I was thinking about this a lot lately…

Instagram first launched back in 2010. Almost 10 years ago. How crazy is this?

Not surprisingly, the way we approach this app has changed a lot. We went from using it to share beautiful moments with our friends to now widely using it for our businesses and building a social media presence.

‘Being famous on Instagram’ is now a thing and it often feels that one’s worthiness in this society is described by the number of followers.

After riding high for the last few years, it seems that influencer marketing – in the traditional sense – is in the midst of a fail from grace & to be fair- I’m not surprised.

We’ve all been noticing a lot of careless campaigning happening within the influencer industry. All of this has led to a dramatic loss in consumer confidence – with only 4% of people now trusting what influencers say online.

So what 2020 holds for influencer marketing? Here are my thoughts and predictions:

The Rise of Micro-Bloggers

Brands have finally begun to realize that sometimes less is more. The success of any influencer marketing campaign does not solely depend on the number of followers.
I’ve done a few influencer-marketing campaigns myself and was surprised to see that influencers with less following have actually brought in more sales.

According to Coschedule report, it showed that 1,000 followers or fewer can produce an engagement rate of 9.7%, whilst accounts with 1,000-4,000 followers produce only 4.5%. At 100,000 followers and over, this drops to 1.7%.

Therefore, I do feel that more brands will focus on working with smaller influencers in 2020.

Getting Back The Trust

Perhaps the biggest problem facing the influencer industry right now is trust. Engagement is rather weak & people are getting more & more ignorant towards influencers’ ads.

People simply don’t trust influencer campaign if they know it’s been paid for.  A survey from Captiv8 found that 49 percent of users would trust an influencer less if they found out that brands were paying them to post advertisements on their social accounts.

I believe that 2020 is going to be all about building that trust back. I expect brands to go with building long-lasting relationships with real-life influencers & influencers to be more open + put more effort into the content they create.

Influencers Turning to Personal-brands

It is devastating for me to see how many creators put all of their attention into only growing within one place. This doesn’t make any sense or any difference.

You see, talking from my own perspective, I can tell you that my monthly income continues to grow way quicker than any of my social media following. I get more e-mails from bloggers in need of my help than ever and by now, I really don’t feel that a number on Instagram can make a huge change if you’re trying to build a career online. It is just a number after all.

What really matters is what are you currently offering to YOUR people.

If you do your research, you’ll see that most of the entrepreneurs running successful online businesses don’t really have impressive social media numbers, but they most probably are already making six or seven figures yearly or might have collected massive newsletter lists.

When at the same time, we see a lot of Instagram influencers that are actually completely broke or in dept.

This only proves that being huge on a single platform doesn’t mean you’re going to make a living online.

If you’re currently focusing on growing your social media following, let me ask you…

Can you offer any useful services to your reader? Or perhaps you’ve just published an informative e-book? Are you keen to run a motivational podcast? What is the purpose of your social media presence?

If you’re creating social media content with no endpoint, no link to your blog or website, no product- you are not doing it properly. There are so many opportunities that social media can bring you, but if you want to survive through 2020 – you have to change your mindset.

Imagine if Instagram dies tomorrow? Imagine if they change their algorithm AGAIN or forbid paid sponsorship? Do you feel like you depend on the success of the platform? Does this make you feel insecure? I guessed so…

Don’t get me wrong- I’m not saying that social media stats shouldn’t matter, but I strongly believe they should come as a side hustle rather than require your full attention.

Here’s why I predict more & more influencers starting their own websites, brands & really connecting to their followers on a whole other level in 2020. After all, that would be the only logical decision.