Thread by @gauravsabnis

Short thread about influencer marketing. Lots of people, especially from my generation and older, are derisive about social media "influencers". As people and as a phenomenon in general. Sneer all you want, but influencer marketing works more often than not. Great ROI.

From the business perspective, it's great because it comes at almost zero marginal cost. Giving someone a free room or free meal or a free sample is a negligible investment for most businesses. If that 1 influencer brings you even just 2 more customers, you profit. Simple math.

In reality, influencers, when chosen right, will bring in way more than 2 customers of course. So it's a no-brainer to use them to spread the word.
From a customer perspective, especially for people my generation and younger, social media has expanded our concept of trust.

In the past, people only trusted family, friends, neighbors, colleagues about product/service recommendations. You wouldn't trust recommendations from someone you had never met, unless it was Roger Ebert or Anthony Bourdain. And them too cos of their body of work.

Social media makes it possible to create their own body of work. And their followers see it and consciously form assessments about expertise and trustworthiness. And many times, individuals of this era trust social media "friends" on certain topics more than RL friends.

So influencers are people compensated, in cash or kind, by businesses to spread the word about their product/service. Fundamentally it's no different than advertising. Many ads can be ineffective, incomprehensive, misleading, or even fraudulent. But ads as an overall thing work.

Same with influencers. There can be incompetent ones and even some grifters. That's true of literally every profession though.
So bottomline, you wanna snark about certain individuals who are influencers for reasons specific to those individuals, go for it. I do too.

But as a general phenomenon and concept, social influencers work. For businesses and for their followers. /End