Life as an influencer
Sally Jo Hickey’s job is to produce impeccable photos that make you want her life. She tells reporter Stephanie Ockhuysen about her social media career.
When the clock strikes 11am, Sally Jo Hickey drops everything and pivots her priority. ‘‘That is when the good Instagram lighting starts coming in,’’ the 25-year-old social media influencer laughs.
With a combined social media following of more than 300,000 people, Taranaki-raised Hickey has learnt exactly how to get the best snap.
She knows it is a cliche, but it’s her job to produce impeccable photos that make you want her life.
Most mornings Hickey, daughter of retired TVNZ weatherman Jim Hickey, is up at 7am touching base with her manager, who she says helps keep her organised and to iron out contracts with brands, answering emails and just general ‘‘adminy’’ stuff.
At any given time she will be working on multiple campaigns with different brands, editing, posting and then, by 11am, when the lighting hits, shooting content becomes her focus. But every day is different for the beauty guru who gained her following through hair and makeup tutorials on YouTube.
‘‘Some days are filled with admin, some are filled with shooting and editing, some days I will travel in to my offices for meetings. Being based in Sydney means there are a lot of PR events too, so often a day is dedicated to just attending back-to-back events.’’
She spends an average of seven hours a day on her phone, a figure she is embarrassed about and only knows thanks to Apple’s screen time feature.
But it makes sense she spends the equivalent of a work day on her phone – social media is her fulltime job.
The screen time figure only takes her phone into account though, not the hours she also spends on her desktop computer, she says.
She tries to clock off by 6pm, the same time her manager finishes, but it is easy to work right through the night as you get caught up in a bubble, she says.
And her idea of winding down is to scroll Instagram anyway.
People not understanding her job, or looking down upon it, are some of Hickey’s biggest challenges.
It isn’t as easy as just uploading a photo from a family holiday or a Christmas office party. It takes just as much time and effort creating her content as it does a traditional magazine shoot, she says.
‘‘I conceptualise, direct, record, edit, manage all my own content, and filming, editing, exporting, compressing, uploading a YouTube video can take me all day but all the viewer sees is a 10-minute video.’’ With everything falling on the social media star to deliver, Hickey says it is easy for those in her industry to have unhealthy work hours.
She is better than she used to be but says it is not uncommon to be working on a project and suddenly to be sitting in the dark and the day has passed her by.
And because she is her own boss, there is no-one there to stop her.
When Hickey was born, her job didn’t exist.
The creation and explosion of social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram – where Hickey has 41,851, 197,000, and 89,500 followers respectively – has led brands to switch their advertising budget from billboards to internet-made superstars.
Before the early 2000s, brands marketed purely through traditional means such as billboards, magazines, and television campaigns, using mainly models or celebrities.
But now, as nearly everything and everyone has moved online, it is more cost effective for brands to use people with a large Instagram following, such as Hickey, and get their products in front of people that way. Hickey believes it is because with social media everything can be analysed, you can track every sale and for a fraction of the price.
‘‘Each year the industry just grows because there are a lot of brands that maybe didn’t quite understand social media marketing before but are now jumping on board.
‘‘Social media is essentially marketing and sometimes it does hit me that I am marketing myself which makes me mildly uncomfortable. If something doesn’t perform well, it is hard not to take it as a personal hit.’’
She compares it to if a person was a social media manager for an electricity company and one of their posts didn’t perform well, it reflects back on the company not the individual.
‘‘In my case you are giving people a window to your life and your raw ideas.’’
The toll social media can take on content creators’ and consumers’ mental health has been well documented.
This year MediaWorks, which produces reality TV shows The Block NZ and Married at First Sight, began offering counselling services to contestants due to the backlash they received from keyboard warriors online.
Hickey says she is lucky and doesn’t receive many negative comments any more but if she does, she is strong enough to delete them and carry on with her day.
She also says the key to good mental health within the industry is trying not to compare yourself with other influencers but to recognise that you are only human.
‘‘I want to make content that is authentic to me; I am not one of those bloggers that is super on trend focused.
‘‘I am not a very competitive person but it can get you down but you have got to try and not compare yourself on social media because, as we all know, it can be quite a poison.’’
Hickey moved to Sydney in February and has seen her following grow ever since.
She is coy when it comes to discussing exactly how much she earns but says it has been her sole income for five years and is enough to live comfortably in Sydney.
A MoneyHub study found an influencer needs at least 1000 Instagram followers to start making money from their profile.
With that many followers you could make $50 per post; with about 4000
‘‘Social media is essentially marketing and sometimes it does hit me that I am marketing myself which makes me mildly uncomfortable.’’ Sally Jo Hickey Instagram influencer
followers that profit could jump up to $400 per post. The same study revealed a quote from an agency where $10,000 (+GST) would buy 7 to 20 total posts from 7 to 14 paid influencers.
The likes of Kylie Jenner, who has 146 million Instagram followers, can make up to $1 million for a single post.
Hickey’s career choice wasn’t a calculated one, it came out of a passion for hair and makeup.
She studied media and journalism at Auckland University of Technology and interned at TVNZ, thinking that was the path she would head down.
But by the time she graduated she already had 40,000 subscribers on YouTube and with a nudge from some colleagues at TVNZ, she decided to give it a go fulltime.
‘‘If it didn’t work out, I could always go back to what I studied but that was five or six years ago now.’’