Great AFR article on social influencers:....”Instagram has also...

Great AFR article on social influencers:

....”Instagram has also introduced a more advanced set of analytics tools for influencers and brands to track the performance of their posts. But Showpo chief marketing officer Mark Baartse is preparing for the day the social network starts asking influencers to pay for these tools. Showpo is a Millennial-focused online fashion retailer, founded by Young Rich Lister Jane Lu. It began experimenting with influencer marketing five years ago, a segment that now makes up at least 10 per cent of its marketing budget."If you look at the changes it's rolling out, Instagram is putting in place the requirements needed for a paid platform," Baartse says. "Only 18 months ago they didn't have all this data they could give us … and today we get it for free. I just don't think Mark Zuckerberg is that generous a guy."Instagram says its analytics tools are free for businesses and creators "and there are no plans to change this". However, Baartse believes sponsored posts will eventually be penalised by Instagram's algorithms, which could lead to brands decreasing marketing spend, especially because it's already tough to quantify the return on investment."It is notoriously difficult to measure and it keeps me awake at night, to be honest," he says. "We had a discussion about it at the Showpo board meeting last month."If this "Instapocalypse" comes to fruition, Baartse says the influencers who rely on pictures of themselves to sell a product will be in trouble, suggesting that the smart influencers are already diversifying into other platforms, such as YouTube. Some now call themselves "filmmaker and content creator".While Day believes Instagram will remain the platform of choice for influencers, she too has also been branching out, with her agency starting a podcast division. "Instagram will definitely be the industry leader," she says. "It's set up in a way that's built for brands. Other platforms have popped up and they haven't really lasted."
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”Regardless of where brands shift money, the biggest factor that will dictate the future of influencer marketing is Instagram itself. Before 2016, all posts on Instagram were delivered in the sequence they were posted. As the social network became more popular, however, it started making changes to show users the posts its machine-learning algorithms deemed they were most likely to care about, and it's kept tinkering with its algorithms ever since.An analysis of 30,000 posts by Tribe revealed the algorithm changes had benefited those with fewer than 100,000 followers; their posts were reaching a higher proportion of their followers, while posts from those with more than 100,000 followers started disappearing from people's feeds.While it's still reasonably easy for users to get to 20,000 followers, Lund says it will be almost impossible to amass a huge following in future."If you have 500,000 followers, you're an outlier on Instagram and the reality is that from a standing start, it will be very hard to get to 500,000 followers ever again," says Lund. "In the early days, like with Facebook, Instagram gave users an enormous amount of organic reach. But when it reached the pay-to-play point, the boom was over."...