• Product A is featured in a new TV advert.
• Product B is on a beautiful billboard I pass on my way to work.
• Product C was featured in a post by Kim Kardashian. She is gorgeous, but my lashes are naturally fair and quite sparse – not a problem I associate with her.
• Product D is used by a blogger who also does Pilates at my gym – a blogger with hair and lashes very similar to mine.
I am going to pick product D.
Brands soon realised that expensive television adverts create talkability; billboards give your brand clout; big celebrity endorsements deliver broad appeal; and a super testimonial from a gorgeous film star is certainly useful. However, sending lots of little advertising foot soldiers directly to a consumer’s phone screen has become the ultimate shortcut to activate the ultimate marketing superpower: word of mouth.
People like me, solving problems like mine, with things I can access, where I am.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Traditional marketing relies heavily on the infamous four Ps: product, price, place and promotion. We probably think of social media as 100% promotion and none of the other stuff. But social media can be hyper-local. It creates great opportunities to showcase a product in seamless and incidental ways with embedded links straight to an online store, which, in turn, delivers straight to your door or even your desk.
In an age in which we can rely on actual people over traditional forms of advertising, we tend to trust each other more than we trust the brands we buy. What do I base this on? The numbers. Of the 20 most followed accounts on Instagram, 17 belong to people and only three of them belong to brands.
See for yourself:
Figures accurate on 8 February 2020
But perhaps it’s different on Twitter? Nope. Three accounts in the top 20 belong to organisations. The rest are all people.
On Facebook, 10 brands clinch spots in the top 20; the other 10 go to individuals:
“People do not want to have a conversation with their chips” is a great quote from the Australian marketing guru Professor Mark Ritson. In an online lecture for the Australian Association of National Advertisers in May 2016 (still available on its YouTube channel), he explained that “social media is about people, not brands. 76% of people do not use social media to follow brands.”
An updated, additional definition for the word “influencer” was included in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary in May 2019: “a person who is able to generate interest in something (such as a consumer product) by posting about it on social media”. The editor of the dictionary remarked at the time that “all of us are consumers, even if all we are consuming is information”.
Try to think of the last ten times you interacted with any brand on any social media platform. How many of those times did you simply reach out to complain or at least give critical feedback? We often use social media like a customer service careline, because we’d much rather drag the proverbial shopkeeper into the town square so we can shout at him (hopefully in front of a crowd!) for selling us rotten food than tell him quietly over the phone. When you love a product, chances are you’ll be telling a friend before you reach out to the brand itself. You paid them for it, after all.
I could quote Matthew Kobach’s impressive PhD to explain this, but I find that his Twitter feed serves as an excellent shortcut. He is head of Social at the New York Stock Exchange and is well worth following.
Whether launching your customer service tirades on social media is a good idea (or how to do it in a positive way) when you want to build a business out of partnering with brands is something I’ll cover later in this book. But when it comes to brands marketing their products, social media soon showed marketers and advertising agencies that because people follow people, they would be more effective if they roped in the assistance of those people. Social media is exactly that – social!
Initially, brands and their agencies collaborated with large-scale influencers: athletes, celebrities, models, musicians, reality stars and actors. If you didn’t command the attention of at least a few hundred thousand to a few million followers, you didn’t mean much to brands. Your posts needed to be seen by as many people as possible. The entire digital advertising sales business is traditionally built on impressions: how many people saw the advert? Enough? Success.
But the problem is that even the US president @realDonaldTrump, with his verified account and more than 70 million followers on Twitter, could have as many as 15 million fake followers (according to twitteraudit.com).
What is a fake follower? A fake follower is an account that is not consistently active, has low follower numbers, has been on Twitter for only a short while, does not stick around for long and could very well have been created by so-called bots (an abbreviation for Internet robots). Anyone can buy bot followers and you can also direct these bots to any nominated account you want to inflate. That’s right: you don’t need to be the owner of an account to be able to buy it some perceived support.
Yes, some of these accounts could belong to users who only passively consume content on Twitter from time to time. But most of them are created by programs written to create accounts under real or even imagined identities, because once there is a demand for a shortcut to becoming an influencer (being able to buy more followers, that is) someone will find a way to service that demand. Why some people have fake followers even when they didn’t pay for this shortcut is unclear, but one widely held theory is that these bots follow a random number of accounts to raise the appearance of legitimacy.
Source: Twitteraudit.com
For the sake of transparency, my own account reflects a 7% fake-follower rating, according to the same website,
