Brands have been using social media influencers in marketing campaigns for a long time. As the practice has grown over the years, many individuals have become celebrities with millions of followers and they can charge thousands or tens of thousands of dollars for a social media campaign or even a single Instagram post.
As influencer marketing has become more expensive and sometimes less effective, many brands look at micro influencers as partners in online campaigns.
So how can brands use micro influencers to increase engagement online? In this webinar, digital marketing consultant Shane Barker goes through the process of finding, contacting and using micro influencers to drive engagement.
His definition of micro influencers is that they are:
Social media users with 1,000 to 100,000 followers
Specializing in a certain niche
Could be everyday consumers (they are very genuine, more down to earth, more like ourselves)
Some of the advantages of using micro influencers is their ability to engage, since their engagement rate normally is higher than for an influencer with a larger following:
Average engagement rate for influencers with fewer than 2,000 followers is 10.7% (source: influence.co)
Average engagement rate for influencers with 100k to 150k followers is 2.5%
Average engagement rate for influencers with more than 1 million followers is 1.5%
Watch the video above to learn more about how to use micro influencers in your digital marketing campaigns.
For years we have heard that Swedish gamer Felix “PewDiePie” Kjellberg has the largest channel on Youtube. He still has the highest number of subscribers by far, but there is reason to argue that he has been dethroned by a person you’ve probably never heard of – Gulshan Kumar. Kumar is the founder of an Indian music company called T-Series which also produces and distributes movies. T-Series is now India’s largest music label and movie studio (according to themselves).
T-Series has a Youtube channel that currently is the 4th most subscribed channel. With 27.4 million subscribers, it is still a long way from beating PewDiePie’s 57 million. But then again, a subscriber is what might be characterized as a vanity metric, which means that it’s a number that does not really add value to your business in itself. Sure, without subscribers it is much harder to reach an audience, so they are not at all meaningless, rather it’s a means to an end.
Even more interesting is looking at for example number of views of a channel, because that is actually a source of income for a youtuber. In other words, it is more important to get views than subscribers.
Most viewed channel on Youtube
The T-Series Youtube-channel is the most viewed on the entire network with a total of 25.6 billion video views. The second most viewed channel is WWE, World Wrestling Entertainment, with 17.9 billion views. PewDiePie is third with 16.3 billion views. That should by definition make the Indian company the largest Youtube channel.
If we look at the number of daily or monthly views to each channel, it is even more striking how much more popular T-Series is compared to the other channels. T-Series has about 46 million daily views compared to PewDiePie’s 6 million daily views (last two weeks):
Total views, last 30 days:
T-Series – 1.4 billion
WWE – 570 million
PewDiePie – 182 million
Estimated monthly earnings (estimates by Socialblade):
T-Series – 348K-5.6M USD
WWE – 142K-2.3M USD
PewDiePie – 46K-730K USD
T-Series get almost ten times as many video views per months as PewDiePie. And there are probably two main reasons to the success of T-Series on Youtube, apart from the quality of the content of course.
First of all, the channel publishes a large amount of videos and now has more than 11,000 videos. So they have a lot of content! Here is one example:
The second reason is that Indian audiences prefer to use Youtube for music and Facebook for news, according to a new study.
“Undoubtedly, Youtube is India’s default music player and the most popular source for accessing music content,” Subrat Kar, CEO at Vidooly Media Tech — a Video Intelligence platform, said in a statement.
With a userbase of over 400 million in India, Youtube is the biggest platform for video content, according to Indian Express. Further evidence of Youtube’s popularity in India is that there are at least two more Indian music channels with more than 11 billion channel views: SET India and Zee TV. That places them too near the top of the list.
It is quite possible that Youtube’s charts will be dominated by Indian music companies in a not too distant future.
I recently blogged about the shadow ban that hit many Instagram users, especially after the hack that forced many users to verify their accounts with a code. My account @kullin was hit by the ban, which in short meant that only my followers would see my photos under the hashtags I used. No-one else could see them and I could not reach any new followers.
The ban, which many still hesitate exists, affected my account for a little more than two weeks. I had not engaged in any suspicious activities on that account, so why the ban hit my account is still a mystery. I did not use any bots, nor did I use the follow/unfollow method. The only reason I can suspect is that I used some hashtags too frequently.
Lost many followers
The effect of the shadow ban was that I lost a lot of followers. I gained some, but not to the extent that is “normal” for my account. In this graph you can see exactly the result of the ban during the first two weeks of September (click on image to enlarge). Organic growth completely died when the ban struck and growth has been negative of flat ever since.
Now that my photos are visible again on hashtags, I hope that engagement on my account will go back to normal. If you want to follow, I’m @kullin on Instagram.
The concept of a shadow ban on Instagram is a much debated topic, and a controversial one. There is no real evidence that it exists and Instagram has never verified that there is such a thing. The shadow ban is a term used by the Instagram community as a description for when a user’s posts is not showing up under hashtags, which it would normally do. The “shadow” label is due to the fact that to the user, everything looks normal, but if you look at the posts from a non-following account, suddenly posts do not appear. If this “ban” has hit you, only your followers can see your posts, resulting in a significantly lower engagement.
There are basically two different explanations to why this happens. 1) Instagram is banning your posts because you have been engaging in some practice that Instagram defines as spammy. Like using the same hashtags over and over again, or using third party apps or bots to like or follow/unfollow hundreds of accounts. 2) It’s a glitch in the algorithm and you are just unfortunate to be affected.
Thousands are banned from Instagram hashtags
But about two weeks ago, the discussion around the shadow ban reached new levels. That was when many accounts got a message that they had to verify their telephone number to be able to access the account. Many even lost their accounts after this verification incident, others reported that suddenly months of posts were completely gone.
Suddenly hundreds if not thousands of users reported that their photos were completely blocked from hashtags, for no apparent reason. I’ve seen users with very small number of followers, up to one account that has 219.000 followers, all affected by this. And it happened to me too. I noticed on the image below that only my followers were liking and commenting. So I looked at the photo from an account that doesn’t follow me, and that’s when I realized that I had been banned from these hashtags.
Ett inlägg delat av Hans Kullin ✈︎ Travel (@kullin)
That’s nine days ago, and I’m still banned. Here’s how my latest photo appears under a hashtag with my name (#hanskullin). Below is how it appears to me, the photo is visible under the hashtag. Above is how it appears from a non following account. The photo is now gone.
Petition to fix the hashtag ban For many users who have spent countless hours perfecting their Instagram presence, this is a real blow. It is now practically impossible to increase the reach of your content or account. And since Instagram is not addressing the issue, users have started a petition called “Fix The Glitch! Innocent Instagram Users Are Banned From Using Hashtags!”
Petition initiator Adele Giles writes:
“From our understanding, normal ‘shadow banning’ is lifted within a few days. This has not been the case for us. This is not a typical shadow banning for users abusing the terms and conditions, this is a glitch that is affecting those who do not deserve it. We have checked if we are using banned hashtags, we have tried not posting or using Instagram for long periods of time, we have tried all that we can but this is in Instagram’s hands. We need you, Instagram, to help us innocent users get our content registering in hashtags.”
So far more than 700 people have signed the petition that will be delivered to Facebook and Instagram founders Mark Zuckerberg and Kevin Systom. Let’s at least hope that Instagram will acknowledge that there is a problem affecting innocent users and that they will find a solution.
The other day it was revealed that Instagram had been hacked and contact information to millions of accounts had been leaked online. At the same time we started seeing reports of people having to verify their accounts by adding their phone number, even if it had previously been added to Instagram. Users were prompted inside the app to verify their phone number and then got a six digit code to insert. If users didn’t do this they could not access their accounts.
While this may have worked well for most users, others reported that their accounts were deleted or that they lost hundreds of their old photos from the app.
This happened to me as well this weekend and my account was effectively disabled for about 12 hours. But I was lucky that my account was restored. After inserting the code, my account got back online, at first without any of my old photos, but during a minute or two, old photos and followers were loaded back until all was back to normal.
For a few days now, many users are reporting that they have lost their Instagram accounts. One person in a forum I’m in, said on Saturday that she lost all photos from the last four months. Today, all those photos are back online again.
Another person has had her account disabled for at least three days without getting it back. After 68 hours her account was restored. The way to get your account back according to this user is to click “get help signing in” then “need more help”. After that, fill out the form and click “my account was hacked” and describe what happened. Instagram Support will email you and “ask you to send a photo of yourself holding a paper with your name, user name, and a code they provide in the email”. Apparently this method worked.
Instagram has yet not responded officially to this incident, so we don’t know if it is related to the large hack from last week or not. Final word of advice, always secure your account with two factor authentication, which makes it a lot harder for hackers to get access to your account.
Many users are currently reporting problems with hashtags on Instagram. When some users upload photos that are tagged, their photos do not show up under the hashtags they used. I have read about this issue in discussion forums the last few days and yesterday it happened to me as well.
I uploaded a photo yesterday evening using about 30 tags, which is the maximum number allowed by Instagram. Normally after I have done this, my photo would immediately show up under the hashtags that I used. But now it didn’t. In fact, on the tags that I had used, almost no new photos from the last hour or so showed up, even on tags where there usually are new photos uploaded every minute, like #reflections.
Ett inlägg delat av Hans Kullin ✈︎ Travel (@kullin)
It was soon obvious to me that this was an actual thing, not something that only I noticed in my app. Normally I get a small number of likes, say 10-15, during the first few minutes after uploading a photo. And many of them are from non followers because they discover my photos elsewhere than in their feed.
Now, however, notifications were almost silent. Only a single like or two during the first five to ten minutes, and only from followers. This was a clear sign that my photo was only visible to my followers.
Hashtags on Instagram aren’t working
So I started to investigate. None of the tags I had used displayed almost any recent photos. Some 30-40 minutes ago, some from an hour ago. My photo did not show up anywhere.
I logged in to other accounts but the results were the same, even for tags that I had not used in this photo. So had I been shadow banned? I don’t know, the concept of shadow ban is controversial and many experts say it doesn’t exist. Shadow ban is a theory that a user is somehow being punished by Instagram’s algorithm, resulting in their photos not being displayed under hashtags.
After about 2-3 hours the problem seemed to have been resolved and my photo was visible again on the hashtags. It even got promoted to the top 9 trending hashtags on more than 10 tags, so clearly all was fine again.
It was soon clear that this problem was affecting lots of people. Instagram tweeted out this weekend’s hashtag project and the replies to this tweet are mainly about the tag issue.
In a Facebook group about social media, people were frustrated because their photos tanked and weren’t displayed at all.
There does not seem to be a workaround for users at the moment, should this issue continue. My only recommendation at the moment is to check the hashtags before you publish and see if they are displaying recent photos. If not, maybe you should wait and publish later.
Also, check Twitter discussions and see if other people are having the same problem with hashtags. Then at least you will know it is a general Instagram bug and not someting that you did.
Footnote: follow me on Instagram for travel photos: @kullin
Brands have been using social media influencers in marketing campaigns for a long time. As the practice has grown over the years, many individuals have become celebrities with millions of followers and they can charge thousands or tens of thousands of dollars for a social media campaign or even a single Instagram post.
