Micro influencers affect purchase decisions

i am an influencer

Digital influencers have become a major force in online marketing in recent years. Brands turn to celebrities and other influencers to engage audiences and sway purchase decisions in influencer marketing campaigns. A new study by Fullscreen and Shareablee shows that these social media influencers have a strong impact on their followers’ behaviour.

The study looks at four levels of digital stars:

  • Celebrities – 20 million followers or more
  • Trailblazers – online stars with 1 million or more followers
  • Emerging voices and rising stars – digital creators with 250k – 999k followers
  • Micro influencers – social media stars with less than 250k followers

Young people are influenced by social media stars

In the study, consumers aged 18-34 were asked whether they had taken any action as a result of seeing social media posts from digital influencers. Not surprising, many of them had and it turned out that celebrities were least effective in swaying consumer behaviour.

Micro influencers and “rising stars” are most effective in getting consumers to try one of their recommendations. As many as 45% of consumers report that they had done that.

“Digital trailblazers” are very effective at getting followers to purchase an item that they talked about in social media. Influencers with less than a million followers are almost as effective, while one in five consumers report that they had made a purchase as a result of a celebrity post.

Instagram creates most engagement for influencers

Among the social platforms that digital influencers use (Snapchat not included), Instagram creates the most engagement. This is especially true for micro influencers who see 86% of total engagement take place on Instagram.

That doesn’t mean, of course, that for example Youtube is not important. For many influencers, Youtube generates millions of views, so it all depends on how you define engagement. Also, I would have liked to see how much blogs affect consumer behaviour. At least in Sweden, many high profile bloggers generate massive sales for brands in campaigns that include a combination of blogs, Instagram and Youtube.

To read the entire report, please click here.

Instagram now shows when you were last active, here’s how to turn it off

Instagram now shows you when your contacts were last active on the app. If you look under the direct messages, it states how many minutes, hours or days since the other users were last active.

That of course means that they can see your status as well.

If you find this intrusive, fear not, there is a way to shut it off. Here’s how to do it.

Go to your profile and click on the settings gearwheel. Scroll down to Show Activity Status and slide to turn it off. Once you remove this feature, you will not be able to see others’ status and they will not see yours.

Instagram about to remove Top 9 for hashtags

Instagram might be getting rid of the Top 9 images for hashtags that normally are placed on top of the screen under each tag. Getting into the top 9 has been a great way to get your posts exposed to people who are not among your regular followers.

One of of my Instagram accounts I noticed today that the Top 9 posts are gone. In that place there are now two tabs and two feeds for each hashtag:

  1. Top Posts
    The left tab shows top posts under this hashtag and there is no limit in terms of number. So there are more than 9 posts, you can scroll down to find as many as you like.
  2. Recent Posts
    The right tab shows the most recent posts under this hashtag.

What does this mean?

There has been a lot of speculation as to whether hashtags are becoming less important or not. Some say they see less reach from hashtags and then there is the entire issue of the infamous shadow ban. But I believe that hashtags will continue to be an important tool, since Instagram recently added the ability to follow hashtags.

A new tab with a feed of the top post will show more high quality photos or videos, that Instagram assumes you will like. So hashtags will continue to be important as a means to reach non followers.

Note: follow me on Instagram at @kullin

Read my travel blog at hanskullin.se

One of the best travel experiences during 2017 was our visit to Crater Lake in Southern Oregon. This spectacular lake is actually inside the caldera of a volcano. It is also the lake in the US with the clearest water since no rivers flow into the lake. This is one of the top travel destinations of 2017, read more on the blog (link in bio). . . #craterlakenationalpark #craterlake #southernoregon #traveloregon #oregonexplored #oregonnw #cascadiaexplored #pnwdiscovered #exploregon #sky_brilliance #travelgram #wanderlust #beautifuldestinations #neverstopexploring #goexplore #passionpassport #exploringtheglobe #ilovetraveling #oregonhikes #theamericancollective #theIMAGED #visualambassadors #royalsnappingartists #teamtravelers #vscoexplore

Ett inlägg delat av Hans Kullin ✈︎ Travel (@kullin)

 

How to use micro influencers to drive engagement

micro influencersBrands have been using social media influencers in marketing campaigns for a long time. As the practice has grown over the years, many individuals have become celebrities with millions of followers and they can charge thousands or tens of thousands of dollars for a social media campaign or even a single Instagram post.

As influencer marketing has become more expensive and sometimes less effective, many brands look at micro influencers as partners in online campaigns.

So how can brands use micro influencers to increase engagement online? In this webinar, digital marketing consultant Shane Barker goes through the process of finding, contacting and using micro influencers to drive engagement.

His definition of micro influencers is that they are:

  • Social media users with 1,000 to 100,000 followers
  • Specializing in a certain niche
  • Could be everyday consumers (they are very genuine, more down to earth, more like ourselves)

Some of the advantages of using micro influencers is their ability to engage, since their engagement rate normally is higher than for an influencer with a larger following:

  • Average engagement rate for influencers with fewer than 2,000 followers is 10.7% (source: influence.co)
  • Average engagement rate for influencers with 100k to 150k followers is 2.5%
  • Average engagement rate for influencers with more than 1 million followers is 1.5%

Watch the video above to learn more about how to use micro influencers in your digital marketing campaigns.

Many Instagram accounts deleted after recent hack

The other day it was revealed that Instagram had been hacked and contact information to millions of accounts had been leaked online. At the same time we started seeing reports of people having to verify their accounts by adding their phone number, even if it had previously been added to Instagram. Users were prompted inside the app to verify their phone number and then got a six digit code to insert. If users didn’t do this they could not access their accounts.

While this may have worked well for most users, others reported that their accounts were deleted or that they lost hundreds of their old photos from the app.

This happened to me as well this weekend and my account was effectively disabled for about 12 hours. But I was lucky that my account was restored. After inserting the code, my account got back online, at first without any of my old photos, but during a minute or two, old photos and followers were loaded back until all was back to normal.

For a few days now, many users are reporting that they have lost their Instagram accounts. One person in a forum I’m in, said on Saturday that she lost all photos from the last four months. Today, all those photos are back online again.

Another person has had her account disabled for at least three days without getting it back. After 68 hours her account was restored. The way to get your account back according to this user is to click “get help signing in” then “need more help”. After that, fill out the form and click “my account was hacked” and describe what happened. Instagram Support will email you and “ask you to send a photo of yourself holding a paper with your name, user name, and a code they provide in the email”. Apparently this method worked.

Instagram has yet not responded officially to this incident, so we don’t know if it is related to the large hack from last week or not. Final word of advice, always secure your account with two factor authentication, which makes it a lot harder for hackers to get access to your account.

Hashtags on Instagram not working causes uproar among users

Many users are currently reporting problems with hashtags on Instagram. When some users upload photos that are tagged, their photos do not show up under the hashtags they used. I have read about this issue in discussion forums the last few days and yesterday it happened to me as well.

I uploaded a photo yesterday evening using about 30 tags, which is the maximum number allowed by Instagram. Normally after I have done this, my photo would immediately show up under the hashtags that I used. But now it didn’t. In fact, on the tags that I had used, almost no new photos from the last hour or so showed up, even on tags where there usually are new photos uploaded every minute, like #reflections.

It was soon obvious to me that this was an actual thing, not something that only I noticed in my app. Normally I get a small number of likes, say 10-15, during the first few minutes after uploading a photo. And many of them are from non followers because they discover my photos elsewhere than in their feed.

Now, however, notifications were almost silent. Only a single like or two during the first five to ten minutes, and only from followers. This was a clear sign that my photo was only visible to my followers.

Hashtags on Instagram aren’t working

So I started to investigate. None of the tags I had used displayed almost any recent photos. Some 30-40 minutes ago, some from an hour ago. My photo did not show up anywhere.

I logged in to other accounts but the results were the same, even for tags that I had not used in this photo. So had I been shadow banned? I don’t know, the concept of shadow ban is controversial and many experts say it doesn’t exist. Shadow ban is a theory that a user is somehow being punished by Instagram’s algorithm, resulting in their photos not being displayed under hashtags.

After about 2-3 hours the problem seemed to have been resolved and my photo was visible again on the hashtags. It even got promoted to the top 9 trending hashtags on more than 10 tags, so clearly all was fine again.

>> Follow my travel blog here. <<

Users are upset

It was soon clear that this problem was affecting lots of people. Instagram tweeted out this weekend’s hashtag project and the replies to this tweet are mainly about the tag issue.

instagram_hashtags_not_working2

In a Facebook group about social media, people were frustrated because their photos tanked and weren’t displayed at all.

hashtagdiscussion

There does not seem to be a workaround for users at the moment, should this issue continue. My only recommendation at the moment is to check the hashtags before you publish and see if they are displaying recent photos. If not, maybe you should wait and publish later.

Also, check Twitter discussions and see if other people are having the same problem with hashtags. Then at least you will know it is a general Instagram bug and not someting that you did.

Footnote: follow me on Instagram for travel photos: @kullin