By: Chris Tulley
Influencer marketing has grown exponentially over the past few years as more and more brands partner with influencers to promote their product on social media platforms such as Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube.
In 2016, the global influencer marketing market size was valued at 1.7 billion dollars. Three years later in 2019, the market size was valued at 6.5 billion dollars. This was just the beginning for influencer marketing and what the industry has evolved into today. The market size is valued at a whopping 13.8 billion dollars, almost 8x what the market size was just five years earlier in 2016. All the data point towards influencer marketing continuing to increase in market size.
Not only are the top influencers being selected for marketing campaigns, but so are micro- influencers who do not have as big of a following. With the market getting more and more competitive over the years as consumers have switched to social media content for entertainment, there has been a higher demand for micro and macro-influencers. However, this race to become an influencer has led to the problem of “buying followers” or having a large following of “bots”, in other words, fake followers. “According to White Ops/ANA, the global losses due to bot frauds were estimated to be USD 7.2 billion in 2016.” Now, brands are faced with the challenge of correctly identifying an influencer to work with who has a legitimate following and can create organic partnerships to reach the brand’s targeted audience.
On Monday October 4th, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp went dark for around six hours and no one was able to access these social platforms. This left many influencers wondering what would happen to their careers and livelihoods if the platforms did not return to working again. Several influencers spoke out on the outage and shared their thoughts and concerns with the industry being so heavily reliant on the social media platforms.
Amber Venz Box, co-founder of affiliate marketing platform LTK said in a statement, “Today, the industry was reminded that social media platforms are not engineered to be business enablement platforms, but rather efficient marketing channels.” The outage came as a wakeup call to countless influencers, especially influencers who are only on Instagram and have not expanded their following across multiple platforms. It will be interesting to see the future trends and how the influencer marketing industry continues to expand and innovate as social media continues to grow.