Become an influencer Page 7

  Generously share and repost their content, honestly ask for advice, share feedback and be the industry friend you wish you had. There is no guarantee that this will always work out the way you had planned, but the potential for growth and camaraderie – in what could be a very lonely pursuit – is a reward that is certainly worth the risk.

  Being generous demonstrates to your followers that you don’t feel threatened and that you are a positive force in a social media era that is often perceived as narcissistic. You are a great tastemaker or even an aggregator in your field of interest; you fully recognise that your own style isn’t the be-all and end-all and you appreciate the creativity of others.

  More truly is more!

  Beware of pop culture blips and bubbles

  Once you have figured out who you want to be, what your point of difference will be and what aspect of your story you want to put out there – what influence you want to have, basically – the next step is to figure out where best to do this.

  Conventional wisdom points to the timeless value of creating your own blog or website platform – a central point that will collect all of your digital activities. We all know social media platforms tend to ebb and flow in popularity. Now add to this the fact that you (in spite of your best efforts at surfing these waves of platforms rising and falling) are ultimately also exposed to a powerful crosswind: the whims of algorithmic adjustments. As much as you can monitor, test and predict algorithmic behaviour, it does often leave influencers feeling as though they are only one adjustment away from invisibility. This is why some specialists in digital marketing still espouse the virtues of a corner of the web that you ultimately control: www.yournamegoeshere.com. A URL that you ultimately own.

  This allows you to flex a bit of perceived power (even if it doesn’t boast massive traffic) by always having an address that users can click through to – a shopfront on the web that is not bound by the limitations of any one social network: a digital patch of land where you can create a portfolio of your projects, and a showcase of your track record. A space that you can optimise for search engines to pick up on the useful projects to which you have contributed – particularly the ones where you collaborated with brands. A space where you can even host added-value opportunities to the brands you partner with, regardless of what the algorithm might make of it, and where you can even start building e-commerce opportunities that also turn you into a better influencer.

  As Mike Sharman duly points out, you need to remember that:

  Every brand cent is accounted for, especially in tough economic environments. Modern influencers are learning a lot by experimenting with Shopify and those lessons are so valuable. Drop-shipping is another one: when you love a pair of sneakers, you can set up a store where people can buy them through you online; they’re delivered straight to the client from the source in China. You become the face of the storefront, but the product doesn’t ever actually pass through your hands. Ghost kitchens is another one: through Uber Eats you can now sell food that is available only through the delivery service; it’s not a traditional restaurant with chairs and tables. Influencers and their virtual storefronts are becoming the middleman. If you understand commerce and you’re commercially minded, there’s a bigger chance you’d do well working with a brand.

  Bouwer Bosch agrees wholeheartedly.

  Those things are all intertwined. I was 23 when [his Afrikaans band] Straatligkinders started doing well and back in the day we paid Loedi van Renen R20 000 for a music video. He was great, but then I realised he lives in Joburg and I lived in Potch, where we had a whole lot of bands. Loedi’s camera cost R17 000, so I drove to the bank and asked them if I’d qualify for a R17 000 loan as a student. They said yes. I took that cash right there and bought the camera. I taught myself how to shoot and started making R5 000 music videos for people in Potch. Not all of the bands could afford R20 000 videos, but there was a demand for R5 000 ones. Then, suddenly Elvis Blue saw my videos and I shot three for him. Then Rocco de Villiers. Then Gangs of Ballet and, before you knew it, I shot two videos for Matthew Mole, one which got more than 2 million hits. All of this because I took the leap to buy a R17 000 camera. Now we’re shooting R1 million ads!

  Bouwer’s story gets even more unbelievable from here.

  At one point I was even exchanging e-mails with Greyson Chance and his manager about making videos for him. This is the same guy who went viral with his Lady Gaga covers and was featured on Ellen. They found me on YouTube back then and I was honestly floored. No way, I thought! We were in Skype meetings trying to make the scheduling work, but I had to go for a back operation and he was in university and in the end it didn’t work out. The point is, that was a clear gap that could have totally changed the course of my life. It only came up because I took a chance to make R5 000 videos, music videos no one else wanted to bother with. Nothing you do is ever in vain, not even R5 000 music videos.

  I have always been fascinated by the amount of energy Bouwer ploughs into making a podcast. I actually featured in one of them, in exchange for one of his Liefde Wen hoodies. I asked him if he was worried about spending so much energy on a project that wouldn’t generate an income. He was not bothered.

  The point of the podcast is to build a proven track record, so I can leverage that currency to land bigger interviews. Your clout isn’t always measurable only in cash. I’m just building influence, for now. Playing the long game.

  If this fires up your interest in setting up a site of your own, it doesn’t have to cost much any longer. Thanks to services like Wix.com, designing a website is now even simpler than helping your grandparents set up a Facebook profile. Or you can build your website on Wordpress.com if you want to flex or strengthen your amateur-developer muscles. Regardless of which route you take, you can seamlessly and affordably set up hosting and e-mail integration on Google’s G Suite in record time – complete with a fancy business-like e-mail address, such as info@yournamegoeshere.com.

  In fact, while you’re at it, take a short digital course on search engine optimisation (SEO) so that you can ensure your website pops up where it needs to. These skills are never wasted and even if you eventually abandon the idea of having the website up and running for whatever reason, at least you’ve parked your domain. Just in case.

  I have a website of my own, I own a domain and although it is still visible and active for now, it has fallen entirely out of use, both by me and in terms of traffic on it. And for now, I’m totally okay with that. Any web platform remains relevant only for as long as someone updates it and there are users consuming what is on it. If those two things stop happening, it simply crumbles into irrelevance, like a sandcastle.

  Proof of this can be found in the story of the biggest social media network on earth between 2005 and 2008: Myspace. At the peak of the Myspace era, it was synonymous with the words social and network – effectively it was Facebook before Facebook. Myspace boasted 100 million active users, which was incredible for the time. In fact, as a music portal it jump-started the careers of well-known musicians such as Calvin Harris, Sean Kingston, Lily Allen and the Arctic Monkeys. I even know a couple, who are now married, who met on Myspace.

  So, if you’ve never heard of it, take it from me: it was a thing – a big one! And yet, it has since imploded so spectacularly that in 2019 all user data (images, music and videos) from before 2016 were accidentally deleted as a result of a faulty server migration. What makes it worse is that I didn’t even know about the 2019 loss of data, even though I had a Myspace account, so I was one of those 100 million users.

  This is not the only story of its kind. Google+ (sometimes written as Google Plus), a social network started by the mighty Google (of all companies), was another failed social network. It started in 2011 and closed down entirely in 2019.

  I am not explaining all of this in such vivid detail because I enjoy a trip down memory lane – although it is fun to reflect and r
eminisce. I am trying to warn against the impression that all the data you have uploaded to social networks and the audience you have built on these platforms will exist forever. They might, but what if they don’t?

  Things change, they move on, and you need to ensure that your influencer business is nimble and substantive enough to outlive the platform itself, much like Calvin Harris’s career outlived Myspace. It is important to remember that what feels like the career of your dreams at the moment (a massive audience on a particular social media platform) might turn out to be a pop culture blip in the long run. This also isn’t unique to social media. I have hosted many TV shows that had faithful daily or weekly viewers for years on end, which have now disappeared. In fact, the entire TV channel that hosted the first TV show I ever presented no longer exists.

  Your favourite platform might cease to exist, users might simply stop visiting it, or worse: you might lose interest entirely. If all three happen, for whatever reason, where would that leave you? If you can live with your answer, then proceed. If you can’t, start building a digital bomb shelter of sorts.

  This could mean building a website or perhaps simply diversifying enough that your content exists across a few different platforms so that you reach your audience through a variety of means. Perhaps what ultimately works for you is an approach that involves not only social media but also traditional media (which is probably the best way to describe my own business model) or one that isn’t only content driven, but also has an entrepreneurial thread: making gorgeous wedding videos like Katinka does, or perhaps making adverts like Bouwer does. Perhaps it’s starting a line of swimsuits, like Nadia Jaftha’s, or a restaurant like Buns Out – à la Maps Maponyane?

  What to dish up and where

  On the topic of Buns Out, when I go to a burger restaurant, I walk through the door because I want food that is filling and prepared quickly. I am less concerned about how healthy it is or any frilly presentation. Instead, it needs to be affordable. In a fine dining establishment, however, a burger would have to be served on upscale crockery and with cutlery of a certain standard. I’d expect it to be made from only the highest-quality ingredients and for it to be pretty well balanced nutritionally. Also, I wouldn’t stand for a paper napkin. Of course, this would come complete with a very different bill at the end of the experience, but that is what I went in for, after all.

  Have you ever noticed how brand posts on Facebook always include an image?

  Image quality on Twitter is less important. Note how this could very well have been a small photo report, lower down on a newspaper page.

  The same applies when we consume social media, which can be divided broadly into four focus categories:

  •Social networking (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn)

  •Microblogging (e.g. Twitter, Tumblr)

  •Photo sharing (e.g. Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat)

  •Video sharing (e.g. YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook Live, IGTV, TikTok).

  Let’s take a look at how a brand adapts the same campaign and brand message across the four big platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest). Even with Instagram and Pinterest both being classified as photo-sharing platforms, the consumer patterns (and therefore content angles) are different.

  For the purposes of this exercise, I gathered some screen grabs from Dove’s Self-Esteem Project, which has enjoyed great acclaim worldwide. It is based on a study conducted in the United Kingdom, detailed on their website, which showed that while more than 1 million girls suffer from low body confidence, two-thirds admit that they feel prettier online than in real life.

  1 in 2 girls say they are using social networks “all the time”, across an average of 4 different networks and are increasingly considered as being “always on”. The average UK girl takes 12 minutes to prepare for a single “selfie”, thus spending 84 minutes a week getting ready for selfies.

  Dove found that “the number of girls who say social networks make them feel worse about their appearance doubles between the ages of 13 years to 18 years” – from roughly a third to about two-thirds in only a few years.

  They tell this story in striking ways, with the help of both images and great textual captions and hashtags, catering to the same group of consumers on different platforms but tailoring how they phrase it according to where it is posted. On Facebook, you will see that brands don’t often post text-only status updates. They include highly polished images or videos with a great placeholder image. It almost looks like the kind of advert you’d see in a glossy magazine. Everyone looks polished: great lighting, beautiful styling, sometimes with text included in the image, but not too much.

  Note how this image was clearly not taken with a phone. The image more closely resembles those family photo shoots you see on Facebook, where everyone magically appears to have dressed in white and denim that day. Where an entire family is arranged in some photographer’s studio in an attempt to look as relaxed as possible, while obviously giving away that they’re posing for a camera by looking straight at the lens.

  On Twitter, the same campaign for the same brand presents more like a news post than a glossy magazine advert. It is clearly an image that was taken on the same day that it was posted – not nearly as much production involved. You can almost imagine it popping up in a newspaper, right? Perhaps it could even have been taken with a phone, but a phone is also obviously being used in one of the images. It is capturing a fleeting moment in time, reporting it for the sake of the information – it is not a portrait for the benefit of posterity. It is about the caption – a very information-heavy caption at that. While the Facebook post didn’t feature hashtags, here you find more than one. These are crucial because they allow this post to align with global activities #ConfidentGirl or #DSEP2018 (Dove Self-Esteem Project 2018), which can be activated by Dove in different ways across the world. The hashtag allows all these worldwide activities involved in the same project to be searchable and accessible by users anywhere. It shows that the brand is truly committed and consistently involved, by creating a publicly accessible record of activities, but not only on the Dove website; they are also walking the talk on a platform where we love holding people accountable: Twitter.

  On Instagram, the same campaign shows a post featuring two images as well, but here they are presented as a carousel – you have to page through – not as two separate but related posts on the same topic, but rather as a set-up-and-reveal tactic.

  The first image in the carousel is of a young girl in school uniform and, as in the case of Twitter, this photo could very well have been taken with a phone. It is not nearly as polished as the Facebook post, yet some design work has been done to craft it into something that is much stronger, visually, than the Twitter post. It feels instant enough to fit into the aesthetic you’ve come to expect from an Instagram feed, but it is somewhere between Twitter and Facebook, from a style perspective. Once you page to the second image in the carousel, it reveals the campaign message. In this way, Dove echoes the message you would be able to read in one image on Facebook, but without crowding the image too heavily. This makes it appear similar to the kind of content that typical private users and influencers would produce and takes it further away from the usual branded content. In fact, neither of the images include Dove’s logo or overt Dove branding. Even if you are scrolling so fast that you wouldn’t normally take the time to read the whole caption, the message in the second image of the carousel will probably land well enough to entice you to read the caption. The caption here is also wordier than in either of the previous examples and features emojis and a whole raft of hashtags – 12 to be precise!

  An Instagram caption lends itself to heavy emoji usage and loads of information.

  On Pinterest, the typical user looks for and pins practical, useful, beautiful and inspirational content to digital versions of the cork board you used to have hanging somewhere within reach of your desk. In the day
s of actual magazines and print publications, you would cut or tear out bits of timeless and useful information for reference: recipes, instructions and style and decor tips. This is why Dove’s “Beautiful Balance” board contains step-driven tips and useful information that don’t explicitly sell deodorant but rather – you guessed it – promote ways to build self-esteem, particularly among teenage girls.

  If you want to spread your influencer business across a variety of platforms, you need to be clear on the differences. Even when it is the very same user that follows you on all these different platforms, you need to understand that people open different apps for different reasons, so you must ensure that you are always packaging the kind of content they have come to look for.

  As Wian says:

  No one opens TikTok to see Instagram-type stuff. They would’ve opened Instagram if they wanted to see their friends, family or celebs they love. But on TikTok, it doesn’t matter who made the video, it just has to be good. On TikTok people can also scroll past within seconds, so you have to captivate them from the first second and because the sound is always up, right from the start your video also needs to be made differently.

  No logo is visible on the Instagram images, yet on Pinterest it is a subtle footnote.

  I asked Wian to list the top three mistakes most people make on TikTok:

  •People don’t start strong enough. A video that did really well for me on TikTok fell flat on Instagram because there, many people watch the start of a video with the sound off and then only push up the sound a few seconds in. I think many people have good videos but because it doesn’t start well, people scroll past it on TikTok. Videos need to be short, simple and you cannot waste a single second; on TikTok it needs to be interesting all the way through.