In recent years, the usage of social media influencers has taken marketing to a new level on social media. Influencers helps the audience to feel more connected or create a desire for them to buy the product their promoting.
However, in latest reports, the use of social media influencers is overplayed. With a high number of scandals, the lack of trust from the audience is growing. Influencers are buying fake followers on their pages and some viewers are feeling forced to buy products with the way the influencers are being told to push out products.
There was a recent uproar about a social media influencer who is CGI. Miquela, who is a computer generated image has become quite popular on Instagram.With this, the rise of "fake" influencers and she's not the only one.
With the thought of "fake" influencers, many viewers are beginning to question the real authenticity of the products they are seeing. For example, if social media influencers are becoming CGI, how can they actually try a product if they aren't real.
In recent studies, individuals are 9.8x more likely to buy a merchandise from viewing a follow peer's post over a social media influencer. The connection between influencers and their audience is slowly diminishing. Their engagement rates are falling down the drain as the average consumer gains more engagement from their friends and followers.
The term "organic influencers" will consist of genuine brand advocates. With these influencers, the importance is in more the engagement than their follower counts. With these organic influencers, the amount of distrust and fakeness that the viewers feel will slowly go away.
Many believe that with organic influencers, the authenticity that the audience will view will come from posts that are more well earned rather than bought off.
In this modern age, many viewers from any social media platform want to invest their time with authentic people. With organic influencers, companies feel that their reach will gain more engagement if the influencers they use influencers who are real and aren't being bought off to sell product. Their plans for 2020 is to gain more engagement through organic influencers and trying to be more authentic with how they want to present their products.