The three levers of influence

Having worked on hundreds of influencer marketing campaigns, programs, and projects, I’ve identified three levers that you can move to impact the level of influence an individual you’re working with can have, and this chapter is entirely dedicated to helping you find who those individuals are.

Using the example in the earlier section, with the personal trainer you follow on Instagram, their influence is entirely contextual. That specific individual, regardless of how large her audience is, or how engaged the audience is, can influence your decisions. Why? Expertise and credibility, the first lever of influence. The second lever is the strength of your relationship. The better you know each other, the more effective. We trust our friends, family, and those we have a strong relationship with. We also have different strength of relationship with those we follow or subscribe to online. The audience size of the personal trainer, and the number of people she can reach, functions as a multiplier. And that’s the third lever of influence.

The Formula

When you set yourself up to optimize for all three, you’ll be more likely to build influencer marketing campaigns with a better outcome.

Audience size

Strategy: Audience first

Make sure that the creator you’re working with has an audience that overlaps with your audience. Assure that you understand how many creators there are in a specific follower range and your market.

Key questions: Who is our target audience? Who has an audience that can help us reach this audience? How large audience should each person we’re working with have?

One of the biggest challenges with influencer marketing is knowing that you’re working with talent that has the same audience that you’re aiming to reach. Without this knowledge, you can’t really justify replacing your existing media dollars in channels that have these capabilities. By understanding who their followers are both individually and aggregated, you’ll know that you’re not just engaging an audience, but your audience. We’ll cover how you do this in detail in section “Finding the right creators.”

Affinity

Strategy: Talent independence

There are more than 2 million YouTube channels with 500+ subscribers. There are more than 10 million creators on Instagram with 1,000 followers. Work with a partner that can tap into this entire group of potential creators and help you find those that have an affinity for your brand, expertise, and credibility.

Key questions: Affinity: Is there a natural liking for my brand or sympathy for the marketing message? Expertise: Is this person knowledgeable in my particular field? Credibility: Why is this person trusted or believed by their audience, and what’s the “reason to believe” in the marketing message or your promise?

Unless you operate completely independently, you’re unlikely to get the right people onboard for your campaign. A multichannel network or talent agent will recommend their rooster and be limited to those that they represent, and sometimes they’ll be the perfect fit for your brand, but other times not. That doesn’t necessarily make them bad, but it limits their ability to help you build a talent pool proprietary to your business (we’ll cover this in depth later in this chapter.)

With a talent-independent approach to identifying and onboarding the right people, we assure that we get the right people onboard every single time, without any compromise.

Strength of relationship

Strategy: Optimize for engagement

Engagement is a great proxy for how strong a relationship is. It’s also a great way to objectively assess if the audience is paying attention to your message. Aim to work with creators that have an exceptional level of engagement. How do you build strategies and campaigns that yield an exceptional level of engagement? This will be covered more thoroughly in Chapter 4: The Art and Science of Creativity. For now, just keep in mind that engagement will be an important variable when you seek out to identify social media creators with influence.

Key questions: What target engagement rate should I aim for? Is this number reasonable with the former two strategies in mind?

The number of people that engage and interact with your campaign is more relevant than how many people you’ll potentially reach. That’s especially true if your overarching goal is to reach as many people as possible. Why is that? Unless they’re paying attention, you’re unlikely to change brand preference, consideration, and brand lift or see any kind of impact. By working only with those that have an exceptionally engaged audience, your campaign will see a more significant impact. A comprehensive engagement rate benchmark report across 15 major countries is available for free for at rlt.to/engagement-countries. Use the insights from the report to help answer the key questions outlined in this section.

Leaders and followers: Social media influencers as early adopters

In the early 1960s, communication theorist and assistant professor at Ohio University, Everett Rogers noticed that ideas, innovations, and new technologies would follow a similar pattern as they were spread in culture and society.

Rogers developed his diffusion of innovations theory and published his findings in his 1962 book: Diffusion of Innovations . In the book (now in its 5th edition) Rogers explains how, why, and at what rate new ideas and technologies are absorbed by society and how innovations are diffused³ in a population. For many (if not most) marketers, the act of developing new ideas that spread widely in society or within a specific population is the very definition of our jobs. As such, there are several valuable marketing lessons uncovered in findings published by Everett Rogers.

Several of which are likely widely adopted (Get it?) within your own organization. Rogers proposes that adopters of any new innovation can be grouped by five different phases: innovators (2.5%), early adopters (13.5%), early majority (34%), late majority (34%), and laggards (16%), distributed mathematically as a bell curve. See Figure 3-1.

Different segments have different needs, and each adopter's likelihood to accept your idea depends on understanding their unique characteristics, needs, attitudes, reasoning, and so forth. Rogers found, for instance, that innovators and early adopters will often spread the word, leading to more people accepting the idea, to a point where the idea will eventually hit a critical mass, or a point of market saturation.

The different groups, and their key traits, are described in the following way:

Laggards (16%)

Laggards are suspicious of (and resistant to) innovation. It’s a rational opinion from their point of view, as their resources are limited and they must be certain that a new idea will not fail before they can adopt. Their point of reference tends to be in the past (“We’ve always done things this way!”), and they tend to isolate themselves from opinion leaders.

Laggards value credibility, availability, and simplicity—and further studies have shown that there’s a strong correlation between this group and both lower income and lower levels of education. Price (and awaiting price falls or promotional activities) is therefore important in their decision-making process.

This should seem familiar, basic even, because the findings have been around and been widely accepted, by most marketing professionals, for more than 50 years. Dig deeper, however, into the diffusion of innovations theory, and you’ll begin to see an interesting parallel to influencer marketing. One of the big (and applicable) ideas in his book is the importance of peer-to-peer networks, and how traditional mass media is an effective way of spreading information, while conversations between individuals spread adoption. See Figure 3-2.

He found:

While mass media channels are often the most rapid and efficient means to inform an audience of potential adopters about the existence of an innovation, interpersonal channels are more effective in persuading an individual to accept a new idea, especially if the channel links two or more individuals who are similar in socioeconomic status, education or other important ways.

Rogers continues: “Most people depend mainly upon a subjective evaluation of an innovation that is conveyed to them from another individual like themselves who have previously adopted the innovation.”⁴

The concept of peer networks is an essential element to the diffusion of innovations theory and also explains why, and how, influencer marketing is so effective. Innovators, and early adopters, effectively become opinion leaders (or individuals with influence) that ignite an initial “take off” adoption process, furthering the adoption of an idea to achieve critical mass.

So, how do you identify key opinion leaders relevant to your marketing objective? Rogers suggests that there are, generally, seven key traits that set opinion leaders apart:

1. 1.

   Opinion leaders have greater exposure to mass media than their followers.

    
2. 2.

   Opinion leaders are more “cosmopolite” than their followers. They are “people on the edge” and can bring new ideas from outside their social group to its members.

    
3. 3.

   Opinion leaders have greater contact with change agents than their followers.

    
4. 4.

   Opinion leaders have greater social participation than their followers.

    
5. 5.

   Opinion leaders have higher socioeconomic status than their followers.

    
6. 6.

   Opinion leaders are more innovative than their followers.

    
7. 7.

   Opinion leaders are more innovative when a social system’s norms favor change, but when the system’s norms do not favor change, opinion leaders are not especially innovative.

    

WHAT IS A “CHANGE AGENT”?

A change agent is an individual who influences clients’ innovation-decisions in a direction deemed desirable by a change agency. A change agent usually seeks to secure the adoption of new ideas, but he or she may also attempt to slow the diffusion process and prevent the adoption of certain innovations with undesirable effects.

—Diffusion of Innovations, 5th Edition (2003)

Consider how these traits are related to influencer marketing and identifying the right creators, social media influencers, and ambassadors for your brand or marketing message, but be careful not to mistake innovators for opinion leaders. Opinion leaders have followers, whereas innovators are the very first to adopt new ideas and are often perceived as deviants from the norm.

Diffusion of innovations among social media influencers

If the definition of an individual with influence is one who exerts influence or inspire the action of others, you can’t help but wonder if influential social media creators are more likely to be early adopters and opinion leaders. As previously outlined, early adopters are role models, trendsetters, and opinion leaders. They influence and simultaneously make great test subjects to trial what will likely be accepted by the early majority. As such, they’re effectively the key to mass market adoption—to a much greater extent than any other group.

Using the key traits outlined in the Diffusion of Innovations , and the characteristics of the different adoption groups (innovators, early adopters, and so on), it would seem to be the case. To find out, we initiated a research project in July 2019, with more than 2,000+ participants, each a social media content creator, or influencer if you will, with an average of 75,000 followers on Instagram. To validate this specific thesis, survey participants were asked to answer the following question:

The bell curve is suddenly compressed to the left, with 29% of influencers identifying as innovators and 48% identifying as early adopters (Figure 3-3). On the other side of the distribution curve, they’re as much as 96% less likely (2% vs. 50%) to belong to the late majority or laggards stages.

Compared to a population average, and research that led to discovering the diffusion of innovations theory, social media influencers are on the other hand 10× more likely to be innovators and 2.5× more likely to be early adopters.

This is remarkable and suggests that influencer marketing can not only replicate the characteristics of a traditional mass media channel to spread information but also drive conversations between individuals that spread adoption.

Social media influencers are, in short, early adopters. That being so, if you believe in the diffusion of innovations theory, they influence the early majority to a greater extent than members of late majority or laggards. The same research project revealed a few other interesting insights as well, among other things the answer to another important question: Who influences those with influence?

Do you trust your doctor?

“More Doctors Smoke Camels Than Any Other Cigarette” reads an iconic (and wildly misleading) 1946 print ad that ran for a total of 8 years in the United States.

During that time, from the 1930s to the late 1950s, physicians, doctors, and models in white lab coats were frequently hired by the major tobacco companies to propose that their deadly products were “just what the doctor ordered!” while slapping a “doctors recommend” label onto their packaging.

Fortunately, Big Tobacco are no longer allowed to apply any such practices in their advertising and are both banned from certain advertising tactics and heavily regulated by the FDA and other regulatory agencies. It’s obvious why the use of an authoritative figure like a doctor or physician was so effective at the time, but it made me wonder—do authoritative individuals in such professions have major influence on what products or services that are adopted by trendsetters, influencers, innovators, and early adopters, these days? And, if so, to what degree?

Going back to the research project mentioned in the previous section, the next part of the questionnaire was focused on a specific category: Health and Wellness. The choice of this specific vertical came with a hypothesis: It’s tricky for participants to correctly identify what would influence their decision unless it sits within an applicable context. Influence is, after all, very contextual.

You could, for instance, assume that your physician has limited influence on your preference of music, while having greater influence within the context of your health, and so on.

But this is where the insights from the survey surprised us. See Figure 3-4.

While it’s true that influence is contextual, our friends, family, and—noteworthy—other social media influencers outrank both health professionals, personal trainers, and primary physicians combined!

What’s going on?

Lots have happened in the world since the 1960s. While Big Tobacco’s “doctors recommend” label has been replaced by a Surgeon General’s cancer warning, the insights first published in Diffusion of Innovations (1962, Rogers) couldn’t be more relevant today. Influence might be contextual, with trust functioning as an important variable in its equation, but do you remember the excerpt from the previous section in this chapter, on the importance of peer-to-peer-networks?

The early majority depend on what’s conveyed to them from other people that are like them, people that have previously adapted the innovation, and as you’ve learned, social media influencers are likely to be innovators and early adopters—driving adoption not only among each other but the early majority in particular. You want to influence those with influence? Drive adoption among those that drive early adoption? Get with their friends, their family, and other creators that they follow.

Remember these insights are specific to the group that answered the survey (where the average person is a social media user with, on average, 75,000 followers) and not necessarily reflected by the general population, to help you understand how to influence those with influence.

Finding the right creators

“How do I find the right influencers for my brand?”

There’s no lack of platforms and tools available that can help you find the right creators, or influencers, for your marketing needs. So why is it still such a challenging task? Back in 2016, my company set out to discover exactly how many talented and creative, influential, individuals that exists on Instagram and YouTube.

Crawling the Web, in a similar fashion to how Google has built their search engine technology, we identified roughly 10 million creators on Instagram with more than 1,000 followers and 2 million YouTube channels with 500 subscribers or more. Now, 10 million people may seem like a lot, but on a platform like Instagram, with more than a billion active users, you’re actually looking for a needle in a haystack that sits within the top 1%.

If you’re looking to work with YouTube creators within the gaming category, you’ve suddenly narrowed the potential talent pool by 80%. Want the channel, within that specific category, to be based in a specific market, like the United States? Suddenly, you’ve narrowed it down to additionally only 25,000 channels or 8% of all gaming channels. Filter by at least 50,000 subscribers, and there are only 3,000 channels left. See Figure 3-5.

Okay… 3,000 YouTube gaming channels, in the United States, with at least 50,000 subscribers. That’s still a lot in absolute terms, but relative to where we started, you’ve eliminated 99.9%. This top-down approach is a highly effective way of sizing an opportunity and evaluating the likelihood of identifying talent that fulfill your criteria.

With this in mind, the rest of this section is spent on setting you up to have the best chance possible of finding the right talent for brand. We’ll focus on the variables, characteristics, methodologies, and questions you should address in your quest to find the right talent for your campaign—and you can then seek out the right tools, platforms, or partners that will answer to your needs.

Owning your talent pool

As you’ve seen, there are millions upon millions of talented and influential content creators across platforms like YouTube and Instagram. And while narrowing your search by using relevant applicable filters—such as category, reach, engagement, demography, audience, and even brand affinity—you can’t help but wonder if this is a sustainable long-term strategy. There’s nothing wrong with the outcome, but it’s an approach where you’re starting from scratch every single time, which can be very time consuming and inefficient. So, how do you win this game of finding a needle in a haystack of data?

You play a different kind of game.

Rather than to embark on a quest to find creators and influencers for a specific marketing objective or campaign, your short- and long-term goal should be to build your own pool of talent. Not to be mistaken for an ambassador program (though that could certainly be an outcome), a talent pool is simply a group of individuals that you can activate long and short term, to meet your business and marketing objectives. This approach holds several additional benefits (outlined as follows) and will drive down the overall cost, time, and energy that you spend on your influencer marketing.

The top-down funnel approach is similar to the one mentioned earlier, but the outcome is very different (Figure 3-6).

The talent pool framework

The ultimate goal of the talent pool strategy is to increase your speed of execution, quality, competitive advantage, business impact, and unlock economies of scale. Simultaneously, you’ll reduce internal politics, risk, and both direct and indirect competition from other brands fighting to work with the same creators. The best part? This is work that can, and should (in my opinion), be carried out well in advance of any specific go-to-market strategies and campaigns and even ahead of any approved media budgets. Your end goal is to build a pool of talented creators, or influencers, ahead of any potential campaign or marketing initiative. This can be coupled with an actual campaign, but it doesn’t have to. I’ll walk you through the entire process using a fictitious, yet realistic, example.

Direct-to-consumer baby product brand

Markets: United States, United Kingdom

Target audience: Millennial parents

Potential objectives: Content creation, consideration, website sales

Target: Talent pool of 100 creators on Instagram

I’d like to start by studying the endgame. I know my brand, market, audience, objectives, and target. In this example, I’d like to have a talent pool of 100 creators on Instagram that I can activate either short or long term.

Studying the endgame

□ Talent shortlist is approved by all relevant stakeholders.

□ Compensation structure in place for every single individual.

□ Their values, style, and content aligned with my company or marketing goals.

□ Engagement, reach, and other relevant KPIs align with our potential objectives.

□ The audience of the talent pool is the right audience.

□ Responsiveness and affinity—clear expressed interest in working with us.

□ Proprietary funnel insights (e.g., who drives sales, brand lift, content, etc.).

Don’t worry about how you’ll put all of this in place for now if it seems overwhelming; we’ll cover that part later. The first thing we’ll do is to identify the overall opportunity. Similar to our prior example of gaming channels on YouTube, it’s a top-down approach. It doesn’t have to be, but I’ve found this model to be more effective than the other way around. See Figure 3-7.

As you can see, we’ve identified a total of 2,665 potential creators within our vertical. They are parents, in our markets, with a sizable following and engaged audience. They don’t necessarily align with our values and audience or even have an interest in working with us, but this is just the starting point.

This may seem overwhelming at first (especially if you’ve never worked with a partner, software as a service, or online platform), but trust me—you’ll narrow down the broader selection into a refined shortlist faster than you think. And you’re setting yourself up to work with this talent pool long term, so the upfront investment should be considered worthwhile. You’re solving the very first bottleneck to unlock an effective and scalable approach to influencer marketing—not just for one campaign, but for years to come.

In microeconomics and business, the concept of economies of scale states that a company should be able to achieve a decreased cost per unit when they increase their production or output. This concept can be applied to influencer marketing as well to increase your efficiency. Reduced cost per unit arise from increased total output. Scale drives down cost through strategies like long-term commitment with top performing talent, long-term approach to building a sustainable talent pool (not one-off campaign) drives down your overall cost.

As you narrow your selection, especially if your team is larger than one, you’ll have to make sure that there’s a clear definition of what you’re looking for in terms of style, diversity, sentiments, values, and such. There’s nothing worse than having one half of your team disapprove what the other half believe is perfect. If you have other stakeholders from other teams weight in with their opinion, make sure that their feedback is assessed objectively.

My next step, in this fictitious example, would be to analyze the audience of my preferred shortlist. To accomplish this, I’d use a third-party company or tool specialized in analyzing and profiling audiences and demographics in social media. A few examples are Demographics Pro,⁷ HypeAuditor,⁸ and the Audience Insights Tool available from my own company.⁹

Congratulations are in order. We’ve identified a large pool of talented influencers and creators that we’d like to work with. Your other internal stakeholders have signed off on your shortlist (phew!)—a common bottleneck and time sink, eliminated for the foreseeable future. You and your team can now execute with greater speed than ever before. But remember, our endgame is to have a talent pool of 100 creators with both increased impact and reduced friction. Things are in motion, but the best is yet to come.

A two-way street

In August 2019, my company polled over 2,000 influencers across 67 countries to understand what their deciding factors are when seeking out to collaborate with a brand.

Factors such as money, fame, and even creative freedom are outranked by having a shared set of core values. That doesn’t mean that those other factors can be ignored, but goes to show that the rigorous vetting process of finding the right creators for your brand will stand or fall by an equally rigorous vetting process of your brand. Additionally, you’ll create a massive unfair advantage for your company if you can demonstrate to influencers and creators that you understand their point of view, something we’ll cover in depth in Chapter 5: Creator-Centric Strategies.

This far, we’ve narrowed down our selection by roughly 80%, from 2,665 to 500 creators. They fit the criteria of our talent pool to perfection. Let’s see if the same can be said about our brand. If you examine the top-down funnel numbers outlined in the beginning of our fictitious example, you’ll notice that we’ve planned for a final steep drop-off. As outlined in our previous checklist, you’ll want to identify who’s responsive and share your core values along with a clearly expressed interest in working with your brand. We took a pass on roughly 80%, so it’s only fair to assume that 80% of creators will do the same with us. It’s perfectly understood if the process of reaching out to hundreds of influencers just to have them qualify you may seem overwhelming or even impossible, especially with all the previous work leading up to this stage. We’ll cover exactly how to engineer each step of the way in Chapter 6: 1:1 Relationships at Scale. You’ll probably be surprised when you realize how easy this part actually is.

Remember, the goal is to have those on your final shortlist raise their hand and let you know if they want to work with your brand as much as you’d like them to work with you. This is also an opportunity to identify other variables that can’t be assessed without their input. Do they work out at a local gym? Go to festivals? Like their current smartphone? Own a smartwatch? Use Cannabis? Drink alcohol? Eat meat? Plan to renovate their bathroom? Yes, these are all real examples. And when you know the answer, and they’ve raised their hand and confirmed that your values are aligned with theirs, you’ll never have to look for a needle in a haystack ever again.

From commodity to valuable asset

By narrowing your search from millions, to thousands, to hundreds, you’re playing a different kind of game. You now have a talent pool of creators, or influencers, “owned” by your company. Rightfully, these amazing individuals doesn’t “belong” to you in any shape or form, but you’ve transformed a commodity into a valuable asset. But this is just the starting point.

Let’s assume that you activate all 100 influencers in your talent pool for a campaign where the goal is to drive sales on your website. Each campaign participant is given a promotional code that their followers can use when they shop on your website. After a week, you analyze the outcome of your campaign. Suddenly, you have a data point and insight that nobody on the planet had last week: You know who sold products and who didn’t. You know who the bottom 20% are (that you likely shouldn’t engage for a second similar campaign with a similar objective), who the middle 60% are (that help you establish an average benchmark), and who your top performers, the top 20%, are (most valuable distribution, undervalued assets). See Figure 3-8.

The same principle can be applied to measure other marketing funnel KPIs like reach, brand lift, website traffic, engagement, website traffic, lead generation, or app installs. If you were to replicate the very same campaign, with the very same structure, and change nothing but to exclude the bottom 20%, you’ve suddenly skewed the odds to somewhat in your favor. Double down on the top 20%, and you’re Billy Beane in Moneyball.¹⁰

The power of the long tail

Amazon, Spotify, and Google have all built their companies on the premise of the long tail. The concept, in the context of business, was popularized in 2004, when Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson published an article entitled “The Long Tail.”¹¹

In his article, Anderson argues that our culture and economy is shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of hits (the head of the demand or distribution curve) toward an infinite, or at least rapidly expanding, number of niches in the tail (collectively with a larger market share than the head). He expanded his reasoning and published a book in 2006, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More. The book entered the New York Times bestseller list the same year, and the theory of the long tail is since commonly adopted in business, economics, and marketing to explain how a sufficiently large number of niche players (books on Amazon, songs on Spotify, and web pages on Google) can compete with the large powerful few—in a world where markets are decentralized to match unlimited variety of both supply and demand.

I’ve been fascinated by the long tail since Anderson first published his book, and his theories have personally given me an edge more than once, specifically in web development, e-commerce, and search engine optimization. As such, when co-founding our business in 2016, some 10 years after the book made the bestseller list, I couldn’t help but wonder if the very same reasoning could be applied to the world of influencer marketing.

Likely, there’d be a small number of hits (social media creators with millions of followers) and a collectively larger number of niches in the tail (social media creators with tens of thousands of followers). Tables 3-6 and 3-7 are based on analysis conducted across the 12,000 most popular social media accounts on Instagram¹² and validate this thesis. There’s a clear head (500 creators with more than 10 million followers) and tail (12,000 creators with more than 1 million followers), and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Go further down the tail, and it’s evident that the market share of the tail clearly outweighs the head (detailed in Figure 3-9)—and this makes all the difference in the world for us marketing professionals.

Table 3-6.

Distribution of creators with more than 1 million followers on Instagram

Followers	Total Creators
10,000,000	500
9,000,000	600
8,000,000	700
7,000,000	800
6,000,000	1,000
5,000,000	1,300
4,000,000	1,800
3,000,000	2,700
2,000,000	5,000
1,000,000	12,000

Table 3-7.

Distribution of creators with between 10,000 and 1 million followers on Instagram

Followers	Total Creators
1,000,000	12,000
900,000	13,500
800,000	15,500
700,000	18,000
600,000	22,000
500,000	27,000
400,000	35,000
300,000	50,000
200,000	80,000
100,000	160,000
90,000	190,000
80,000	210,000
70,000	250,000
60,000	300,000
50,000	350,000
40,000	450,000
30,000	550,000
20,000	820,000
10,000	1,500,000

See, consumers didn’t just turn their back on the old model of one-size-fits-all mass appeal—they turned toward something they liked better, something they welcomed with opened arms. For the very first time in their lives, unlimited variety of supply meant that there was that perfectly tailored something for everyone. When consumers have the option to choose what they paid attention to, they naturally pay more attention.

Between 2015 and 2018, several marketing research companies, influencer marketing agencies, and social media platforms reported that the real power of influencer marketing sits with social media creators on Instagram with a smaller following, loosely referred to as “micro-influencers.”

“Micro-Influencers Are More Effective With Marketing Campaigns Than Highly Popular Accounts” reads the headline of an article published by Adweek in 2017.¹³

During the same time, around 2017, I drew the same conclusion. The fewer followers you have on social media, the more engaged the audience. It makes sense when you think about it, as per the theory of the long tail and unlimited variety of supply. This meant two things for marketers. First, there’s a greater supply of content creators found in the long tail. Secondly, their audiences are paying closer attention to what they’re doing. On the flipside, you’d have to collaborate with a much larger collective of creators to make up for the limited reach and sheer size of each individual audience.

But then, that very same year, something happened: Instagram and its parent company Facebook began, quite literally, to move things around. With its most recent update, the order of the posts on a user’s feed would no longer show up in chronological order. Instead, their algorithm would switch the order of the posts on a user’s feed into what they think each account would like. It sparked some controversy at the time (changing the familiar seems to have that tendency), but came with intentions to improve the way its users experienced their product. The official announcement from Instagram, accurately titled “See the Moments You Care About First,” explained that as Instagram had grown, its users had begun to miss out on as much as 70% of their feeds. Including posts they’d actually care about the most.¹⁴

With complex algorithms in charge of serving its users with engaging content, something interesting happened with the long tail. Suddenly, content creators and influencers with both smaller and larger following began (at an aggregated average, I should note) to see greater attention¹⁵ from their audiences. See Figure 3-10.

As indicated by the left side of the graph seen in Figure 4-13, there’s a clear correlation between the size of your audience and how engaged they are, but it’s only half of the truth. Look to the right side of the graph, and engagement is not just stabilized, but increased. This is the Instagram algorithm at work, serving its users with the posts they actually care about the most. So, has the long tail lost its power? Does the head suddenly have more power than the tail? Judging by the graph, seeking to collaborate with influencers that has an audience of 5 million followers (and an audience just as engaged as someone with 50,000 followers) seems like a no-brainer. Paradoxically, that conclusion would trick you down the wrong path. Perhaps contradictory at first, the tail has even more power than ever before. But remember that these numbers are aggregated averages. There may be more social media creators with a larger following and highly engaged audience, but there aren’t that many of them. Consider the following:

Group A

Followers: 5,000,000+

Average engagement: 3.5%

Total creators: 1,300

Group B

Followers: 50,000–100,000

Average engagement: 3%

Total creators: 175,000

On average, if you were to disregard the total number of creators in each group, Group A would be a clear winner. But disregard the size of the group, and you’re failing to recognize that the size of the tail is greater than the head. A better question would be how many creators there are, in group B, with at least 3.5% engagement? The answer is more than 48,000. Perhaps an unfair approach to manipulate statistics, but remember we’re marketers, not mathematicians.

How about 10% engagement? Still 8,700 creators at your disposal. Meanwhile, there are only 59 users in the entire world with 5 million followers and 10% engagement. The engagement is still found in the long tail; you just have to look closer.