s actually leaning against the wrong wall, then stop. Be honest – with yourself an
d then with your audience.

  If you’re a wedding blogger who gets a divorce or a vegan influencer who goes back to eating meat (both of these have actually happened), as difficult as it might be, just be honest.

  Prepare to watch the follower numbers tumble, but know that you might also be surprised by how many people also enjoy following the life not lived. Just because I don’t have children of my own doesn’t mean that I avoid all mommy bloggers. There are plenty of influencers in my feed who are into stuff that I don’t really relate to: vegans, gamers, financial specialists, political reporters ...

  Every now and again someone will comment on a sport-related post I create, to point out that they have been following me since I hosted a request show on campus radio, or that they used to watch me hosting music shows and they love how far I’ve come since then.

  Have the courage to regularly (perhaps annually?) diarise and then prepare your own State of the Nation address: take stock, commit to new goals, talk about this to the people who follow you, and gather and even share their feedback. We tend to think that people only want to see content creators who have it all figured out, but what if your followers find even more value in seeing you adapt, seeing you grow?

  Being real and transparent about your journey might just help you reach a level of trust with your followers that keeps them there, even if the content moves away from the topic that initially attracted them to you.

  3

  FIND YOUR TRIBE

  The ghost in the machine

  When engagement is low or when accounts don’t grow the way people think they should, they often tend to lump one bogeyman with all the blame; the dark force that supposedly holds your account back from social media stardom is the algorithm.

  Everyone who has battled to grow their account, from small bands to massive brands, up-and-coming influencers to world-famous athletes, has turned their attention to the algorithm and many have thrown their hands up in despair. But I have good news for you. The algorithm is not all that mysterious; it’s not devious and it certainly doesn’t want to prevent you from becoming a successful influencer.

  What makes the algorithm tricky is that it’s not a clearly codified set of rules. It is not like a set of commandments or laws. It is constantly shifting, improving and adapting, and it varies from platform to platform. This is also why we’re constantly feeling our way through it, trying to understand it by playing with it. It’s like a great big puzzle and often it can feel as though you are building it in the dark.

  The other big issue to consider is that if you can’t gain enough engagement organically, the chances are higher that you’ll boost, promote or pay for posts to pop up in more feeds more regularly. You will advertise and this is part of how social networks make money. I think that while this is definitely true for brands, it is less so for influencers. When you’re a digital creator, your content can certainly outperform a paid model, because you’re not only posting and sharing commercially driven content: many of the stories you tell as an influencer are also perfectly human and relatable, which means you can build a much more impressive engagement rate than most brands are able to do. As explained earlier, regardless of a marketer’s best efforts, people will always follow people.

  You need to figure out ways of making sure you make the most of this advantage by developing content that builds a solid track record with your target follower. Ideally, you want your follower to “tell” (by way of their browsing habits) the algorithm to fast-forward the posts you send into the great big pool of content that is your social platform of choice straight to the top of their feed.

  But let me start at the beginning so that we’re on the same page about why algorithms exist.

  Initially, as a social media user you saw every post from every account you followed. Posts were presented to you in chronological order. Imagine watching a bunch of social media posts standing in line like people, in a neat little queue. No post gets to jump the queue – first come, first browsed.

  This makes a lot of sense, right? Yes, but then social media went pop! According to Instagram, we started missing out on as much as 70% of the content produced by the accounts we followed. We had so much happening on our feeds that we were stuck, looking at our distant cousin Helen’s third child, drooling in high definition – while your crush had just posted a photo of himself at the beach ... Of course, as luck would have it, this swimsuit post was uploaded immediately after you logged off. Sadly, your tolerance for baby spit ran out an instant too soon. Then, by the time you logged on again, just before bed, the swimsuit post had disappeared in the noisy, crowded mess that had become your home feed.

  In came the algorithm, the solution to this chronological queue in which posts had to wait. The algorithm was created to ensure that you would see those swimsuit photos pop up the very next time you logged on, regardless of whether this was that night or two days later. This was not because the algorithm could read your mind, but because you had liked every single post your crush had put up for the past few weeks. You had spent ages thinking of witty comments to leave every time someone else tagged him in something and duly followed through. He liked your comment immediately. And, of course, you also spent an inordinate amount of time scrolling back on his timeline, studying his personality through the distorted prism that is social media. We’ve all been there – this is nothing to be embarrassed about.

  If you select “Most Recent” in your Facebook News Feed options, you’ll basically switch back to the algorithm-free feed we first got to know in the mid-2000s.

  On Twitter you used to be able to reset your feed, toggling back to that age before the big algorithm shift, but I don’t see the function on my account anymore. On Facebook it is still there: you can shift your News Feed preference to “Most Recent” if you don’t want the algorithm to automatically select the “Top Stories” for you, based on your browsing habits.

  The algorithm is designed to seamlessly improve your browsing experience and it is constantly also learning from users, which is one of the reasons why it is not entirely predictable. The thing is that we’re not predictable: our habits shift and change. In fact, the tech magnate Elon Musk says that it’s a slippery slope from here to a full-blown, artificial intelligence, robot-run future. He told this to Joe Rogan on Rogan’s immensely popular podcast series back in September 2018. Episode #1169 went viral for another reason – they smoked weed together – but the bit about search engines and algorithms, getting to know and predict our most intimate habits and preferences, was the most fascinating takeaway for me.

  Simply put, the algorithm is deciding what features and what doesn’t. And how does the algorithm decide on whether something makes the cut or doesn’t? It takes its cue from you and from the network itself. You can’t control the network, but you are teaching the algorithm what to show you without even realising that you are doing this.

  The algorithm makes selections on your behalf, based on who you engage with and which keywords feature in the content that you read, view, share, like and comment on. Every time you fall down that rabbit hole of aimless browsing, you’re leaving another series of breadcrumbs in a trail that you’re constantly building for the ghost in the machine to follow, effectively telling the algorithm: this is what I like; I don’t want to miss any of this or that kind of content; please give me more ...

  Do you ever see the same person’s Instagram Stories pop up first at the top of your Instagram home feed, over and over again? Perhaps your bestie, your significant other, your favourite celebrity or that influencer you discovered the other day. In fact, run your own experiment: make a point of finding and watching all the stories from any one account that you follow on Instagram. Search for them if the account doesn’t come up and make sure you watch their stories every single day. Like every single one of their posts and drop a comment as well. Keep doing this for a few days and, before long, you’ll see them popping u
p earlier and earlier in the carousel of Instagram Stories at the top of your home screen every day.

  But where does that leave other platforms like TikTok? Wian “Magic” van den Berg is a 25-year-old magician and influencer from Frankfort in the Free State, who is one of the top influencers on the video-sharing platform. In fact, he is in the top 1% of the most followed creators, having built a following over roughly two years.

  Wian explains the TikTok algorithm really creatively:

  When you upload a video, TikTok sends it to a sample of users. Let’s say 100, but no one knows ... Then, if 10 of those people like the video, it’ll just perform okay for you. But if 90 of those people like it, it’ll be seen by another 1 000 and if 900 of them like it, it’ll be seen by a million people. When I hit a million followers, my brother still remarked that he wonders if it’ll feel as if my growth slows down, because then you only see it tick over with every 100 000 followers, not in tens of thousands or even in thousands any more. And yet, it felt like it picked up speed after a million. I think that’s simply because more people have a chance of seeing your video. It takes a few failures to realise what a great post requires; you just need to keep going and keep looking for a hit.

  Cross-promotion is one simple way of ensuring you diversify the variety of platforms your audience follows you on. Share your Instagram feed posts on your stories and vice versa. Also, tease your TikTok/Twitter/Facebook followers about your Instagram content and vice versa.

  In early 2020 Instagram released some information on what the Instagram algorithm looks at and this is useful across platforms, because it outlines some pretty universal truths about how platforms compile the feed you’re presented with:

  Interest: How much attention a post generates from those who see it. This is measured by how many likes, comments, shares and views your content attracts.