The Evolution of Influencer Marketing
Over the past few years, with the rise of social media use, numerous content creators emerged with their personal stories, videos, and photos, gaining millions of followers. Social media became one of the vital parts of our everyday lives. The influence of social media on the audience led to the formation of influencers, who gained the approval of the audience with their content. Before jumping over to the role of social media on influencer marketing, we must look at what society defines as a social media influencer.
An influencer, in simple terms, is Kim Kardashian. Not kidding. An Influencer is defined as a person who influences others with their social activity through their content. When we talk about social media influencers, it precisely revolves around people who influence others using social media platforms i.e. Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, amongst others. For the sake of this article, influencer marketing is means the role of social media influencers to help brands reach their targeted audience, drive engagement, and build trust among the audience through engaging content.
Pre 2007 — In 2002, shortly after the Friendster launch, it became the first social platform to gain a million users till 2008. It was a massive testimonial site where we wrote and endorsed our friends. I had one of those accounts. Take note though, the internet was not as fast as they are today. The rising popularity brought other competitors into the space such as Myspace, giving users another option for interaction on social media. LinkedIn was launched in 2003 but wasn’t as accepted as Friendster. LinkedIn later differentiated itself by providing an opportunity for employers to interact with possible candidates. It became the first-ever job searching social media platform that gained popularity. To this day, it is still used for professional networking.
Around the same period, a blogging platform called Blogspot was launched in 2000, which was later bought by Google in 2003. Does anyone know Kenny Sia? He was the PewDiePie of Malaysia then. Every morning, I would turn on my computer and read Kenny Sia. Again, due to the internet and technology, reading was awesome and cool then.
In 2005, YouTube was launched and provided an avenue for content creators to create videos and share them with their audiences but because video creation was still rather foreign (at least here in Malaysia and Southeast Asia), it didn’t really catch on till 2008. If it had been, and if I had known then, I would have continued acting, and created my own little YouTube channel. Who knows, I’d be one of the big YouTubers today. Who knew… Today, it is the 2nd most common social media platform for influencers to this date.
In the year 2004, Facebook came to the internet; yet it has a restriction on its availability — only to college students. It became much more popular after it was made available to the rest of the world. I was one of the college kids who went against opening it up to non-college kids — that exclusivity was special, we even had a group for it with ~100,000 users. I am not sure why Friendster lost out throughout this time, but it was clear that there wasn’t a clear winner then and user acquisition was much easier because nobody truly dominated.
2007–2014- In 2006, Twitter was launched while Facebook gained extensive popularity. Facebook became the largest social media platform in 2008 having 2 times more traffic than Myspace. As history tells us today, Myspace and Friendster died down and in that same period, twitter gained popularity with the famous news circulating over the internet. Mini stories were popular. People didn’t want to read long-form content as much. From 2011 to 2014, Facebook reached an annual revenue of around 3.7 billion dollars while Twitter generated around 12,233 tweets every second. 2–3 billion YouTube videos were watched during this year which marks the excess of social media during this period.
2015–2017 — Snapchat was first launched in 2013 which came up with the idea of stories within the social media ecosystem. This trend was then followed by Instagram in 2016, which gained a lot of popularity making it the top-most ranked social media platform for marketing purposes. Today many industries are using the stories to engage with the audience over social media. With the end of 2018, Snapchat lost a huge number of users, as it is quite difficult for fans to find the specific influencers. Instagram was bound to become the best platform for influencer marketing and replace Snapchat stories. (And, it did)
2018–2019 — In 2018, Instagram became the center of attention, marketers started spending 50 to 60 perfect of their money on this platform, for influencer marketing. During this year, the marketers are looking to spend 60 to 70 percent of their money on the same interest, which is six times more than YouTube. This makes Instagram the top-rated medium for influencer marketing in the year 2019. Tiktok is a newly-introduced app that launched in 2019 and gained massive popularity for its short videos. Instagram Story, Facebook Live, and YouTube Live are also the famous social media tools for promoting a brand as well as creating awareness amongst the consumers, which launched during 2019.
What’s Next?
At SushiVid, we have always strived for growth and advancement. Companies like Nokia lost because they were not innovating fast enough and that’s my greatest fear as the founder of SushiVid, in this ever-changing world, and especially in influencer marketing, we have to constantly and very quickly innovate and move forward. We were getting really good with YouTube when the demand for Instagram surged and just when we got a hang of what’s good on Instagram, Instagram stories came about. And now we have TikTok, Live Streaming… It’s all going so fast!
