EOTO 2: What I Learned About Influencers

One of the presentations that stood out to me the most was about online influencers. Online influencers are now a part of our daily lives and I feel like they are severely toxic to our society. The presentation talked about how these online influencers sometimes have a positive effect on young people. But from my understanding, they are overly misinformative and cause people to think that life can one day be all sunshine and rainbows. 

Their so-called "careers" are solely based on social media and they feel it is their job to make their lives look as perfect as possible. Social media influencers do pretty much nothing but somehow still become popular and are encouraged to keep doing what they're doing. It's sickening to see. Imagine asking someone nowadays what they do for a living and they say, "Oh I do social media, I'm an influencer." How sad is that? Like are there no true life goals these people are striving for? It just seems they want to take the "easy road" and see if they can be paid to do nothing but post on social media. 

The influencer market is only continuing to grow. TikTok in and of itself has led to a huge surge in more online influencers. People now think Tik Tok is a way to get their foot in the door and become famous overnight. Meanwhile, the majority of folks land on their pretty little faces and come up with nothing.

Once a person has a big enough following they can get picked up by brands to promote certain products. Again, not many people get there and more and more people see these "influencers" and think that they themselves can do that as well. 

Not all influencers need to have millions of followers to consider themselves impactful. There are 3 smaller categories of influencers, nano-influencers which have between 1K and 10K followers, micro-influencers which have between 10K and 100K followers and macro-influencers which have between 100K and 1M followers. Every one of the influencers that fall underneath these categories (especially the smaller two) wants so badly to be Dwayne Johnson or Selena Gomez, each with over 200M followers. Too bad so sad, go find a real job.