By Olivia Schueller
Caitlin Houston is a 34-year-old Connecticut micro-influencer running the lifestyle and family blog Caitlin Houston Blog, posting about things like mom life, gift guides and clothing.
“There’s a lot of people who don’t understand what a blogger is and what a blogger does,” Houston said.
Houston works 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. like many people her age, but she said a lot of people don’t think blogging is a “real job.”
“They don’t understand it,” Houston said. “The second I say I’m a blogger or influencer, somebody thinks I’m just out there talking about something I was paid to talk about.”
Houston explains influencing as, “Giving people knowledge about an item or a brand or topic and hoping that they take your opinion as worth more than just an opinion.”
She uses many social media platforms to promote her blogs and communicate with her audience.
Houston uses Instagram to spread knowledge about a product or brand. She also uses it to share pictures of her family and form relationships with people.
“So when I do talk about something, they take my word honestly and they believe what I’m saying is organic,” Houston said.
Facebook is Houston’s most active platform.
“I have a large audience on Facebook that doesn’t use Instagram,” Houston said.
For every blog post Houston writes, she also creates a graphic with text and posts it to Pinterest with key words.
“I do it with the hopes that they will click that pin which will ultimately take them to my blog and keep them there for a while,” Houston said.
Houston’s goals aren’t just numbers on social media. One goal was to create a presence in her community.
She loves it when people reach out to her, like one woman who wrote, “I love your blog” and “you helped me through this part of motherhood.”
Through blogging, Houston’s connected with people outside her community.
“I have friends probably all over the country,” Houston said. “People that I talk about daily, talk to daily.”
Houston and her friends run lifestyle blogs, but influencers don’t all have to focus on the same subject.
Some influencers focus on very specific niche-interests.
Marissa Mullen is 26-year-old living in Brooklyn, New York. The Connecticut native left her job as a house band coordinator for The Late Show with Stephen Colbert to pursue her passion…for cheese.
“I am a “Cheese Plate Influencer” as they say online,” Mullen said.
As a micro influencer, Mullen is a one-person band. She creates content for three separate Instagram accounts.
@ThatCheesePlate shares her full cheese plate creations. @CheeseByNumbers show’s swipe by swipe directions on how to create each cheese plate and @ThatCheeseClass shows boards created at her workshops.
But Mullen doesn’t just run an Instagram accounts, she runs a business.
“Some days I’m busy working with clients to create content, which means crafting and photographing four cheese plates in a day,” Mullen said.
As the only employee to her company, she spends days answering emails, handling invoices and booking events. Her most recent project is her upcoming cookbook, “That Cheese Plate Will Change Your Life.”
But it’s not just family blogs or things like cheese.
Video gamers can also have a career in influencing. They share their content when they post videos to either their social media or YouTube channel. Videos game influencers are unique because they take you through an experience.
“Facebook, Twitter, they don’t allow for the sharing of the experience itself,” David A. Tomczyk, professor of Professor of Entrepreneurship & Strategy at Quinnipiac University, said.
The video itself is a solo experience and the social interaction happens before and after.
Houston and Mullen are a part of a large group of micro and macro-influencers, world-wide.
“Influencers are considered to be thought leaders,” Professor Mary Dunn of Quinnipiac University’s school of communications, said.
Dunn teaches a class called “Strategies of Social Media,” and her research includes influencers. Dunn said that people don’t realize how much production goes into being an influencer.
“It’s beyond a job, it’s a whole industry,” Dunn said.
This “industry” is made up of macro and micro-influencers. Macro influencers often have over a million followers. Micro influencers have a couple thousand followers.
John Powers, who teaches a course called “Social Media in the Digital Age” at Quinnipiac University said, “It’s a natural way to do what you love to do.”
Before social media influencers starting popping up, brands used well-known celebrities to endorse their products or brands. Today, it is more common for a macro influencer to partner with brands.
“LeBron James wore them, so I have to get them, has turned,” Powers said.
MuseFind is a influencer marketing platform. Its data shows that 92 percent of consumers trust an influencer more than an advertisement or traditional celebrity endorsement.
Powers said, he sees that average people with a large following were more trusted by the public then celebrities.
In the late 2000s, American model and reality television star Kendall Jenner endorsed Proactive, a skin care brand. In 2017, she endorsed Pepsi. This shows how she went from a small product to a worldwide brand.
From the outside looking in, this can still look like a glamorous career, but it’s much more complex on the production side than anyone realizes.
Micro-influencers may work independently, while macro-influencers work with their team to produce content.
“Many of what we call macro-influencers, who have over a million followers, but aren’t considered cultural celebrities, those accounts that are posting so regularly often have teams behind them,” Dunn said.
These teams are forming a number of careers for people.
“There are actually supportive creative careers within the industry of influencing,” Dunn said.
Amanda Perelli is an editorial fellow at Business Insider covering YouTubers and influencers. She said both smaller and larger businesses are only growing in popularity.
“I think people think right now that the industry is very saturated, but I would say it’s only going to get bigger,” Perelli says.
In 2019, spending on influencer marketing will…
Parelli said a lot of brands still don’t practice influencer marketing. She thinks that once more brands use this type of marketing they’ll see the success of influencer marketing versus celebrity endorsements or television advertisements.
Powers said the success of “great content” comes from being active on multiple platforms.
The research firm, eMarketer, found that on average, people will spend 3 hours and 43 minutes each day on their smartphones, feature phones and tablets this year. That’s 8 more minutes than they’ll spend watching TV.
“Huge percentages of people are spending vast majority of their time on those social networks, that is where information is being shared,” Powers said. “It’s where messages are shared, it’s where brands and people are expressing themselves.”
Social media also gives influencers the ability to network with others in their niche.
“Instagrammers also do a lot of cross promotion with others of similar interest,” Dunn said.
Cross promotion allows influencers to work with other influencers. This can lead to an increase in followers and the opportunity to partner with more brands.
For example, MAC cosmetics isn’t going to come out with a line of hardware tools. So if you’re a beauty blogger endorsing brands, you’re not going to endorse your “favorite” hardware tools.
“If it feels random, the audience is going to think you’re just in it for the money,” said Dunn.
The audience just wants partnerships to make sense.
“Audiences don’t care that they’re doing partnerships,” Dunn said. We’re seeing that consumers are actually excited for these micro influencers, that they’re getting to make some money.”
However, the audience wants to see disclosures when working with a brand.
“You would think it would put off a bunch of people, but instead if you’re upfront about it then the consumers are like OK, I still value your opinion,” said Dunn.
The brand, influencer and audience ideas have to mesh, but the influencers has to practice transparency in order to be successful.
“That full disclosure is a better business practice for the audience who’s the vulnerable population, the influencer who has to manage this relationship and the brand who’s using all this tactically to support the brand,” Dunn said.
A big change has come to some Instagram accounts.
The social network is testing a feature that will no longer show someone’s “likes.” Account holders can see their likes, but their followers won’t know the amount of likes on a picture or video.
In an article on Instagram hiding ‘likes’, Perelli writes, “By promoting products to followers, Instagram has become a huge source of revenue for many social-media influencers and a major part of their online businesses.”
Instagram likes are often used as measurement for brands.
Adam Wescott, a partner at Drm Select Management Group, told Business Insider that, “”For creators, it’s a big change because likes are the number one tool for tracking post engagement. They know within minutes how their content will do based on number of likes.”
Houston, the creator of Caitlin Houston Blog, isn’t worried about Instagram’s trial feature.
“Truthfully I feel a sense of relief that they are going to be doing this because I put too much pressure on myself when a picture doesn’t get as many likes as I think it should,” she said.
Houston thinks brands will be able to look at quality and “impressions” instead of quantity. The lifestyle blogger focuses more on her comments than her likes.
“Comments are huge to me and I think more important than likes because people are stopping to engage with the photo,” she said.
Influencers will still be able to make an income from their social media accounts.
“For a lot of people it’s a career because they’re able to make money in so many different ways,” Perelli said.
Wescott told Business Insider that he believes brands will find alternative ways to measure engagement through looking at things like comments, shares, and Instagram stories.
An increase in influencer marketing will also create job growth.
“When mainstream brands and bigger brands start putting money into that, I think it could really become a career for even more people than it already is,” Perelli said.