Instagram influencer engagement hovers near all-time lows
mobilemarketer.com
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Thus engagement rate could be decreasing, but that doesn't say anything about the total average engagement of Instagram posts, which might be increasing. Possible reasons engagement rate is decreasing (but overall engagement rising):
1) The people who followed your brand in the early stages are your most enthusiastic fans and most likely to engage with your posts. Followers that hop on the bandwagon are less likely to engage, thus lowering your engagement rate. In effect, over time, your follower count will increase, but new followers will increase the denominator (number of followers) but won't increase the numerator (engagement).
2) Perhaps, there's been a rise in automated followers. Thus, your follower count has been increasing but most of it are bots, thus your engagement rate is decreasing.
3) Perhaps Instagram might be pushing more people to follow brands they don't want to engage with. Whether it's through algorithmic recommendations, or more ads that tell you to follow a brand.
Depending on how things are working behind the scenes, I could see your third scenario being related to what I've observed.
To be fair to them it's a tough Product situation. The majority of their advertisers are not savvy technical marketers who know the ins and outs of Ad Manager, have attribution solutions, etc. So in a sense, they need to overly simplify. But when you oversimplify things, require less technical setup of things like conversion tracking, etc., you tend to move further upstream from revenue-driving activity in the funnel, which can get very wasteful very quickly.
It's just one example, but I tried to measure this once by graphing clicks on tweets by Tim O'Reilly. He's got a nice history since he was early on Twitter and mostly uses Bit.ly so click data is publicly available.
What I found was that in 2010 he had about 500k followers and was getting 800 clicks per link on average. But by 2018, he was only getting 400 clicks despite his follower count having grown to 2M.
So, from Tim's perspective, the value of a follower dropped by a factor of 8. I think that's interesting even if we don't know exactly why the drop because it highlights the vanity of follower counts. Rather than feeling like his audience grew on Twitter, he should feel like it shrunk in half.
It's hard to draw definitive conclusions on why the drop. Was it diffusion? People who worked at Twitter tell me it was a cultural change too where people stopped using Twitter as a feed reader. So maybe that's part of it too.
Measurement is hard and conclusions even harder.
I've definitely done it myself. I follow because I'm really interested, so I interact with the posts on the new thing, and gradually I get less interested as the content becomes less novel. Just as an example, I got really interested in the CNCF and followed them, but after a time, my interest in updated from them waned. I went from wanting to see everything they were doing, to only caring about major updates to software, to really only caring when something new joins the CNCF.
Also, as his followers over time follows more people, their feed will get saturated with tweets.
I don’t have any data to support this claim, but I’ve seen people posting more stories than regular posts, my wife usually closes the app after she’s done watching her latest stories. So, maybe likes are losing importance in instagram?
I think it's because users regard stories as acceptable for mundane, kind of boring, every day life content. Whereas singular posts come with greater expectations of quality or exceptionalism.
Most stories typically aren't worthy of being memorialized in a main profile page and since people are posting so frequently it seems natural it would drive engagement through the roof if you want to keep up with your friends socially. Thoughts?
If it's my cousin with a fish, of course I'll like the photo. That's me saying, "I saw that fish, good work, keep it up," and my cousin takes my like the same way.
If it's a big account, what's the point of being like #14532143, or even upvoting top page reddit/hn posts for that matter? Is it just cathartic or something? I don't get the point.
Disclaimer: I possibly don't know what I am talking about as I don't really know Instagram mechanics at all, but I am guessing they are similar to Facebook's.
Also if you view the activity feed (in a different corner of the app) you can see what your friends have been up to. This is where you will see more explicitly "Sally, Sue, John and Dave liked a post by Mr. Famous" (and similar activity).
Wrong.
In your notifications screen (who liked your stuff), you can change pane and instead see what your friends has liked.
Most people don’t know it, but yes, it means you can “spy” on your spouse or vica-verce.
It’s the sort of creepy most people wanted to avoid when they left Facebook, and unknown to them, Instagram still has it.
My comment was merely meant as a correction to an incorrect claim and making people aware that they can be spied upon, also on Instagram.
This doesn’t apply to “sponsored” posts, which show up in my feed regardless of what I like (and are almost always about plane tickets or cell phone plans). They are so uncharacteristic as to be easy to spot, and if they were engaging, the brand wouldn’t have paid to distribute them.
Would be curious to see results of "private engagements" e.g. engagements on stories. Some of the top Twitter accounts I follow continuously tweet about the increase of DMs / private conversations on public posts. This would play into Mark Zuckerberg's vision of transitioning some of social media from the "town square" to the "living room". [1]
[1] https://www.facebook.com/FacebookforDevelopers/videos/f8-201...
Consider a very simple model where the probability of "disengaging" in a given year is 50%, at which point the follower doesn't engage any more with your content (but they don't unfollow you). It doesn't matter what churn rate you pick, you still witness the same effect. And then assume that your follower count grows linearly by 1000 each year.
Time 0 1 2
Engage 1000 1500 1750
Follow 1000 2000 3000
Ratio 1 0.750 0.583
In fact, if you have a flat disengagement rate, as long as even a single person disengages without unfollowing, you will see this downward trend in engagement rates. Same assumptions as before, but this time, of the people that churn, 99% unfollow.
Time 0 1 2
Engage 1000 1500 1750
Follow 1000 1505 1762.5
Ratio 1 0.997 0.992
Instagram just shows her photos to fewer people (and often never shows them to anyone but existing followers - no considerable Explore or Hashtag views).
I've clicked around many "influencers" photos recently and followed their hashtags and often their photos don't show there. Fun anecdote: the less clothes the person (man or woman) is wearing the less likely the photo is to appear in the hashtag feed.
My conspiracy theory: Instagram is favoring personal relationship and smaller accounts, or maybe trying to encourage small accounts to become "addicted to engagement" in order to pull more wannabe influencers into the platform.
None of my findings are by any means thoroughly researched or done in a scientific manner. Just casual and curious browsing.
I'm curious if anyone else has seen any odd hashtag behavior lately. It's possible Instagram just tailors my version of a hashtag's "Recent" feed to me.
This is the end result of 'perfect competition' or 'long tail' - depending on what your dance is.
That's what I was thinking at first, but it's not just my wife's posts. It looks like lots of others have this issue, too.
I've only reached out to one "influencer" (a photographer) with 60k+ followers and he didn't care and said he doesn't ever check on these things. And one bikini brand (55k+ followers) who did notice; their own brand's hashtag often won't "work".
For one project 700 likes was the end. I collected those in a few months due to natural growth and then it suddenly stopped. With 700 likes to the page there were only around 150-200 impressions per post (no matter time or day or post content) and Facebook _heavily_ offered me to use their ads to push my views.
Tell me what you want, this is about monetization of their platforms, nothing else.
Meaning ceramic underwear?
It's quite hard to track though some progress has been made through tracking you online on longer time scales. Most people dislike this type of tracking across channels cause we really don't get much out of it besides being bombarded with ads from the same company.
Exactly. Coca-Cola and McDonald's didn't become billion dollar companies by not advertising.
The regular level influencers are complete nonentities. I remember a story here a while back where an "influencer" with 2 million "followers" couldn't sell 36 T-shirts.
The t-shirt account can't get past 200 comments with 2.6 million followers? Sub-0.001% engagement screams purchased followers - you typically get more than that in spam comments or shoutout-begging alone most of the time I've seen if they are humans...
I am also inclined to believe this even more so due to scrolling through the follower list for under a minute, based off usernames. Another thing is that while scrolling through, some hypermajority appear to be either India, Middle Eastern, or CIS countries, while she has never written a description in any of those - possibly the vendor was also difficult to order from or ship outside of the US or her home country otherwise.
I suspect AI wouldn't even be needed, just harvest real comments from existing high engage feeds and dump them with minor word swaps on to low engage feeds. this alone would probably take a couple years for countermeasures to respond to, assuming there is even an incentive basis to respond at all.
Like a lot of marketing and ad spend in general. Influencers (or any other media) are simply other channels to put product in front of people who no longer watch TV or read magazines.
Regardless, it's infuriating to read hotels, airlines, clothing companies and others throwing money and freebies at people just because they have a high follower count. It's also sad to watch people from my hometown become walking advertisements -- one girl recently started shilling for Disney -- and try pushing their "brand."
1. I can name a handful of products that I've bought because <insert some triathlete / olympian> uses them. Out of 6 or so products I've bought I've only had bad experiences with 1 of them, otherwise they all were
2. Sales tactics are basically tried and true throughout time. It's no coincidence the most effective e-commerce techniques are scarcity and social proof[0]. Genuine influencers have the ability to affect social proof on a massive scale.
3. I loathe FashionNova, but they are a grade A example of how effective influencer marking can be if done correctly at scale[1]
4. Scaling influencer marketing is a delicate balance. It's just not programatic (and never will be) like placing ads on Facebook or Google.
[0] - https://www.qubit.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/qubit-resea...
[1] - https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/news-bites/influe...
Which makes a lot of sense since a lot of that has happened behind the scenes in a way that may have limited their visibility or limited their margins.
I wonder if 'social proof' is easier to fake/generate on social media with Sybil attacks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack) as well as payment to real individuals to vouch for something they don't actually use
I wonder if people will/are starting not trust these measures of social proof
In that case there was no real product to buy, the _only_ reason to try to buy the product was its advertising, more than 4,000 people did, and its advertising was almost exclusively via social media / influencers.
https://www.marketingweek.com/roi-look-like-world-influencer...
https://digitalmarketinginstitute.com/en-gb/blog/20-influenc...
That said, I do kind of wonder about some of this myself. What percentage of an influencer's fans would already be planning to buy the product regardless of said influencer's marketing efforts?
I mean, your average gaming/TV show/music focused social media account/channel is already likely targeting people with an interest in those areas. And the more niche ones likely only appeal to the people who already bought said products anyway. The average Ceave Gaming viewer already probably owns Super Mario Maker 1 and 2, and the average TWD98 viewer is probably an avid Mario Kart fan. Wonder how many other influencers and successful channel owners have fanbases made up of existing customers/people who've already made up their mind on a product/service?
money still flows in though
If not, do you mind explaining why it's different? Also, what do you mean by "their ideology"?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_athletes_on_Wheaties_b...
To your point, i think there is no comparison. Famous athletes/artists have earned the public's trust due to being very talented and working hard. I don't think most social media promoters have earned the same kind of recognition and thus trust, especially when it is obvious from the get-go that they are going after monetization ASAP, they are not in it for the fun of it. It's not equally inspiring
You might be surprised at how hard these people are working though. The field is pretty crowded, everyone successful has likely worked extremely hard to get where they are.
People have a distaste for people whose work is, however hard, to manipulate them. Same reason why they hate manipulative ads.
This is true, but is also crazy. Just because you can throw a ball or put some paint on a canvas better than anyone else — even if it took a ton of work to learn to do that — that says absolutely zero about any other worthwhile aspects of your character. Self-discipline does not directly lead to morality, kindness, empathy, charity, etc.
You don't know how hard some people work. Some athletes drink all night, do drugs, skip practice, and show up to work the next day and score a goal. Is that working hard?
Some "influencers" spend 20 hours per day/7 days per week working on their business. Is that working hard?
You don't know how hard some of them work.
When I asked my sister why she just called a girl at her school "famous" she said because she has 100k+ followers. So she is famous for being famous.
Rightly so. It is easy to gain popularity by appealing to people's lower insticts or by being ridiculous. Maybe the top 10 "famous for being famous" persons really did put extraordinary effort , but i think it's much less true for everyone else, otherwise they would be famous for something else. And even if it is true, it's not the kind of work that ppl value a lot. It's one thing to be famous as a Kardashian, another to be famous as Maria Callas or Madonna
There are types of great effort which produce zero value and are only judged subjectively. I really respect the guy putting Doom on his microwave, but to most people that is a completely pointless exercise. I suspect popularity is like that. I laugh at the girls taking 400 selfies standing in front of a bridge, to post just one on Instagram, but I can't deny there is some effort and skill going on there.
The whole point of an "influencer" is to become as popular as possible on the internet to make themselves feel self important and to make money. I can't fathom how this is enviable or why people desire to give them money.
That's fair, me neither.
> The whole point of an "influencer" is to become as popular as possible on the internet to make themselves feel self important and to make money.
I think that might be the goal of crappy influencers, but most of them are just trying to monetize the content they create so they can continue to create that content. Yes, there are some whose success does not seem correlated with the quality of their content or the effort they put into it. That might be part of the reason they draw so much ire.
>I can't fathom how this is enviable or why people desire to give them money.
Technology democratizes the ability to publish content and measure traffic. Now everyone can quantify how many eyeballs they are commanding, and they can sell access to those eyeballs.
> most of them are just trying to monetize the content they create so they can continue to create that content
...is something I don't really understand.
Why must they believe they need to get money to make such content (whatever "content" is?)
I mean, at one time I had a personal blog at my personal domain, hosted on a shared server (right now it is dormant - I really need to get something back online). I coded the CMS myself in PHP, made code updates as needed, then created content using that CMS, and published it for public viewing. I did all of this for free.
Now, one could argue:
"You spent time, and time is money, so you paid something to do that. You deserve that money back."
I can't fault that argument, other than to say that I put my site up to give out information to others on the internet, because I had consumed so much of others free information that they had put out on the internet. In effect, I didn't see my content as product to be compensated for, but rather as my own form of compensation for consuming others content.
But it seems today that a lot of people don't see it that way. They want their cake to eat it, too. They want and almost demand that they get paid for their content. Sometimes they go to extreme stupid lengths to achieve this. Most of time they just nag and complain.
For certain content, I can perhaps understand - but at the same time I would feel kinda "used" paying for it - however that payment occurred. For instance, those IG peddlers who take great photos of beautiful places in the world. I'm not sure what they sell - some are obviously selling clothing, or at least the clothing brand. Others are shilling for other products. The only ones I can really get behind are those photographers selling the photography itself in the form of books or other media.
Even so, it still feels like I am paying someone to have a great vacation while they take photos from around the world.
Or am I the fool? Have I been "leaving money on the table" by not monetizing my content? I'm not sure how I would monetize my content (my site was mainly about hobby robotics and similar) - but having seen other sites with similar content which was monetized in some fashion, I could see how I could do it. I'm not sure I would make much money at it, but it could be done, I suppose...
Again, maybe I'm just old.
Influencers are much more insidious, you can't tell when they're being themselves and when they're being an influencer. You can't tell what is an honest opinion and what is an ad. A consequence is that that the value of everyone's opinions goes down because you can't trust anything, things like small time blogs used to be a good source of decent information, you'd get valuable real feedback from someone with no money in the game, but now they're an influencer that goes out the window. This is even worse when it bleeds into the real world.
As for their ideology, it's the sheer willingness to prostitute their "soul".
Watch TV, get 5 ads every 5 minutes.
Watch Instagram, get 1 ad every 15 seconds...
Considering the main topic is about influencers, and that their "currency" is popularity, it's not even that off-topic to repost it here: http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html
Per HN's policy of commenting substantively, I will say these influencer deals are amateurish and lacking paperwork.
Currently an engineer at Big4, and exploring the seed/angel investment landscape. I'd love to get in touch to get advice and pick your brain on how to do further market research.
So a management company that recruits hopeful influencers and skims the top of their take-home pay? No, thanks.
I'm sure plenty will be fine on their own.
In addition, they wouldn’t have to orchestrate these deals over direct message and email exchanges.
This criticism is akin to saying Stripe or Visa or any broker platform not adding value. It’s a fallacy of smaller pie slice in a larger pie. These are economic activities not being pursued because of barriers to entry for brands, and the overhead of orchestrating many smaller influencers versus 1 legitimate big contract with a more established influencer.
And yes, they would get 30% less, because they have to pay taxes now.
It’s unbelievable to people in the Northwest that people in NYC, London, and other fashion hubs spend $1K on an article of clothing. This is the norm, not the exception here. Brands like Supreme barely want to sell their $600 t-shirt to paying customers, much less give them away.
Point being, it’s a strawman to compare the target demographic of free tech swag to up-and-coming models getting free designer clothing. Still, it seems the fashion industry is adverse to paperwork and the formality. They’d love it if they didn’t have to deal with paperwork, and can get a tax incentive to give out more (which can potentially be abused, but that’s a separate discussion).
Au contraire! I was actually specifically referring to some jokingly overpriced Balenciaga or Supreme shirt, almost certainly purchased by someone who is somehow shocked (shocked!) that they can't afford rent.
EDIT: Ah I see the confusion. When I said "free t-shirt," I meant, "t-shirt given to the influencer to promote for free," not "free tech t-shirt usually worn to a gym."
A platform that provided a more structured agreement between the influencers and their clients would go a long way to fixing this, and would help both parties. It's perfectly reasonable to take a fee for doing that.
On the back of all of the comments here, I'd be wary of instagram's power over your business model.
http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20190621-chinas-influencer-...
Where was the ability to directly link a product you are promoting in your post? How many times have you seen people say, link is in my profile?
They could be facilitating the sale of promoted products directly and offer brands and individuals services to make it easy to go from click to sale. Additionally make sure people stay on the correct side of the law and disclosing that they are being paid. Maybe even require such payments to go via Instagram.
This makes it pretty obvious that the growth of influencers is concentrated in the long tail, where engagement is lower and sponsored posts less valuable.
So their sponsored posts get more engagement than non-sponsored posts? Does that mean people basically follow them for their product placements?
If you need to call yourself an influencer, you are unlikely one. Instagram's policies to market itself don't change facts.
Marketers used to pride themselves being hidden persuaders.
An influencer is just an extremely cheap actor. Tom Cruise costs $20 million to get for this commercial, and 1,000 influencers costs only $1 million.
Is it basically an instagram user with lots of followers that posts sponsored pictures or is there more to it than that?
I know someone else who does hiking equipment reviews who I expect is in a somewhat similar boat.