How Influencers affect the business market?
Kylie Jenner damaged a large worldwide company!
She posted a message on Twitter, which expressed her dissatisfaction with Snapchat’s redesign
After Kylie published this tweet, The whole company’s market value evaporated by about $1.3 billion.
Kylie Jenner is one of the most influential users on the internet. Many people consider that her preference always has a decisive influence on her large following. However, why celebrities have a tremendous influence on the social media platform? Why has Influencers marketing become essential in the commercial market?
You can get the answer in this article
Who is the influencer and why they are important?
Now, more and more people prefer to use social media to pick up information. The need for information has created the role of influencers as content originator which uses an influencer’s popularity to gain attention for a product or service. Their followers not only admire the influencer’s life but also they often decide to praise or even copy their lifestyle. As Crystal Abidin, a professional digital anthropologist mentioned, influencers are internet users who prefer to post a large amount of follow-up information on their social media account with an attractive textual and visual description of their life. They use this information to create a particular communication space with their followers, which monetises “advertorial material” in their social media posts to achieve economic benefit. Taking Kylie Jenner as an example, she is a successful social media influencer with 110 million-strong Instagram followers. She took advantage of her influence on the internet to establish her cosmetics empire to become one of the youngest cosmetics billionaires. As Kelly-Leigh Cooper, a BBC reporter, described, Kylie’s success is closely related to her status as an influencer of social media, and her experience showed the most significant trend in the global fast-selling industry. Many customers, especially young customers, are not interested in traditional advertising. The “personality, belief and ethics” of the brand is what they prefer to see in the advertisement. Charlotte Libby, a cosmetics expert at the famous cosmetics group, says social media reduces the entry criteria of new brands into cosmetics industries, making the competitive environment fairer than before. “Influencers” prove that cooperating with social media celebrities can give brands a chance to exhibit more personality. According to MediaKix, influencers can be an ideological leader who can drive engagement and set the trend among the recipients, assisting followers to accept sponsor content of brand collaboration. Compared with traditional celebrities, Influencers break through the noise of conventional advertisements and propagate brand value to potential customers with a real, natural manner. Thus, as MediaKix described, many well-known companies notice that social media has a profound impact to their target market and research showed that 70% of brand marketing practitioners in the US indicate that they “agree” or “strongly agree” to raise the budget of influencer marketing.
How influencer culture impact their followers and how brands use their “power”
The power of influencers should not be underestimated. For followers, searching most attractive and useful resources is what they actively do on social media, and this is the reason why self-branding need to appear. According to Khamis, Ang & WellingIn, the surrounding of media surplus, the requirement of distinctiveness and visibility of advertising will increase. Influencers often show their particular personal approach in their posts, which makes followers can have a sense of “authenticity” and “distinctiveness” because most influencers’ social media content is all about their life. According to Marwick, authenticity is considered a social construct community, which creates a fluctuating set of affective relationships between individuals, audiences, and commodities (as cited in Melody Nouri,2018). Influencers can quickly establish emotional links with followers using the power of “authenticity”. Followers can feel a sense of intimacy between themselves and influencers rather than a sense of inaccessibility like traditional celebrities. Also, according to Melody Nouri, the social media relationship between followers and influencers not only builds a sense of connection but also it assists content creators in understanding followers’ requirements and preferences. As Giles (2002) described, under the “parasocial interaction”, followers will respond to the media influencers as if she/he was a personal acquaintance. Followers will have a higher degree of intimacy when they watch influencer’s posts because they build the illusion of touchable friendship with followers. Brands take advantage of this “parasocial interaction” between influencers and followers. As Morgan Glucksman said, brands cooperate with social media influencers to understand their target customer’s requirements to shape the perfect brand image. Brands use “influencers” to build a direct conversation with potential audiences and make them are interested in their products. Also, according to Marwick, the successful influencer creates self-branding, and it has an entirely different type of status markers than traditional entrepreneurship. The visibility and attention which self-branding creates to be able to publicise better the brand’s “independent & personal” values, which attract more attention from social media users to achieve adequate publicity to target audiences.
As we can see, influencer marketing has become a trend in the commercial area. Influencers not only can build positive self-brand on social media, which attract followers to accept their lifestyle and individual value but also they enable to build strong communication between target customers and brands. Besides, influencers can fully demonstrate their uniqueness and authenticity in their social media content, which makes followers have a sense of trust to the brand they recommend and this is the most important reason why commercial markets rely so heavily on influencer marketing.
