Living Life Online
In the rise of social media emerges Zoe Sugg, or Zoella, is the second most followed woman on YouTube in the UK behind Adele, blogger, vlogger, author, girl boss and face of her own multiple beauty, body care and lifestyle lines. Her 11.7 million YouTube subscribers have accumulated over the past 10 years since she started her YouTube channel, just after the creation of Twitter and years before Instagram came to be. Zoe’s livelihood depends on her (and her team’s) ability to use social media to share her life as a personality and build the Zoella brand to sell products.
Currently, as a personality and through Zoe’s brand Zoella, the Zoella YouTube channel has 11.7 million subscribers and the channel MoreZoella has 4.5 million subscribers. Zoe has 8 million Twitter followers and 11 million Instagram followers, both under the username Zoella. What was once only a username has become a powerful brand. With its power Zoe is a bestselling author with her Young Adult trilogy Girl Online and has launched multiple lines of beauty and body care under Zoella Beauty, plus lifestyle products like candles and stationary under Zoella Lifestyle. Most recently, Zoe and her brother Joe, also a popular YouTuber, released “Sugg Life” merchandise. It is through the Zoella social media channels that these products are sold. Social media is where the target consumers are influenced. After all, 62% of 18–24-Year-Olds would buy a YouTuber-endorsed product (vs. celebrity-endorsed). So a product created by the YouTuber with their brand, name and face on it is even better.
Zoe’s Instagram account, Zoella, is filled with outfit posts, dog pictures, shots with family and friends, food pictures and pictures of her favourite products. Often posts will prompt followers to visit her blog for a new blog post or announce new products or merchandise. The few #ad posts posted coincide withe her brand and are usually for her own products. The most effective social media branding is done in an authentic way and through her “personal account” Zoe is able to promote the Zoella brand as closely to her personality and as authentically as possible. The Zoella affiliates, Zoella Beauty and Zoella Lifestyle, have their own separate accounts and are run, no doubt, by marketing teams exclusively with the purpose of featuring and promoting products. The same goes for Twitter. Zoe uses the username Zoella for her “personal account” and her posts consist of what music she’s listening to, conversations with other YouTubers and announcing new videos and products. Zoella Beauty and Zoella Lifestyle have their own accounts for marketing purposes. These “personal accounts” are really business and brand accounts due to the nature of their use of promoting Zoe’s personal brand.
Zoe started creating content online after being inspired by other people on YouTube that she had been watching. She appreciated their ability to share tips in life, beauty and fashion and wanted to do the same. Intimidated by YouTube she started a blog and eventually moved to YouTube once her confidence grew. The oldest video on her channel is from 7 years ago, “60 Things in My Bedroom”, the newest is “March Favourite 2017” and the most popular is “7 Seconds Challenge With Miranda Sings”. Almost half of her twenty most recent videos are collaborations and feature other YouTube personalities.
A large component in Zoe’s social media use is her interaction with other YouTubers who have the same job that she does: selling their brand through different social media channels. Frequent collaborators and guests to her channel are her boyfriend Alfie Deyes (Pointless Blog), her brother Joe Sugg (ThatcherJoe), Tanya Burr, Mark Ferris, and so many more that live their lives through social media. They are a clique that appear in each others videos, Instagram feeds and Twitter replies, reinforcing the power of their personalities and brands. It’s hard not to get sucked into the world of one YouTuber when the others are close by with just as entertaining videos and attractive brands. Even though these people are Zoe’s friends and family, and she has disclosed that she has turned down collaboration requests opposed to the idea of collaboration as a business deal, the close association with each other only helps to promote each others brands and their own too.
The relationships between all of these people splashed on all forms of social media is especially clique-like because their lives seem so unattainable. From the outside looking in they seem to exist in a bubble where they get free stuff and get cool opportunities just because they post videos and photos online. It is difficult to remember the time and work that it took all of these people to get to where they are now, living their very comfortable lives. Young people compare themselves to their seemingly ideal lives and wonder why they themselves are not able to attain such things overnight. It took years for Zoe to reach 11 million followers and to have the ability to live as she does from the salary that she makes from ad revenue and selling her branded products.
An aspect of her life that Zoe is open about is her struggle with anxiety and how her life in the public eye has affected her. There are so many pressures that come with sharing your life online because you’re sharing it with anyone who will read your blog, watch your videos or scroll through your Instagram. Garnering so much attention as a personality through personal opinions and letting people into your daily life has proved to come with a lot of pressure from a lot of different places, like friends, family, the media, followers and other creators. It’s really hard to have the courage to put yourself out there and, on such a big scale, I can’t imagine how terrifying it would be to allow anyone and everyone into something as intimate as your daily life, your relationships and your thoughts. I suppose that social media has made sharing these things less intimate. Now everyone posts pictures from their bedrooms and inconsequently speaks their mind on Twitter and Facebook. I’ve heard a lot of YouTube creators say how happy they are to have the ability to look back on days of their lives that they filmed, as if they are home movies and a way to preserve memories. But I don’t know if I would want my family’s home movies public.
In an interview with Blogosphere Magazine, Zoe speaks to how she copes with the responsibilities of being a well-known YouTuber, including how she has had to learn to deal with the pressures that comes with it. She understands that what people like about YouTubers is that they are real and accessible and people love to watch other people live their lives. She loves that too and it’s what drew her to YouTube in the first place. She knows that intrusion is what comes with it and recognizes that it is out of love for what she does and not out of spite or hate. She speaks to creating a boundary between work and real life that won’t exist unless you make an effort to create one. It must be hard to create such a line that you have to keep yourself from crossing too, one that will keep parts of your life personal and give the ability to do things for yourself, not for the camera to share online. For Zoe, the pressure felt as a successful YouTuber can make you feel suffocated by fans, other creators and the media. They all have expectations of what you should be doing. If your living your life for someone or something else then you shouldn’t be carrying on that way. An interesting point made in this interview is her reaction to the opinions of other creators and the expectations of the media who try to dictate what she should and shouldn’t be doing, and reminding her that she is a role model to her younger viewers. She says, “yes, but I’m also a 26 year old woman. The minute you start questioning those things and you start questioning your own behaviour is the minute that your not enjoying it anymore”. This reiterates the fact that the life that she is sharing through social media is her own and it is what her job and her livelihood depend on. The maintaining of the Zoella brand depends on her sharing her life through pictures and videos that create an image powerful enough to influence. For Zoe the purpose is more than selling products and she admits, “I would like to think that I helped people. When people watch my videos they can come away feeling better about themselves or the day they’ve had. Or, kind of, inspire them to do something that they wouldn’t have done otherwise”.
Although YouTube does provide viewers with entertainment and is powered by the creativity of those who share their videos, personalities like Zoe who are selling a brand use YouTube and its social media power to do so. Paired with Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat Zoe has the ability to use these platforms as a means to support and sell her brand.
