Over the past years, Instagram has become increasingly more popular with its ever-growing number of users. It has only been a little over five years ago since Kevin Systrom – the founder of Instagram – had agreed to sell his company to Mark Zuckerberg – founder of that other big social media platform: Facebook – for an astonishing amount of $1 billion of both cash and stock. At that time of the deal, Instagram had an active user base of 30 million people. This past April however, Facebook announced that Instagram had grown to an extraordinary amount of 700 million monthly active users. (Jackson 2017) By integrating the two social platforms and adding Instagram as a complement, Facebook will be able to exploit network effects and expend its overall user base. (Eisenmann 2009)
Therefore, it has become prevalent that companies are willing to invest large sums of money in Instagram marketing campaigns in order to reach the social media’s network large audience. To illustrate: the top celebrities in terms of Instagram earnings are estimated to be around £425,000, £387,000 and £310,000 per Instagram post by Selena Gomez, Kim Kardashian and Cristiano Ronaldo respectively. (Burnip 2017) However, a trend has emerged of so-called ‘influencers’, referring to people who can have a great impact on a large number of potential buyers. The interesting part is that companies do not only focus on celebrities anymore, but nowadays the-girl-next-door could become the next Instagram it-girl.
This business has proven to be highly lucrative: earnings for a ‘mid-level influencer’, which implies a follower base between 2,500-25,000, are estimated to be around $200-$500 per post. Moreover, influencers can also get many products for free in change for a post promoting that product in a so-called affiliate marketing strategy. This can take many forms: luxury brands provide influencers with their latest hot items while hotels can even provide an influencer with its master suite room. Since everyone is interest in getting a piece of the pie, this has lured many people into Instagram’s profitable industry.
However, recent studies have shown that many of these self-claimed influencers are actually fakes: many of their users consist of manufactured, automatic bots. Even more so, a large share of the activity has found to be inauthentic, consisting of bought likes and positive comments to boost posts. (Maheshwari 2017) A whole new business has risen in providing these followers, comments and likes against a price with suppliers mostly operating in Russia, Ukraine and India. These suppliers create ten thousand fake accounts at once and provide customers with likes and some positive comments. They operate through forum such as BlackHatWorld, where all all kinds of internet experts try to generate revenue with their online operations. (van Niekerk & de Graaf 2017) Instagram has already tried taking measures against these detrimental activities, it is facing challenges in dealing with accounts that are manufactured altogether. In 2014, the social media platform has deleted millions of fake users, which is known as the ‘Instagram Rapture’. Nevertheless, these automation services keep posing a real threat evading detection by simply mimicking what real people would do. Furthermore, these services are offered for prices lower than paid ads. (Maheshwari 2017)
These services allow people like yourself to grow a large user base and generate many likes and comments against a nice price. To illustrate, a Dutch news provider paid $30 in order to get 2000 followers and around 250 likes and 30 comments for their alpaca account in an experiment. (van Niekerk & de Graaf 2017) So the secret is out: you can simply buy your way into your Instagram fame career, at least until Instagram bashes your fake follower base.
Bibliography
Burnip, L 2017, ‘Cristiano Ronaldo earns £310,000 per Instagram post placing him third on the social network’s list of top ten influencers’, The Sun UK, 5 July, viewed 6 October, <https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/3956497/cristiano-ronaldo-instagram-earnings-per-post-ranking-influencers/>.
Eisenmann, T, Parker, G, and Van Alstyne, M.W. 2009, ‘Opening Platforms: How, When and Why?’ in Platforms, Markets and Innovation, Gawer, A. (ed.), Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 131-162.
Influencer Marketing Hub 2017, ‘Instagram influencer sponsored post money calculator’, Influencer Marketing Hub, viewed 20 October 2017, <https://influencermarketinghub.com/instagram-money-calculator/>.
Jackson, E 2017, ‘How much would Facebook be worth today if it hadn’t bought Instagram?’, Forbes, 30 April, viewed 5 October 2017, <https://www.forbes.com/sites/ericjackson/2017/04/30/how-much-would-facebook-be-worth-today-if-it-hadnt-bought-instagram/#91ec9209d77b>.
Maheshwari, S 2017, ‘How bots are inflating Instagram egos’, The New York Times, 6 June, viewed 5 October 2017, <https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/06/business/media/instagram-bots.html>.
van Niekerk, R, de Graaf, I 2017, ‘Instagram: wereld van gekochte volgers, neplikes an likebotes’ Nederlandse Omroep Stichting, 23 September, viewed 5 October 2017, <https://nos.nl/op3/artikel/2194372-instagram-wereld-van-gekochte-volgers-neplikes-en-likebots.html>.
I think Instagram is very good example of how our word is changing because of information technologies. Looking at 5 years ago, I found it so different how we were making pictures and posting them, but also how I was shopping. Looking at Instagram critically I do understand that influencers – people that have big impact on social media – do commercials and that this is just new way of advertising. Nevertheless, my shopping experience improves: by associating myself with certain influencers, I find it easier to pick clothes. Moreover, many companies change their business model fully towards social media, which makes them care more about their customers. All great companies with no delivery and return costs, with quick shipment – all of them come from social media and not from traditional retailing! The approach becomes more personalised, the access to information easier. Regarding your statement that one can buy its way to Instagram career, I would not agree that it is so easy as “pay and get”. Not every influencer is good influencer. Because of variety of bloggers out there, people tend to find more personal connection. This also mean that they are sensitive to the content blogger post. Simply having big number of subscribers and comments is not enough anymore, it is WHAT you post matters. Therefore, I strongly believe that in the future quality of social influencers will only improve which also means improving our social network experience.
Hello, Esmee,
Thank you for sharing this article. This is the first time that I actually think about how influential the activity below Instagram posts is. It could be considered as if the overall engagements post a framing effect on the reactions after them. Essentially, the way the post is projected initially has e very strong influence on how it is perceived by each consecutive individual who is engaging. The framing effects as a cognitive bias takes advantage of the environment the human interacts when he is engaging in an activity or making a decision. In this case, the framing effect would be the large number of likes and engagements with the post. In most cases, people will be more likely to engage with a post which is already very active rather than with one, which is very novel. It almost resembles the penguin problem: no one jumps until the first one does. Similarly, further engagement could be very predictive once the current post is already active enough.
Having this in mind, it is not unusual to think that people will be prone to manipulating this bias and effect among people when trying to increase engagement. It is even sometimes silly, having in mind that all our efforts to become famous are reaped by Instagram. Since my curiosity was sparkled, I did a small research and found out that there are actually websites who offer the service of generating generic likes on people’s posts against a monthly fee (Gramista, 2017). Taken out of the popularity contest context, people really are excited to engage attention on themselves. I am wondering about the time it would take Instagram to really fight the fake bots, or whether it would be successful in doing so. Since the practice is not too new anymore, fake engagements are present in numerous profile already, and it would take involved data investigation to tackle the problem. Nevertheless, it is far from impossible. Do you think this will happen, and if so, will it be too soon?
Sources:
Gramista, 2017. Take your Instagram to the next level! Retrieved on October 23, 2017 from https://gramista.com/