Social Media Influencer

The social media influencer we decided to choose for our research was @ShaniGrimmond best known for her work on YouTube as a beauty blogger. Capitalising on her success on YouTube she spun off and gained followers on Instagram and Twitter epitomising the social media savvy personality we have been investigating all semester.

She’s the perfect example of someone who uses different platforms and was chosen especially because she’s just released a line of merchandise and using her platforms to sell it.

Her target audience is also the same as our target audience for our campaign aka Millennials on Social Media.

It’s important to note her most used hashtag on twitter is #ad showing she utilises this platform to sell things and make money for herself. It’s also important to note her most tagged people are all other YouTubers she aligns herself with to sell things.

Infographic

Our group designed a survey that gathered demographic, quantitative and qualitative information on people who are high social media users. The aim of the survey was to investigate why people follow social media influencers, if those influencers have an impact on their day-to-day decisions and their overall perception of social media influencers. The data collected and analysed from the survey showed a lot of interesting trends and results. These results have been presented in the infographic below. To view the infographic closer, please click here.

 

Social Media Posts:

In response to the results of our survey, I chose to make a post on Twitter highlighting the strength of opinion shaping that Social Media Influencers have over celebrities when it comes to product endorsement. I aimed to make this post engaging by concluding the tweet with a question, adding our hashtags and a link to our infographic blog post.

For this weeks social media post, I decided to post to Instagram.  I chose to caption the photo with a statistic highlighting the percentage of survey participants that follow social media influencers.  I also added a link to the infographic post on our website, along with a screenshot of a section of the infographic to draw attention to the post.

I reached out to twitter this week in response to the infographic we formulated on our results from our survey. While I am yet to receive any response I choose to pose a question to the audience. Is our world really choosing social media culture over celebrities now and if so what does this mean for our campaign.

For this task, I posted to Twitter. This is because Twitter is a less dominant platform for social media influencers. I wanted to attract those on Twitter who follow social media influencers and engage with them about the data that we collected.

Week 9 Feedback

The main feedback that came from the week 9 consultancy session was that we need to talk more about what platforms we are going to utilise for our campaign. From this feedback we will aim to do two things:

1. Be more active with out social media posts
2. Review our communications strategy to ensure we mention the platforms we are using to distribute our messages and why we have chosen them.

Communication Strategy

Purpose statement: The purpose of this online communication strategy is to ensure that the Queensland Government’s target audience can see, hear and understand their key messages.

Communication Goals:

1. Create discussion around issues
2. Encourage participation in decision making around policy formulation
3. Collect and analyse information to use for policy development

Overall goal: To promote and encourage audience participation and discussion of policy formulation and development.

Target audience: 18-25 year old who are heavy users of social media and have a particular interest in/follow a large variety of social media influencers

Internet phenomenon: Social media influencers (YouTubers, beauty bloggers, travel writers, fitness bloggers etc)

Focus: The amount of power influencers have over their audiences

Key message: Social media influencers have too much control over the choices and attitudes of young adults

Key communication methods:

• Facebook – Post survey/polls relating to social media influencers
• Instagram – Post pictures of social media influencers with a question caption and use hashtags to reach larger audience
• Twitter – Post message about social media influencers, use hashtags to reach larger audience
• WordPress – Post blogs about social media influencers for audiences to read, audience can interact wiht blog post by leaving comments, liking or sharing the blogs
• ***All posts will be made once a week***

Social Media Calendar

• Post to the blog weekly as a group
• One post/per person weekly to the blog
• Once a week each team member will allocate a post to a dedicated social media channel of their choice (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat). These posts will be made on the same day every week (Wednesdays) to ensure consistent timing so that data is more accurate.

Identifying relevant hashtags

Many social media influencers have adapted hashtags that suit their brand. Because we are looking at social media influencers in a broad spectrum we have adapted out hashtags to cover social media influencers in general. The hashtags we have selected for our campaign are: #socialmedia #sponsored #paidadvertisment and #mediainfluencer

Survey Design

We have designed this survey to gather demographic, quantitative and qualitative information on people who are high social media users. We have designed the questions to gather people’s opinions of social media users and whether they think that social media influencers have too much/too little control over people’s lives. Through this survey we are aiming to investigate why people follow social media influencers, if those influencers have an impact on their day-to-day decisions and their overall perception of social media influencers.

Survey question:

Q1. What is your age? (Check box option)

Q2. What is your gender? (M/F/Other)

Q3. Do you use social media often? (Likert scale question)

Q4. What platforms do you use? (Multiple choice)

Q5. Do you follow social media influencers on social media? (Yes/no)

Q6. Do you think social media influencers have an affect on your daily decisions? (food/drink/clothing/technology/vehicle preferences) (Likert scale question)

Q7. Why do you follow social media influencers? (Open ended)

Q8. Whats your opinion on social media influencers? (Open ended)

Q9. Do you prefer celebrity endorsements or social media influencer opinions? (Celebrity endorsements/social media influencer opinions/none/both)

For this survey we have included a range of different questions. This is to help the participants engage with the survey to optimise our results. Questions 1 and 2 are designed to gather the demographics of our participants. This will help us identify which demographics are interacting/not interacting with social media users and their opinions on the topic. Questions 3, 4, 5 and 6 aim at gathering information about the participants behaviour. We have used a Likert scale design to determine how much the participant uses social media and a multiple choice option to find out which platforms they use. Questions 7 and 8 are open ended. This will allow us to gather a deeper understanding on the users opinion towards social media influencers and why they do/do not interact with them. We have then ended the survey with a simple forced choice question to find out whether the participants prefer celebrity or social media influencer opinions.

Reaper Task

For this task we scraped 3200 tweets from social media influencer, Kylie Jenner’s Twitter account, although only 1,726 were available. We analysed these tweets and determined which types of tweets attracted more attention. Some of the elements we considered when approaching this task were; visuals dominating text, endorsements dominating general tweets as well as the length and time the tweet were posted.

From analysing the data that was scraped there were noticeable patterns discovered. Tweets that included photos received more interaction than those with plain text. Also, Kylie Jenner’s replies to other people’s tweets received more attention than regular tweets from her account. The top 10 most popular tweets were all generated within the past 18 months.

Tweets that received less attention were replies to fans. A majority of the bottom 10 tweets were made in June 2017 which was surprising. It was assumed Kylie’s Jenner less popular tweets would be those from when she first started posting on Twitter and had less followers.

None of the top 10 or bottom 10 tweets used hashtags. This means Kylie Jenner relies on her followers to engage and share her tweets and relies less on using hashtags to attract audience engagement.

Hashtags

The hashtags we have selected for our campaign are #socialmedia #sponsored #paidadvertisment and #mediainfluencer.

We have selected these hashtags as our chosen issue is the power of Social Media Influencers. We are not against Social Media personalities themselves, but rather the negative effects that some Influencers may inflict on teens and young adults, through issues such as paid sponsorship of illegitimate brands.

We hope to engage the opinions of the public through the use of these hashtags, whilst also collecting research information for our communication strategy.

Social Media posts:

The first social media platform I have chosen to post on is Twitter. I chose Twitter for my first post as the purpose of hashtags is to spread the tweet to a wide audiences, despite my account not having many (any) followers.

The aim of this very broad, general first post is to encourage public responses and opinions on our social issue through the use of our chosen hashtags to attract a relevant audience.

• Hannah Arthur

 

The first platform I choose was Instagram. I thought using the platform I was talking about would prove most effective.

I kept my profile on public so I could get a response from the public and I used an open ended question to get a range of mixed responses.

• Jessica Rowen

The first platform I chose to post on was Facebook.  I posted a question about our chosen topic, hoping to get interaction from people already on my friends list, along with a wider audience through using the relevant hashtags.

• Samantha Roberts

• Jessica Miller – The first platform I have chosen to use is Twitter. I have chosen this platform because using hashtags allows me to relate my posts to those who also have a interest in social media influencers. I also attached a photo of different social media influencers to encourage people to interact with my post and to mae the tweet more appealing.

Week 2:

• Jessica Miller – This week I posted to Instagram. I chose this platform because I have a reasonable following who I think will be able to relate to this post and share their comments. Instagram is one of the most favourited platforms for social media influencers to flourish on which I think will also be a benefit for this post as the hashtags relates to them and their audiences.

 

I chose Facebook as the social media platform for my second post containing our hashtags.
I am less familiar with how hashtags work on Facebook; but am assuming that on a public post such as the one I have made, they work similarly to Instagram and Twitter.
Hopefully, the use of these hashtags engage a wider audience to share their opinions on this public post.

• Hannah Arthur

 

This week I decided to post to twitter.  After my post last week getting little to no attention, I was interested to see if the use of hashtags were more effective when using twitter.  I also added a photo of the renowned Kylie Jenner advertising a product in hope for the post to gain more attention.

• Samantha Roberts

For the second week of our social media campaign I decided to utilise twitter because I thought it was a more public platform which could get more people to reach out and respond to me.

I used a picture of a known social media influencer to attract people and used our designated hashtags and posed a question to the readers asking if they’ve ever purchased a product that they saw on social media?

• Jessica Rowen

 

Tesla Meme

The meme we decided to use is a stock photo of a portrayed ‘love triangle’ that surfaced on the internet earlier this year as a meme. The original picture depicts a man walking down the street with his girlfriend while eyeing off a girl walking past them. The underlying humour evident in this picture is the man is focusing on something that may be worth more value than what he currently posses.

This meme has fidelity, fecundity and longevity. It surfaced on the internet approximately one to two months ago and is still a current trending meme on social media. Everyone recognises it as a simple stock photo and understands the original meaning behind. It also portrays an underlying message that can relate to a large majority of society, that being we all want things things that we cannot have. For example, the latest phone, a better job, the latest clothes etc.

For this activity we were allocated Tesla as our special interest group. Tesla is primarily know for its slick, expensive cars. To relate this to our chosen meme we edited the picture so that the guy is eyeing of a Tesla car, wishing he had it but in reality he has to put up with his old, rundown current car.

 

This meme addresses Tesla’s audience because the man looking at the Tesla car (other girl) indicates that Telsa is the preferred and desired car brand over the current car he owns (his current girlfriend). This is projecting to Tesla’s audience that they are a superior brand and encourages viewers to purchase their brand over other car brands.

Bridging the Gap between Social Media and “Reality”

Social Media is undoubtedly a tool that can be utilised for personal gain. Time and time again I have seen a paid promotion on my newsfeed from a person with a large following. In short, they’re being paid to live a luxurious life.

The question then becomes – is any of what we see online even real?

The constant filters, hash tags and sponsors are ultimately deceptive. I’m going to try and demonstrate how warped the social media culture is today and how it extensively impacts on the lives of people in today’s world.

Using former Instagram famous model Essena O’Neill as an example it’s easy to see the warped reality Instagram can create for not only the content viewer but also the creator. Essena rose to fame with her beautiful beach photos and effortless beauty but it wasn’t long before the glass ceiling shattered around on. In 2015, after years of being in the spotlight she had finally had enough. She edited all the captions on her much liked pictures from a formal picture where she stated her loneliness or a paid promotion she had done all in all she summarised the one thing we were all yet to catch onto – sometimes social media is fake.

The ultimate goal of Essena’s own self-destruction and her decision to shy away from the public eye is to demonstrate once and for all how toxic social media is. The aim is for millennials who are most influenced by social media due to being raised on it to realise it’s warped nature. How all-various online channels themselves are flawed. Delivering news is different from the social media platform it pertains.

Jessica Rowen

Hunt, E. (2015). Essena O’Neill quits Instagram claiming social media ‘is not real life’. [online] The Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/nov/03/instagram-star-essena-oneill-quits-2d-life-to-reveal-true-story-behind-images [Accessed 30 Aug. 2017].

 

The Rise of the Fake Famous

Social media marketing is hugely popular within the advertising industry because of its word-of-mouth credibility and its ability to easily reach a wider audience.  This new phenomenon allows social media influencers with the biggest follower counts to charge brands thousands of dollars for sponsored posts.  Celebrities like Kylie Jenner are rumoured to earn more than $40,000 for a single post.  But, is social media marketing actually worth it?

New advertising standards require influencers to label paid posts as ‘ads’, which has eroded the ability to subtly influence their followers and therefore decrease the effectiveness of social media marketing.

Advertisers have also found that they weren’t getting a return on their investment because too many had created a “false economy” by buying followers.  Not only this, but it is excessively common for social media influencers to use bots to write fake comments.  This also means these non-genuine comments influence the exposure of any paid post via Instagram’s algorithm.

I can admit that I have thought about building my social media profiles hundreds of times to be able to live a luxurious life at little cost, but I’ve always understood that gaining a large following was such a challenging thing to do.

Carla Efstratiou is the owner of Stylehub, a booming online fashion label with two brick and mortar stores in Sydney.  “We’ve had some who’ve had a million followers, but when they promoted our clothes we had literally no sales or feedback.  I started looking over her posts and realising the traction didn’t make sense. She was getting a 1000 likes a minute, which is impossible,” (Hennessy, 2017).

With people being so desperate to become social media famous and essentially get paid to live a luxurious life, it is clear that social media users will do anything to grasp this.

Samantha Roberts

 

Hennessy, Annabel. “Instagram Influencers Being Dumped by Advertisers.” The Daily Telegraph. 19 May 2017. http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/instagram-influencers-being-dumped-by-advertisers/news-story/3cbe082a238f3c0b524cba4aa870d2e1