It is a ‘long-term game’

Becoming an influencer takes time, say experts

PETALING JAYA: Industry experts say it will generally be “long-term game” for anyone to become an influencer on social media, what with the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.

Gushcloud country director Wan Hou Yin said there had been an increase in the content created on social media during the movement control order.

“Official sources tell us that daily average TikTok users increased by 70% while video content posted increased by as much as 110%,” he said.

“I believe people started creating more content during that time for fun and personal sharing,” he added.

Wan said in general, however, the main aim of the majority of new content creators on social media was not necessarily to make money, though some might have wanted to do so incidentally.

“I guess the idea of making an income from content may be at the back of their minds, but more often than not if that’s their objective from the beginning, they might find themselves struggling to keep up because their intentions were in the wrong place.

“While the risk in creating such content is low, achieving high views for the content would depend on many factors such as the quality of content, consistency of postings and the content topic,” said Wan.

He said an Instagram creator may get paid a certain sum to post a photo or create a video based on a campaign brief given by the brand, adding that there might be certain brands which might be willing to buy over the social media accounts of influencers who have a substantial number of followers on their social media accounts.

“However, this is not our general practice, because morally we don’t think that’s right,” Wan added.

Pixaworks Creative chief executive Inbaraj Suppiah said a large following was needed before someone could earn a decent income from social media.

“Influencer work would mean getting other businesses to pay you to promote their products and services, and a person will need to have a decent following.

“The hardest will be to generate income from ads as you will need to generate a huge number of followers before you’re able to generate significant income from YouTube,” he said.

“That is a long-term game but sometimes you get lucky if it goes viral and you can build on that instant fame.”

While the risk in creating such content is low, achieving high views for the content would depend on many factors such as the quality of content, consistency of postings and the content topic.

Wan Hou Yin