With many mass-market and luxury companies considering influencers as a core part of their promotion strategy, influencer marketing is estimated to be worth $15bn by 2022.
The 2010s were indeed a golden age of influencers. Social media platforms, especially Instagram, allowed people to showcase their projects and create the desired image of their lifestyle. The most exciting and captivating feeds swiftly attracted big audiences, and their creators got the power to influence. Meanwhile, for many companies, an opportunity to be mentioned and promoted by these internet’s opinion leaders was amazing.
However, in recent years the number of influencers has significantly increased, and many consumers experience influencer fatigue. One of the reasons is simply that many bloggers, along with the growth of their accounts, target wider groups of people and, thus, become more impersonal, so their content doesn’t speak with followers’ hearts anymore.
Another issue is that our society is becoming more conscious and thoughtful, what makes people gravitate towards more reliable and valuable information. This tendency was arising even before the pandemic, but COVID-19 has definitely accelerated it. Last year you could notice that influencers who posted more relevant and up-to-date feeds, which helped followers to overcome current crises, had the best traffic on their pages.
And that’s when genuinefluencers appear in our digital lives. These passionate individuals are typically experts in a specific niche, ready to share their expertise and knowledge, spread unbiased information rather than sell whatever brands offered them.
Interestingly that not all genuinfluencers are influencers and vice versa. This happens because the first ones are identified as creators and remarkable for their high-quality content instead of the big audience size.
Predicted to be one of the main trends for this year and beyond, reliable and authentic genuinfluencers are exactly what today’s audiences are craving. For brands, it’s a big gain, too: the social media market is over-saturated with glossy yet homogenous content, so there’s a high demand for “real” individuals who can help companies prove their credibility and social awareness.
You can see how powerful this approach is in the collaboration between Gucci and Gerald the ‘Veg King’, a retired fisherman who loves gardening and spends most of his day planting and feeding. Thanks to his impressive harvest and very optimistic personality, he became a social media sensation. So Gucci invited him to participate in their video shoot for Gucci’s Off The Grid 2021 collection, which is a more sustainability-centred collection made mainly of econyl - a type of nylon produced from abandoned fishing nets and offcuts.
The post-Covid era is a time when everyone can become a genuinfluencer, generously sharing his unique experience and proficiency, aiming to nourish communities of soulmates and just making this world better. Why don’t you become one?