All Hail King Kylie
Kylie Jenner. We all know her. We either love her or we love to hate her. The youngest of the Kardashian-Jenner Klan has completely and totally mastered social media. Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, even Vine, Kylie has a massive following. Part of this is due to her famous family and Keeping Up with the Kardashians but the other part is because she has discovered how to use social media to garner social currency and create buzz. Over the past few years Kylie has grown to be one of the more famous sisters ad this can be largely attributed to her social media accounts. She’s the epitome of a social media star.
Kylie may have you fooled if you think of her as just some famous rich girl who has no talent. Of course, she is a famous, rich young woman but she has become so much more than that. Take a look at her social media accounts and you’ll see countless followers and admirers. Kylie is the most followed person on Snapchat (MTV), has an Instagram following of 90.9 million and 20.1 million on Twitter. One does not simply have a following like this because they have a famous family, she must be doing something right.
King Kylie has created a personal brand unlike anybody else. She’s managed to use this personal brand to not only sell herself but sell myriads of Kylie products. Kylie is younger than most of us but more famous and successful that some of us could ever hope to be. One big question that still remains is how? How has Kylie managed to use social media to build her brand so successfully? After looking at her social platforms and digging around I can attribute her success to a few things. Her name-brand last name, her openness, and her variety, frequency and reach.
Growing up being a stars of one of the hottest reality TV shows has gotten the Kardashians pretty far. Each member of the family has a unique personal brand as well as a slew of products that they offer the public. Kylie is no exception. The show and her famous family are what initially brought the people to her account. Her previous fame is what drew in the crowd but that is not what keeps people interested and coming back for more. Nobody keeps up with the Kardashians because they’re boring.
Kylie grew up in the spotlight, at the age of 10, TV cameras were in her house. She is used to having people see parts of her life that a normally private. This leads to the second factor: her openness. I, like many others, follow Kylie on her multiple platforms. One of the unique things about Kylie Jenner is how open she is online. Unlike many other celebrities, who try and keep their lives private, Kylie lets everyone in on what she’s doing and how she’s feeling that day. Especially via her Snapchat, Kylie gives fans an outside-looking-in perspective on what it’s like to be Kylie. Kylie posts videos and photos of her doing everything from the most mundane task of making lasagne to taking a private jet to some island with her family and friends.
This tactic is something that comes naturally to Kylie. She is used to sharing her life with people, but this openness has become so much more than just “posting”. Kylie, no doubt, has noticed that this is openness sells. It is a rarity for celebrities to open their lives like this, so Kylie is a dime a dozen. She has harnessed the power of people watching her live her life and has now used this power to sell. Whether it is brands she is paid to advertise for, her own lip-kits, the Kendall and Kylie app, the Kylie pop-up shops, Kylie’s social has allowed her to create a brand that can sell these things. I can only attribute this due to the fact that she is so open, it feels like a friend is recommending you to buy a product. If it’s not that then maybe if you buy this product you can have a life like Kylie’s. It is no secret that Kylie is brand herself and her social media keeps that brand in-tact.
One of the biggest selling points on Kylie Jenner is that she is everywhere. Find a social platform and she’ll be on it. This allows her reach to grow beyond that of the normal celeb. Many of Kylie’s fans are young girls, which is why this tactic is so successful. Many of her fans have grown up with social media and for Kylie to be available on their favourite platforms is only something that will make people love her more: “Kylie’s strategy has worked so well because her audience is predominantly young women — Generation Z and Generation X, who are completely at home with technology, and for whom social media is part of life.” (Career Girl).
Not only is she on all the different mainstream social platforms, she is posting constantly on one or all of them. Each platform sees a little bit of a different Kylie. This tactic is important because it draws people in to follow all of her social accounts. I started by following Kylie on Instagram, where she would show flashy photos of life and advertise her lip-kit, but if you wanted to get real-time updates you needed to be on Snapchat. So, I proceeded to follow her on Snapchat. By taking one social platform, and using it to market one of your other social platforms is a smart move. Kylie truly has done an amazing job in mastering that. Anybody can see that Kylie shows different bits and pieces of herself on different platforms, which creates a need (and yes I really truly do mean a need) to follow the other platforms. Kylie is aware that people are Kylie obsessed and she has used this to her advantage.
Selling is what she does. Whether we are aware of it or not, Kylie is constantly promoting products. We buy into this. We buy into this because of who she is. We follow her Snapchat to see her newest shades and sneak peaks of her lip-kit. We buy her lip-kit so maybe we can be like Kylie too. She reaches us on so many different platforms that the things she advertises are imbedded in our unconsciousness. Kylie has conquered social media and some of us don’t even realize that she’s doing it.
Kylie Jenner’s social media success is amazing. She’s really homed in on what we as people like to see. But that is truly what she, and many of us post about: what people like to see. It’s all fun and games to admire and talk about King Ky and her onslaught of fans but what we see is almost definitely not real. On social media, we all show our best selves, and Kylie is no different. She is human too.
While it is easy to sit here, read this and think who cares? Or why is this even important? It is important. Social media is our now and our future. It isn’t going away anytime soon. The generations below us don’t even know life without social, I hardly know life without social. I sit here with my 67 year old father (who has Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook), and I read an article about how Kylie may be getting her own spin-off show and my dad says “You know what kills me? That anybody gives a shit.” and he’s right. But people do give a shit, deep down he even gives a shit. That’s how Kylie has garnered such an incredibly large and strong following. Analysing what she does and how she does it is important. It allows us to identify key success factors, which we can then harness and put towards our own personal branding online. It also gives us some insight into how we operate as a society, like what our interests are and what makes us tick.
No matter if you dislike Kylie Jenner or you love her, she is there. She is killing it online and to try and deny that is going to get you nowhere. Kylie has developed a personal brand unlike anybody else because she has mastered the art of social. Kylie knows just what to show and how to show it. Despite the fact that one of the main selling point of Kylie is that we feel like we know her, we have to remember that this isn’t her true self. As we’ve stated time and time again, we show our best selves on social media. On that note, I will leave us with these quotes:
“I’m way flashier on Instagram and Snapchat because I feel like that’s what people want to see, and that’s I’ve always done, so I’m not going to stop. People want to see my cars and my purses. People love fashion. But that’s so not me.”- Kylie Jenner
“People think they have a perfect idea of who you are from a four-second Snapchat video… and fake blogs, stories, magazine covers. In reality, that’s not the case. Nobody knows who I am except family and my close friends.”- Kylie Jenner
http://www.careergirldaily.com/kylie-jenner-marketing-strategy/
http://www.mtv.com/news/2920721/kylie-jenner-snapchat-most-followed/
