Florence Given - empowering women to live deliciously and embrace authenticity
Scrolling through Instagram these days can feel like being dragged through a shopping centre, with the $16.4 billion influencer industry (2022) leading to more soulless sponsored ads and less authentic content.
Within this digital capitalist minefield, Florence Given (‘Floss’) stands out as a refreshing voice. Instead of promoting fitness tea, Floss wants her 679K Instagram followers to indulge in gratitude, joy, empowerment and positivity — what she defines as ‘living deliciously’.
This 25-year-old creative powerhouse is making waves as a best-selling author, artist, feminist icon and influencer, and her ability to cultivate an engaged online community has certainly helped the process.
INSTAGRAM INTERACTIVITY
Floss is taking it further than your average influencer’s monthly Q&A. She often makes use of the question sticker in Instagram stories, connecting this to her brand by asking questions which prompt self-love and positivity in her signature relaxed yet engaging way. These include ‘what does it mean to live a delicious and romantic lifestyle to you?’ or ‘what things do girls do that you love?’
She then shares the responses she receives. This builds a supportive sense of community in her digital space, engaging and rewarding her fans by valuing their opinions as important and allowing them to identify with each-other, as they are sharing advice and love with other floss-fans all over the world.
Fan contribution also reduces the amount of time-consuming content which Florence must create about herself, making anything she does share — such as TikToks of her dancing in iconic 70s looks, or her confidence-boosting advice reels— seem saturated in authenticity rather than obligation.
CONNECTING THE COMMUNITY
Her Instagram community building has been so successful that in 2022 Floss started making posts captioned ‘FLIRT AND MAKE FRIENDS IN THE COMMENTS’ helping her like-minded fans to directly connect with each other on her platform, which led to offline meet ups, dates, flat-shares etc. Of course, female-safety conscious Floss made sure to monitor this space for trolls or potentially dangerous propositions, deleting any inappropriate comments.
This was not a brand sponsored or financially incentivised project, so it went above and beyond what is expected from an influencer, clarifying that this woman truly loves her online community, and wants to bring them together any way she can.
A RADICAL BALANCE?
However, the effectiveness of Florence Given’s online presence may be threatened by the frequent breaks she takes from posting on social media — part of her unapologetic commitment to protect her mental health and focus on her writing.
These lapses unavoidably reduce engagement in her digital space, as she is showing up less on her followers’ feeds — and how often content is posted can increase or decrease likes and comments by up to 24%, so infrequent posting will produce dips in visibility and interaction.
Despite this, the meaningful benefits of this approach ultimately outweigh this digital cost, as crucially Floss vocalises this decision on her Instagram stories. This promotes a healthy, balanced attitude to social media, often missing from the influencer content we consume daily. Encouraging her predominantly female audience to set their own boundaries, both online and offline, is an empowering and important message worth losing a few Instagram likes over.
