Social media influencers : A reality that brands can't afford to ignore

The age of celebrity may be passé. This digital era is the age of social influencers. Without being a celebrity, these social influencers have huge followings in various social media platforms. This phenomenon has given rise to the 'influencer economy'. Through the power of their sheer followings, these influencers mould the world views of their followers by their content. We see various influencers relating to niche domains such as fitness, cooking, travel and many more emerging each passing day. No wonder, brands are increasingly taking the help of these social influencers to popularise the new products that they launch or bring traction in the existing portfolio.

But the question arises, when marketing spend of big brands run into millions of dollars, why do they take the help of these micro-influencers with around 50,000 followers to make the brand popular? The answer is consumers like to get the real experience of people than blindly believing on what the company says about its products.

Social influencers usually give this real life experience about a product or a service or even give their honest views on a particular topic. This trust factor binds the influencer with his or her followers. And each established brand or even social and political groupings are eager to tap this trust factor to attract more number of users under their fold. That's the reason we see many influencers on platforms like twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and many other such platforms are being actively engaged by the brands.

In the Indian context, social influencer market is very relevant as the user base of social media platforms are growing every day. India has more than 100 million active monthly users in Instagram, around 425 million active monthly users in YouTube, and 330 million users in Facebook among others. As internet penetration grows, this number is also expected to grow manifold in coming years.

Meanwhile, the advertisement spend on digital platforms is also rising at a rapid pace. According to Dentsu's Digital Report 2021, advertising budget spent on digital media has increased from 20 per cent in 2019 to 28 per cent in 2020. It is expected to reach 34 per cent by the end of 2022. As the spend on digital media grows, companies are likely to engage more with social influencers in coming days.

When brands and users are following the social influencers, investors can't stay away for long. The trend of fund inflows has already started in the US. For instance, the social network app Clubhouse, which requires an invitation to join, raised $200 million in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz in April, putting its valuation at around $4 billion. Not only in the US, even many such India-born apps are creating a lot of buzz with investors keen to fund these ventures.

The ongoing pandemic has seen migration of users to digital platforms in droves. Such rapid migration has led to more influence of these social influencers in the recent time. However, the competition is intense with many joining the race to emerge as social influencers. Some analysts even started talking about saturation in social influencer market. Whether the market has attained the peak or not, social influencers are realities of the digital world and brands can ignore them at their own peril.