the mechanics of influencing amaze me.
i have around 20k followers on instagram (for travel/landscape photography), nothing freaky y'all. As a result I am friendly with a few 100-300k instagrammers in my area/sphere of interest and am privvy to some of their stats - quite often they are getting less eyeballs on posts or stories than i do on mine, but because of the size of their follow count they can command $1000-$2000 for a 2-3 post assignment, not including whatever gifts, goods or hospitality come with the gig. That's definitely small change compared to some, but not bad at all as a sidegig that they don't declare as income... what i don't understand though is how the fuck brands are actually able to monetise anything from that, especially when as i say, the engagement is quite often minimal. a few in the group also quite clearly use bots to buy/source new followers, which hollows their engagement out even more - but companies, even with supposedly savvy social media teams, don't seem to notice or much care.
i even put out a brand post from a large company, the post i made ended up with 30k views, 2k likes... and 50 clicks for the actual affiliate product. i imagine almost none of those 50 even bought the service provided and even if they did, the profit that would lead to would have been cancelled out by my own modest fee. i increasingly think that most businesses have a social/influencer marketing budget they consider a write off and just hope to god something they throw out into the void sticks!
