A Brief History of Social Media Influencers

Almost everyone nowadays owns a smart device and has one or multiple accounts on social media. People use social media to connect to each other and consume the majority of their information online through these platforms and what people and organizations share on them. This has, in turn, led to the rising numbers of influencers. These influencers are simply people who are presented on social media as role models or creative individuals that many people follow for their content and are influenced by their actions and words. 

The rise in social media influencing

Social media began to gain a lot of popularity at the beginning of the past decade and then, in the year 2010, Instagram was introduced to the world. This has, in turn, led to the appearance of social media influencers on the platform, otherwise known as microbloggers at the time. They shared regular content about their daily activities or advice on certain topics to be able to grow followers on Instagram and become more popular. By gaining more and more popularity on Instagram, these influencers gain more money and some of them have even moved on to launch their own lines of clothing or brands in different categories and have created their own mini empires. 

Celebrities as influencers on social media

As the influencers’ career started gaining more and more popularity over the years, many celebrities started taking on social media influencing themselves. By simply having a large crowd of followers and giving regular content to those followers that keep them interested, celebrities became naturally-made influencers and online marketers. Many celebrities now use their social media platforms to share details about their daily activities or share advice and sometimes even their preferred brand to influence the crowds and they can be sponsored in most cases by brands to do exactly that job. 

Impact of social media influencers marketing

Platforms like Instagram and other social media sites have completely changed the marketing game. Nowadays, anyone with a large crowd of followers can have a huge influence on people with accounts on such platforms even if they don’t all necessarily follow the influencer themselves. However, as a result of the large population of followers, the number of shares and likes can increase and in turn raise the visibility of whatever content the influencer is sharing with their followers. This has led to many marketers taking their campaigns to social media to brand out their products or services through sponsored influencers who get paid a fee to share their content with the largest number of social media users. 

Influencers are now the modern age’s celebrities except that, instead of making movies or songs, they share useful content with their large masses of followers. Social media platforms like Instagram have allowed for the rise of influencers and the great popularity they have gotten. The great thing about this is that pretty much anyone nowadays can be a claimed influencer on social media if they have the right type of content and large numbers of followers that are targeted by marketers. It is an interesting modern career that has developed over the years and has proven its impact.