Are there too many influencers?
It never once crossed my mind that I should try to become an influencer. Then, I wrote a series of poetry books in 2020 and not a single book agent would consider publishing my work unless I had a massive social media following.
So in 2021, I set out to make content on TikTok about love and relationships — topics that tied into my writing. At the time, I had very modest goals. Reach 10,000 followers and then start querying agents again to sell my books. Now, a year later, I’ve surpassed my follower goals on TikTok, I’m creating videos for Youtube, I’ve landed multiple brand deals, and I’ve made thousands of dollars in just a few short months after taking influencer marketing seriously.
Is the influencer market oversaturated?
And as it turns out, there are a lot of other people becoming influencers and content creators right now too — and their platform of choice is TikTok.
TikTok is the world’s fastest-growing social media app. It has one billion active users and of them, eighty-three percent have posted a video. That’s a lot of video content being uploaded onto the site and subsequently being crossposted on other apps like Instagram, Pinterest, and Youtube. Now, some marketing experts and mega influencers who have been in the business for the past decade are asking whether the influencer market is oversaturated since so many more people are creating content and thus, competing for the same limited attention of audiences.
Youtube star Emma Chamberlain says social media culture is dead
One mega internet star who theorizes the power of influencer marketing is changing is Emma Chamberlain. Chamberlain, who rose to fame through her Youtube videos, amassing more than 14 million subscribers, said on her podcast back in April that the strength of influencers is on the decline. Now that there are more people posting “day in the life” vlogs on social media, the concept of peeking into someone’s life doesn’t have the same novelty as it did just a few years ago, she reasons.
Celebrities who have benefited from audience interest in “day in the life” content are the Kardashians, who are considered the most powerful influencers in the world. The family built their fame through their reality show, which gave audiences backstage access to their daily lives. When the show first premiered in the mid-2000s, it felt like a new, fresh concept to see the ultra-wealthy showcasing their lives in full display for the public.
Despite the Kardashians being on TV for several years now, they are still influential. They’ve solidified their place in modern pop culture not just as reality stars, but also as businesswomen, launching successful products that they sell to their fanbase. And their longevity in the media has been one of the main reasons they’ve been so successful. In the world of marketing, staying top of mind with consumers helps brands build trust, love, and loyalty, which the Kardashians have with their following.
It’s easier to create content for influencer marketing
Nowadays though, you don’t need a TV network to pilot a show about your life or even a DSLR camera to film Youtube videos to make content for social media and build a following. TikTok has changed consumers’ expectations of video content. Low-lift videos created by users, as known as user-generated content (UGC), have become more desirable to watch because it feels authentic to audiences.
I’ve found that my best-performing videos on TikTok aren’t highly produced (and I have a professional background in filming, editing, and show producing). Instead, my highest-watched videos are simply of me speaking into the camera and sharing my life experiences, expertise, and opinions.
Creating low-lift video content like this is easier and more accessible thanks to a number of new mobile apps that have simple video editing suites. I think that’s why there are more people creating videos right now than in the past 10 years — that’s how long I’ve been working in professionally in the social media space. With its lower barrier to entry and the possibility of making a good income through content creation, there are more people attempting to become influencers. In fact, influencer marketing-related services and companies grew by 26 percent in 2021, according to Linkfluence. Additionally, the influencer market grew from $1.7 billion in 2016 to $13.8 billion in 2021, according to Influencer Marketing Hub.
But as more influencers enter the industry, how many of them are actually influencing audiences?
Do influencers really influence?
There is some anecdotal evidence claiming the strength of influencer marketing is diminishing. Back in 2019, an Instagram influencer with more than 2 million followers couldn’t sell more than 36 T-shirts to her followers. And marketing experts say that’s not uncommon, mainly because followers don’t equate to consumers. Additionally, 50 percent of businesses launched by influencers fail more than 50 percent of the time — but that’s pretty similar to small business failures. In fact, only 25 percent of small businesses last more than 15 years.
Does that mean influencer marketing is dead? Not necessarily. In marketing, converting audiences into purchasing customers can be a challenge, especially if you’re an emerging brand. And we can think of influencers as brands who have cultivated a following based on the identity they’ve created online with their content. And even major brands struggle with this, especially at a time when the brand name doesn’t always guarantee sales and market saturation is high for many categories.
Do brands want to work with influencers?
It is the golden age of brand deals. Forbes reports that brands are projected to spend $15 billion on influencer marketing during 2022. However, I’m a bit skeptical of this number as inflation continues to worsen and consumer sentiment grows pessimistic about the economy, which usually means that companies start cutting their marketing budget as a way to save money. And influencer marketing could fall into this cost-cutting bucket should we enter a recession.
Additionally, as social media platforms fill up with sponsored posts and branded content, some audiences are craving authentic connections from creators.
I think the issue isn’t that there are too many influencers competing for the same amount of attention from audiences. Rather, audiences are looking for the next big thing to keep them engaged like a new platform, a new style of storytelling, or a new concept.
As digital consumers, we’ve been trained to expect something greater because social media algorithms are always promoting more extreme versions of opinions and content that we’re watching. And creators constantly have to adapt to make themselves seem appealing to audiences.
For example, when I originally started uploading content to TikTok, it was mainly content based on my writing and poetry, but I wasn’t getting the traction I was looking for, so I started posting about my personal experiences with love and relationships. Those topics resonated with viewers and my audience started to grow. Every few months, I saw that my growth would stall out, so I had to reinvent myself in a different way. For instance, I started sharing my tips and stories about working a corporate job and being a manager. That helped me continue to grow my following. Then I expanded my brand by sharing content about money, finance, and investing. That pivot helped me increase the scope of my brand. For a long time, I resisted posting “day in the life” vlogs because I didn’t want to give away too much of my life.
But as my growth stalled again on social media, my video views dropped, and my brand deals slowed down, I pivoted again. I recently started sharing small glimpses into my life to see if that sort of content resonated with my followers.
@jareenimam Spent the day not focusing on work @jareenimam #AmazonVirtualTryOn #worklifebalancegoals #sundayscariesbegone #corporatetiktokers #womenincorporate #comewithmevlog ♬ Aesthetic Girl - Yusei
The moral of the story is that as a content creator or influencer, you have to be adaptable and constantly change because you’re operating on someone else’s platform and you’re playing by their rules. This causes a lot of influencers to make content that over time feels largely the same, and unoriginal. When audiences feel like everything is a “repost,” that’s when we start reaching levels of market saturation and consumer fatigue.
@jareenimam Thanks @tarityabyankita for the earrings 💕 @jareenimam #PerfectPrideMovement #selfcaredays #worklifebalancing #njfinds #nyeats #comewithmevlog ♬ Aesthetic Girl - Yusei
Is becoming a mega influencer possible?
If your goal is to become a megastar like Emma Chamberlain, Charli d’Amelio, or David Dobrik, it will probably be a lot harder to reach those levels of fame and success now because of market saturation. We all know virality is a big part of helping drive exposure and brand awareness, but as more video content is uploaded on Instagram, TikTok, and Youtube, it can be hard to break through the noise. Unless you’re new to an emerging platform or have amazing luck to have your content consistently go viral, chances are the way to become a successful influencer is to focus on being a consistent content creator.
Audiences want more than a spokesperson to vouch for brands. Nowadays, they want to relate to content and be a part of a community. Instead of striving for 2018 influencer celebrity status, it may be worth focusing more on community building and audience development because ultimately, the most powerful part of an influencer isn’t their aesthetic or brand, it’s their audience.
Cultivating authentic connections with viewers is something companies, brands, and celebrities strive to do all the time. If you’re a content creator looking to grow your brand in a meaningful way with your audience, then here are a few things you can start doing today:
Research the audiences for your niche
Whether you create relationship content or personal finance content, each niche has its own audience. Look to see what other creators are posting about in your niche and don’t just watch their videos, look through their comments. See what their community is asking for and check whether you can help fill in the gaps by providing your own expertise.
Engage with your community
Every comment you get on your videos is an opportunity to make a meaningful connection. If someone says they like your video and you notice they don’t follow you, ask them to give you a follow. Providing a call to action in your comments can help inspire viewers to subscribe to your channel.
Deliver on promises
If you say you’re going to start a series or launch a product, provide a status update to your community. For example, I had to tell my community during the start of my TikTok journey that I was pivoting away from poetry content to relationship-based content, but I was still planning to work on finding an agent to release my book. Even though I haven’t published my books yet, I did keep my audience informed about my plans because some of them followed me because they wanted to keep hearing about my literary work.
Get personal
Posting videos of trends and viral sounds can help get you views, but you need more personal and substantive content to convert a viewer into a follower. Ninety percent of your content will most likely not go viral, but that’s OK. That 90 percent of content is created for your current followers. That content is something they want to watch and that’s why they’ve subscribed to your channel.
Create, reiterate, adapt, and evolve
Being a content creator on a social media platform means your strategy will always be changing because you’re trying to hit a moving target thanks to how often social media algorithms change. One month’s strategy may not work next month. When you see dramatic shifts in your views, don’t panic — experiment. This is an opportunity to assess your content. Have you deviated too far from your niche? What are other creators doing? Should you try something new?
Creating content with new hooks, music, topics, and formats could help your channel feel fresh and help audiences discover your content.
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Should you be filming 10-minute videos on TikTok?
TikTok now has 10-minute videos, but should you start making them?
It seems like every app wants to be like TikTok nowadays with its snappy videos and trending sounds. But TikTok has other plans.
TikTok announced at the end of February 2022 that it was going to offer creators the option to film videos as long as 10 minutes. It’s a big move for a social platform that is known for short videos. There are many TikTokers who believe the move is in an effort to viral YouTube where long-form content is commonplace and in certain niches, expected. Already, users on TikTok are speculating that the app is prioritizing longer videos because many users are experiencing low video views for videos under a minute.
I’ve personally uploaded two different videos to test out whether the rumors are true. I filmed a 1-minute video about the internet’s reaction to Kim Kardashian's “work more” comments in a Variety Magazine interview on a Friday evening. The video only got about a thousand views, which is not a good showing on my channel because I have about 70,000 followers.
So the following day, Saturday midday, I posted a 3-minute video that was a longer version of Kim Kardashian's “work more” controversy. That video also underperformed, with less than a thousand views. Of course, there are other factors to consider when assessing performance metrics, like when the video was posted, but overall, I didn’t see any evidence on my channel that longer videos are being prioritized by TikTok.
I personally don’t think TikTok is introducing 10-minute videos to rival Youtube. I think TikTok wants to be more like Youtube in the sense that it wants to monetize more of the content on its app with advertising. If you go onto Youtube, you’ll find videos that are anywhere from 2 minutes to hours long. For instance, I recently published a 17-minute long tutorial on Youtube about how to turn a hand-drawn work of art into an NFT design using Canva. I would have never posted or made a video like that on any other platform. And the reason I feel like I can make videos that long on YouTube isn’t because I have the space to make them as long as I want. Rather, I feel like I have the opportunity to be compensated for my time through YouToube’s monetization program.
Youtube creators who are successful at monetizing their videos can earn millions of dollars thanks to YouTube’s advertising program. However, TikTok’s creator fund doesn’t work in the same way. That’s led to a lot of frustration for TikTok creators who have gained millions of videos but earned only a few dollars on the platforms. When TikTok pays creators from the creator fund, it is essentially pulling from a limited pool of money that the company gives to creators based on their video views and watch times. And as more creators join the fund, the smaller TikTok’s payouts become, critics have said.
TikTok however, has denied these claims, saying there’s plenty of money to go around. In the summer of 2020, the company said they were expecting to grow the creator fund to over $1 billion in the U.S. in the next 3 years and double that figure globally. Since then, the company that owns TikTok, ByteDance, has ballooned in growth. Increasing its revenue 70 percent year-over-year in 2021 to $58 billion, according to Reuters.
However, that revenue growth hasn’t translated to higher payouts for TikTok creators. It’s caused some creators like author Hank Green, who has more than 6 million followers on TikTok, to flee the platform and join Youtube because he claims that it doesn’t financially make sense for him to be spending so much time on TikTok’s platform if the creator fund doesn’t compensate creators fairly.
"Literally, when TikTok becomes more successful, TikTokers become less successful,” Green said in a video that has gained hundreds of thousands of views.
I, myself, have about 70,000 followers and although I have plenty of videos that have garnered millions of views, I have only made about $40 from the creator fund since I joined in late 2021. (I’ve made more money through Google Ad Sense on this blog.)
Now that TikTok is introducing 10-minute videos, there are many questions about whether TikTok creators will be compensated in the same way as Youtube creators. I suspect not because where exactly is TikTok getting that revenue from? YouTube, which is owned by Google, has a thriving, multi-billion dollar ad revenue business. For instance, it’s common for popular videos to rank on Google’s search engine, thus driving SEO traffic to the creators' videos. Youtube videos are also easy to embed into websites and blogs and are generally much easier to discover. Whereas, TikTok videos are hard to discover on the platform, and their embedding feature isn’t compatible with many websites and platforms. In addition, Youtube advertisers can buy programmatic ads, display ads, banner ads and more to be featured alongside popular Youtube videos. TikTok doesn’t have this infrastructure – yet.
Slowly, I think TikTok will integrate more ways for advertisers to participate on its platform beyond branded content, sponsored posts, and sponsored hashtags. But it will obviously take time.
Even if TikTokers have the option of posting longer videos, there are no clear answers about whether creators will be compensated for their time. But in a world where social media popularity is a form of currency, maybe some creators don’t really mind not getting paid for their time and effort.
How to get started on TikTok
It seems like just about everyone is on TikTok. If you’re curious about getting started on TikTok this blog post will show you how to get started recording on TikTok, easily.
Learn how you can start recording TikTok videos.
It’s true, a lot of people are on TikTok. It may be one of the fastest-growing social media apps currently. In 2021, the short-form video app said it had reached 1 billion global active TikTok users each month.
It’s clear TikTok is taking over the world, or at least, the trend of short, digestible videos has become incredibly popular. And there’s no better time to get started creating on the platform than right now. I’ve been working professionally as a social media expert for more than 10 years, and I believe TikTok has one of the easiest interfaces when it comes to making short-form videos. It’s fast and easy to learn, so the barrier to becoming a TikTok content creator is low.
Here are simple steps you can take to start filming your own videos on TikTok.
Step up your TikTok profile
When you are starting off on TikTok, it’s generally a good idea to write a bio that includes what topics you’ll be posting about. Adding your topic or “niche” to your bio can help audiences easily understand what your channel is about and it could help you grow your account. It’s OK if you don’t know what content you are planning to produce when you first begin. For instance, I originally started my channel sharing my poetry. But over time, I started posting videos about art after I had an art video of mine go viral. However, I changed my storytelling strategy again when I realized I didn’t have enough art content to produce. Now, I have a clear sense of the content I create, which centers around love, money, and careers – topics I have a lot of experience researching and discussing. And that is also reflected in my channel bio.
Start recording on TikTok
When you are ready to start filming, simply click the plus button at the bottom of the TikTok app. This will launch your phone camera to record video. Here you have the option to upload clips and edit them natively in the app, which I don’t recommend doing because the editing suite is not as comprehensive as other tools like Final Cut Pro, Abode Premiere, or iMovie.
Instead, I recommend either uploading fully edited videos to TikTok. Or recording natively on the app, which users theorize TikTok prefers. Meaning, you are likely to have more exposure of your content to a larger TikTok audience if you natively record on the app and use its features, like trending sounds and stickers. TikTok hasn’t officially confirmed this, but it is a common theory successful TikTokers credit with helping them grow on the platform.
Determine the length of your TikTok video
On TikTok, you can record videos between 15 seconds, 60 seconds, and 3 minutes. TikTok users like watching short videos. Therefore, I recommend creating content that is anywhere between 7 seconds (yes! I know that very short) and 30 seconds when you are starting off. The common length of videos though is about 15-second clips, which I think is a good length to record when you are getting started.
Use storytelling techniques for your TikTok videos
Unlike Instagram Stories where users can post snippets of their life, TikTok’s audience rewards good storytelling. Therefore, it’s a good idea to format all your videos with a beginning, middle, and end. Even 15-second videos have these narrative arcs.
When you start off your video, have a captivating hook. A common hook is posing a question or a problem and then explaining the answer or solution to the audience. Think about your favorite movies, how did they hook you? For instance, for many crime thrillers, the grisly crime scene starts off the movie. The audience knows immediately a crime has been committed and now they invested in trying to figure out who did it and why.
Make your TikTok videos dynamic
There’s nothing more boring than watching someone talk directly to the camera. TikTok users are used to short and engaging videos. To add dimension to your content, use motion – like panning and zooming – to keep the audience engaged visually. Use sounds and text-on-screen to keep them watching.
Use trending sounds to promote your TikTok
Sound and music are really important to TikTok’s community. Users are encouraged to upload original sounds and reuse the sounds of other users in their videos. There’s an option when making your video to add music to your video. You can navigate to “TikTok viral” where you can select the sounds that are currently the most popular on the app and apply that to your video. Adding trending sounds to your video can help “push” your video potentially to the “For You” page, which is the page most TikTok audiences use to watch and discover new content.
Use relevant hashtags to boost your TikTok videos
Once you composed your video, you’re ready to post it. But before you do, you will have the option to add captions. It’s important to add a short caption with room for you to add up to 5 relevant hashtags. Adding hashtags to your video is crucial because it helps the app categorize your content and share it with audiences who are interested in the topics you’ve hash-tagged in your video.
Don’t worry about your TikTok video views
When you are starting off on TikTok, it might happen that you strike it big and your first video gets a million views. It’s rare, but it happens. But then the next video might get only 10 views. First-time users of the app generally have their first 5 videos amplified by TikTok to a larger audience – causing inflated video view numbers. That helps garner large video view numbers when you are starting off. Some social media experts hypothesize that by doing this, users get excited about using the app, and want to try continuing to reach higher video views. However, it’s natural to see those video views taper off as you continue using the app. For instance, when I started off on the app, my first 5 videos got about a thousand views each, and I had no followers. That’s pretty good. But my next 10 videos got less than a dozen views. During these low points, I would experiment with my videos and try to change something about them, such as how I told stories, my filming techniques, or even the way I used lighting in my videos. I tested out multiple variables to see if those changes impacted my view count. Through that process, I was able to refine my storytelling and editing to produce better quality videos, which yielded better views later on – and my audience took notice.
Just get started recording on TikTok
Finally, just get started. Your first video won’t be as polished and perfect as you want it to be. But that’s OK. TikTok is a platform with many users of all skill levels. There isn’t an expectation of perfection. Focus on telling a good story, have fun in the process, be yourself, and you will find your audience.