Detox tea, waist-trainers, reusable bag sets, and teeth whitening kits… what do all of these products have in common, you might ask? They have all seen advertisement fame on the Instagram posts of “Influencers.”
Instagram, a social-media platform dedicated to photo sharing, birthed the “Age of the Influencer.” Through a snapshot here or there and the occasional quirky caption, users were able to project entire personalities and lifestyles. True or not, followers were eating it up. In some cases, a single user could amass millions of followers.
And with a lot of followers comes… a lot of revenue. Companies will pay popular Instagrammers thousands of dollars per post to represent their products. Why? Because people will and do buy them. Thus, the rise of “Influencer.”
However, an “Influencer” isn’t restricted exclusively to products. They can influence almost anything–like when Taylor Swift, a celebrity Influencer with 124 million followers, told everyone to go vote:
Within 24 hours of the posting, 65,000 people had registered to vote.
It’s hard to know how long the “Age of the Influencer” will last. With new social-media platforms rising and falling all the time (rip Myspace), the only constant is that nothing is set in stone. Nonetheless, the scope of influence that popular Influencers have been able to reach cannot go unnoticed.
As younger generations, the target demographic of many social media-platforms, focus more and more on social change, hopefully the “Influencers” of tomorrow will be more likely to influence justice than consumerism.
Want to try your hand at Instagram fame? Learn how to take the perfect snapshot here.
