Social Media Influencers

From Tokyo, Japan and Auckland, New Zealand, this is Down to Business English, with your hosts Git Montrow and Samantha Vega.

I have to tell you something.

The most disturbing documentary on Netflix last night.

Let that have been skip.

It's called the Social Dilemma, and it was all about how social media gone completely off the rails. And instead of bringing people together, is now actually causing huge divisions in society.

Yes, I've seen it. I thought it was great. I also know someone that watched it and then erased their social media accounts because of what they learned from the documentary.

Well, I won't be going that far, but I can understand why your friend was motivated to do that.

So what was your biggest takeaway from the that instead of being a force of good, social media is primarily designed just to sell us stuff?

Well, being an advertising platform in itself is not such a bad thing. No, for me, the big takeaway was that social media. Whether it be Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, or Twitter, they have all uh unintentionally come up with a way Change the way people behave.

Unintentionally.

Yes, unintentionally.

And how did they end up doing that?

Well, I think you need to watch the social dilemma again then for all the details.

I'll have to give it another go.

All I will say is that the original intent of social media engineers was to create between users. But the algorithms and tools they came up with to do that. To create that engagement, have a more insidious side effect.

Is this our topic today, Scan? The social harms of social media?

Not directly. However, our topic today is closely tied to social media.

As in people who promote products through their Instagram and Facebook feeds?

That is certainly one part of the online influencer story, yes.

I've always wondered how effective online influencers actually are in terms of marketing.

Hmm, and that is one of the questions we will be answering.

Sounds good.

Okay, so let's do it. Let's get D2B down to business with social media influencers. Who are they? Are they an effective way for brands to market their products? And what does the future hold for the social media influencing industry?

Let's start by clearly defining what a social media influencer is.

I would think that term is fairly obvious.

You would think so, but there are several definitions as a matter of fact.

Is that right? My image of a social media influencer is someone who has a large following on a social media platform and has the ability to influence the purchasing decisions of those followers.

Someone like the reality TV star Kylie Jenner?

Yes, Kylie Jenner would be a case study on social media influencing. Didn't she recently become a billionaire through her online marketing presence?

Very true. And she is the perfect example of what is referred to as a mega influencer.

A mega influencer?

Someone who typically became famous offline, you know, a TV personality or a well-known musician or even a professional athlete. And they have more than a million followers on at least one social media platform.

And with such a large following, they are able to make more major endorsement deals with big-name brands to write posts about their product.

Precisely.

It sounds pretty much like your run-of-the-mill commercial endorsement arrangement. But instead of taking out ads in a magazine or on TV, brands are paying for ads on social media.

What you need to keep in mind though is that unlike TV or print ads, There is much more engagement between the influencer and their audience through a social media channel, such as Instagram. The fact that the audience has chosen to follow the influencer is very powerful. Whether it is Kylie Jenner, LeBron James, or Justin Bieber, right from the get go they have more authority in the followers' eyes.

I suppose so. A TV ad costs millions of dollars to produce and is seen by everyone, whether they are interested in the product or not.

And a social media post, on the other hand, would be much more targeted. The audience has already expressed an interest in what the influencer has to say by following them in the first place. And that ability to target a specific demographic and the more personal relationship between influencer and follower. That is what is so appealing to brands.

Sure, it would definitely lead to a better ROI or return on investment for the advertiser.

And getting a stronger ROI on their advertising dollar is very important. So important in fact that it has created space for other types of online influencers, not just the mega influencers.

Oh. And who would they be?

There are three distinct categories. There are the macro influencers who have between 40,000 and a million followers. And then there are micro influencers with 1,000 to 40,000 followers. And finally, the nano influencers, who have less than a thousand followers.

I take it that the more followers an influencer has, the more they can charge advertisers to post about their product.

Yes and no. It isn't so clear cut. An influencer's value is tied very closely to their authority with their followers.

What do you mean by authority?

Basically, authority refers to the degree followers accept or trust the influencer's endorsement.

In other words, how much does a follower believe what the influencer says about a product? Are they sincerely recommending it because it's a good product or service or are they simply promoting it because they're being paid?

Exactly. Now of course mega influencers garner extremely high fees for their posts. Kylie Jenner, for example, has charged over a million dollars for one single post.

A million dollars for a single post? Wow, that is magnificent. And how many followers does she have?

On Instagram, something like a hundred and seventy million followers.

Well we all can't be like Kylie Jenner. What about the other type of influencers? How much are they making?

According to Mike dot com, an online media publisher who claims to have the largest reach and engagement with millennials and Gen Z. The average influencer can take home anywhere from$30,000 to$100,000 US dollars a year.

That's very lucrative. How many followers are required to make that much money?

Well, in another report from Vox Media, an audience of fifty to a hundred thousand followers can be worth as much as three thousand US dollars per post.

They would be the micro influencers you mentioned.

Yes, and even nano influencers who may only have a few thousand followers, they can make anywhere from thirty to sixty thousand dollars per year, according to this report.

Wouldn't we be nano influencers then? I mean our Down to Business English Facebook page has a couple of thousand followers.

Actually, we are still under 2,000 followers, but we're getting close. So I guess we are on the verge of becoming nano influencers.

It really seems to me that this industry has evolved over the past few years. Back in the day when I lived in Kosamui, Thailand, I remember hearing stories about so-called influencers contacting vacation resorts. Wanting to trade a week of free accommodation in exchange for exposure to their followers.

I'm guessing that the resorts didn't take those requests very seriously.

Not at all. First they didn't really need the advertising, and second, how in the world would they ever know if they are getting any tangible results?

Both very legitimate concerns.

But that was back in the early days of social media. Influence marketing has clearly evolved over the years.

It sure has. According to that same Vox report, 72% of major brands are dedicating a major part of their advertising budget for influence marketing next year.

That's significant. Traditional media like TV and print can't be happy about that.

It certainly is stiff competition and will only get worse. Experts are forecasting that in 2022, as much as$15 billion may be spent on influence marketing.

So how does one go about getting a piece of that pump? Sounds like being an influencer is something almost anyone can do. You just need a strong social media presence and an audience.

Well, it turns out that it is a lot harder than it looks.

I was being sarcastic. In my experience, marketing is a very hard job and takes a lot of effort. But assuming the person does the work, puts out a lot of content on Instagram or YouTube, builds a large audience. How exactly did they go about landing a marketing deal with an advertiser?

Very simple. An agent. The industry has evolved to the point that a plethora of agencies who focus on pairing influencers with brands have sprung

up so gone are the days of influencers contacting a brand directly and trying to bargain some kind of exchange with the brand. A week's stay at a five-star hotel in exchange for a half a dozen exposure posts, for example.

I could hear your air quotes there.

I'm sorry, but that business model always sounded a little fishy to me.

I concur. I don't know for sure if that approach has completely been replaced by influencer agencies, but I don't think it's very commonplace anymore. I'm not even sure if it was very successful in the first place.

This entire industry is a good example of how technology has yet once again disrupted a traditional business model. Advertising and marketing used to be a very exclusive and a very difficult business to be successful in, but social media has really lowered the barrier to entry.

That's true.

And how is it doing that?

There has been a recent trend toward developing and using virtual influencers.

Virtual influencers as in an influencer who is not even real? Gotta be kidding me.

I'm afraid not. Currently there are over one hundred virtual influencers in business right now, eighty of them introduced in the past year alone. The most successful VI is a quote unquote model by the name of Lil Makila.

Now look who's using air quotes.

Well, she isn't a real model. But regardless, this virtual influencer has made deals with the likes of Prada and Calvin Klein and has made twelve million dollars this year alone.

What in the world would a virtual model spend twelve million dollars on?

Very funny. I'm sure the team behind creating her are happy with her earnings.

I'm sure they are. In any case, do these virtual influencers pose a real threat to human influencers?

Not at this moment, but The possibility is there.

Well, before we are all replaced by AI and virtual bots, I think it's time for us to get D2V down to vocabulary.

Down to business English audio scripts are a great learning tool. Be sure to visit the D2B website and download your free audio script of today's podcast. Down to businessenglish dot com. That's www.down to businessenglish.com.

Vocabulary list today is the idiom to go off the rail. When you say something has gone off the rails, you are communicating that that thing has started to act very strangely.

Behaving in a way that is completely different than it is supposed to be.

In the story, I commented that the Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma, was all about how social media has gone completely off the rails.

In other words,

I was saying that this program showed how social media is behaving very differently than it was originally intended to.

I think it is safe to say that history will look back on the year 2020 and say that everything went off the rails.

Yes, a global pandemic, economies shutting down, people working from their homes for weeks on end. Yes, 2020 went very much off the rails. I hope 2021 gets us back on track.

Don't we all? Next up today is the compound noun, a takeaway. This noun has several different meanings, but we used it to mean the knowledge you take away from an experience. I asked Skip what his takeaway was from the social dilemma. In other words, I was asking what the most important point he learned from watching it was.

And I said the big takeaway was learning how social media is changing the way we all behave.

Can you give us another example using takeaway?

Sure, Joe Biden was recently elected to be the next president of the United States. But to me, the takeaway from November's election is that American society is very divided. Even though Biden won by a large margin, there were still many, many, many people who voted for Trump.

Seventy-four million for Trump and 80 million for Biden? Yes, that is a divided nation.

Certainly is, and I am not sure we have heard the last of Donald J. Trump. I have a feeling that something insidious is going to happen.

Insidious? Isn't that the next D2V word?

It is.

Very sneaky of you. So, what can you tell us about Insidious?

When you use the adjective insidious to describe something, you are saying that even though it may look harmless, in fact it is very dangerous.

In the story, Skip talked about the insidious side effects of social media engagement tools.

So, what I was saying was the side effects might not look or feel dangerous, but in fact, they are very dangerous.

Do you know what I consider insidious? From an economic point of view.

No.

Sales tax. If there is one thing that can prevent an economy from growing, it is raising the sales tax. When that happens, consumers simply stop buying things.

Oh for sure. I completely agree with that. Do you have our next word?

I certainly do. Next is another idiom, run of the mill. This idiom describes something as being very regular or average in quality.

If I'm not mistaken, I think this idiom originally comes from the textile industry. When fabric came straight from the factory, or mill, it wasn't inspected for quality. That type of fabric was called run of the mill quality.

That sounds believable. In the story, I commented that the business model behind social media influencers sounded like a run of the mill commercial endorsement deal. In other words, it didn't sound much different than an average or typical TV or radio advertisement deal.

Run of the mill is often used in a negative statement to communicate that something is very special.

Can you give an example of that?

Down to business English is not your run-of-the-mill language learning podcast.

Ha nice example. What is our next word?

Our next and final word today is another idiom. To be fishy. When you say something is fishy, you are saying you are suspicious of it. In the story, Samantha commented that for an independent social media influencer to offer a five star resort hotel. Exposure to their audience in exchange for free accommodation? Well, it sounded fishy.

In other words, it seemed a bit suspicious to me, and I doubted if the exchange was worth it. I still think it is fishy. Gift, do you have any idea where this idiom came from?

You know, I didn't look into it. But another version of the idiom is to smell fishy. Since the smell of fish is quite strange. I assume that if you said something smells fishy, idiomatically, it would mean that you thought it was strange, or that you doubted it in some way.

Can you give an example using it in a business context?

I can, in fact. A couple of weeks ago, I received an email from a headhunter. The email explained that they wanted to introduce me to a job that paid over 15 million yen a year.

That's like one hundred forty thousand dollars a year, a very healthy six figure salary.

Yes, very, very healthy. Something about that email seemed fishy. There were several spelling mistakes, and they wanted me to provide them with a lot of personal information. Also, the email address was some strange domain name.

That does sound fish. So did you respond?

It was tempting, but in the end, I thought better of it. It was just too suspicious. I sure would be interested in a six-figure south.

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Thank you, Samantha. Once again, it was a pleasure talking with you.

Thank you, Skiff. I enjoyed it. It was a very interesting topic.

Definitely not run o' the mill, that's for sure.

And Skip, as I probably won't be speaking with you over the next week or so, you make sure that you have yourself a Merry Little Christmas and Happy New Year.

Oh, that's right. Thank you, Samantha. You have yourself some happy holidays too. Try not to go off the rails drinking too much egg dog.

Who me? No way. That stuff is insidious. Tastes great, but way too many calories. I'm going to stick to red wine.

Sounds like a plan.

Happy holidays.

Everyone out there listening to Down. Thank you for your support and we will see you in the new year.

Happy holidays, everyone. See you in 2021. Take care.

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