How to make a mint as a ‘fashion influencer’
And no, you don’t have to be a millennial with a million followers, discovers ESTHER WALKER as she signs up for social media school
About 18 months ago, I was just a normal Instagram user. I had around 1,000 followers on my private profile, where I posted pictures of my children and holidays with no real purpose.
I’d heard of people who used the social media site professionally — so- called ‘fashion influencers’, whose enviably stylish lives capture huge followings online and the eye of big brands, who pay them to wear their clothes.
but these Instagram stars had hundreds of thousands of followers. What’s more, they were skinny little things in their 20s who spent hours setting up, taking and polishing photographs to perfection.
Even if I made my profile public, I couldn’t see how I would ever amass those sorts of followers.
And if I could, weren’t these influencers making negligible amounts of money?
but, over the past year, something has shifted. Midlife women like you and me have become surprisingly successful at selling clothes online. Forbes’s annual influencer list is topped by a married 31year-old mother, Chiara Ferragni, whose deals with fashion brands from Guess to Gucci put her earnings in the millions.
And this summer, when Clemmie Hooper, a 34-year-old midwife from South London, posted a picture of herself in a black boden swimsuit, it instantly sold out. And (shock!) she is not a size 10. She has the sort of I’ve-had-four- children-and-likebiscuits figure most of us can relate to.
but they still have enviable numbers of followers: Clemmie has 566,000, while Chiara has a huge 15.2 million.
It was a chance meeting with a friend who works in digital marketing that changed everything for me. ‘You don’t need a million followers,’ she told me. ‘You can be a micro-influencer. You only need 10,000 followers.’
Especially, it seems, if you’re a midlife mum. Kat Farmer, 45, the british stay-athome mum behind the blog Does My bum Look 40 In this, may now boast 101,000 followers, but her lucrative deals with Marks & Spencer and House of Fraser started when she had fewer than 50,000. ERICA DAVIES, 40, started earning a salary online when she had around 40,000 followers, thanks to partnerships with La redoute, Marks & Spencer and boden. And she readily admits she’s a size 12 to 14 and doesn’t look like a model.
I did some maths. I had 12,000 followers on twitter and I get about 6,000 visitors a day to my website the Spike ( onthespike.
com). If I could persuade a combination of those people to follow me on Instagram — and put up some nicer photos than my kids playing in mud — could I, a 38-yearold married mother-of-two, go pro?
Fast-forward a year and I have 13,400 followers on Instagram (those 400 are very important to me). I focus on posting outfit ideas, recipes and jokes.
In the grand scheme of things, 13,400 is still tiny, but my followers are a kind and witty bunch. I take on a little sponsored work: it supports my writing income, but it’s by no means a living wage.
A huge payout for me would be £1,500 for one ‘campaign’, which might mean one or two Instagram pictures, a series of Instagram ‘stories’ — posts that disappear after 24 hours — and a mention on my website (all flagged up as ‘sponsored’).
but those don’t come along often — and, even if they did, your audience switches off if you make too many sponsored posts.
I know that you are supposed to try to grow your following. the more followers you have, the more reach you have and the more desirable you are (in theory) to brands. It’s like being a billboard by the A40, as opposed to being fly-posted down a dark alley. So perhaps it’s time I thought bigger and had a bit of ambition.
My husband is looking tired and fed up with earning most of the money, so either I become an uber driver or I get influencing.
It turns out that I couldn’t have chosen a better time to dive into the commercial side of Instagram. Along with the boom in social media, a secondary industry of ‘digital marketing’ agencies has sprung up. Some act as talent agents for influencers; some act as ‘dating agencies’ to match a brand to the right Instagram or Youtube personality.
Social Circle is one of them. As well as bringing together brands and influencers, it runs free courses for wannabe Instagram ‘superheroes’ who can pull in upwards of £1 million per year in sponsorship deals. It offers help with how to attract brands, secure deals and fulfil contracts and advises on accountancy and tax once money starts rolling in.
but can it help me? I meet Eleana overett, 29, and beckii Flint, 23, at the Social Circle offices in Shoreditch, London (where else?). Eleana is a strategy mastermind who has 10,700 subscribers on Youtube, while beckii is a veteran of the online world.
Doll-like and charming, with vibrant red hair and a perfect cupid’s bow mouth, Beckii started making Youtube videos aged 11 and now has 126,000 followers after a video of her dancing to a Japanese pop song went viral.
But these girls are no airheads — they are sharp and knowledgeable about the industry. People who say women aren’t good at negotiating money haven’t met these two. We start by running my Instagram numbers through social Circle’s online ‘ value calculator’. this algorithm works out what you can charge based on your followers and your ‘engagement’, which is a loose term meaning how many of your followers are paying attention to what you post.
Engagement might mean someone commenting on or sharing a picture, for example. I am rather devastated to see I can charge just £50 for an Instagram post. My dreams of making a million at my kitchen table, are shattered.
Eleana and Beckii are quick to reassure me this is merely a benchmark and not the maximum I could ever expect to earn per post at this stage. they are also dismissive of my claim my following is too piddly to be of any interest to brands. ‘Follower numbers are only part of the picture,’ says Eleana. ‘What brands look for as a measure of success is engagement.’
Engagement really is important, the pair insist, as followers can be bought or otherwise faked.
But, even if an account genuinely has many followers, an Instagram personality with 500,000 followers may have low engagement simply because their followers feel removed from them.
It’s a fine line to tread: offering a lifestyle that is highly enviable and yet achievable, too. LEt’s
get real, though. What do I need to do in order to pull in the big bucks? the girls go quiet. the elephant in the room is that Instagram favours beautiful photography. And, well, I’m not taking very beautiful photographs.
I ask for tips. ‘there are a lot of apps that will help you edit your photos,’ says Beckii, kindly. ‘You can increase brightness and saturation and apply a custom filter. It all really helps.’
‘Always keep in mind the rule of three,’ adds Eleana. ‘Pictures ought to be divisible into blocks of three areas, both horizontally and vertically.’
this means nothing to me, but I admit my photos are pretty terrible, always taken in a rush, never edited and probably not madly inspiring. Eleana and Beckii comment on the fact that I regularly cut my head off when I post pictures of an outfit: ‘Most people want to see faces.’
I take solace from the fact that, despite my terrible photos, I do ‘convert’ — which means that if I recommend something, it sells well. this is the key outcome High street brands are looking for. Designer brands are usually just after someone cool to wear their clothes — sales are a secondary concern, as their product is so prohibitively expensive (and they know it).
In the most recent sponsored work I took on for John Lewis, for example, I raved about a brilliant, affordable black trouser suit, which sold out within the day in all sizes. When I recommended the ‘snoody’ — a scarf for children — sold by the shop trotters, my followers crashed the website buying it.
these are all good signs of potential influencer status. so perhaps there is still hope for me to become an Instagram superhero. I’d better get practising my photography. Or learn how to dance to Japanese pop songs . . .