The Influencer Follower-Count Era Is Ending

The Business of Fashion Podcast - The Business of Fashion

This episode of The Business of Fashion Podcast explores the declining importance of follower count as a metric of influence in the digital age. As algorithm-driven platforms like TikTok's For You

Key takeaways

• Follower count is no longer a reliable indicator of influence due to algorithmic content distribution on TikTok and Instagram.
• Affiliate marketing platforms like ShopMy provide brands with granular data on which creators drive actual sales, enabling more precise partnerships.

Main topics

• Decline of follower count as a key performance metric
• Rise of algorithm-driven content discovery (TikTok For You Page, Instagram suggested posts)

Notable quotes

"Follower count can be a product of so many different things. You even think about like... someone else mentioned, you know, you think about a Sports Illustrated model. They might have millions of followers, but they might mostly be men."

Conclusion

The era of follower count as the ultimate measure of influence is ending. As algorithms prioritize content discovery over follower-based

Transcript preview

Speaker 4 (0:00) Introducing Meta Glasses. You have questions? They've got answers. Speaker 3 (0:05) Hey, Meta, what's the capital of Peru? Lima. How Speaker 4 (0:09) do you say, Speaker 3 (0:09) where's the restroom in Spanish? Speaker 2 (0:12) ¿Dónde está el baño? Hey, Meta, is a hot dog a sandwich? Speaker 3 (0:17) Technically, no. Spiritually, yes. Speaker 4 (0:20) Hey, Meta, what should I do with my Speaker 2 (0:22) life? Speaker 3 (0:22) That's one of life's biggest questions. What do you think? Ask Speaker 4 (0:27) anything with the new Meta Glasses. Speaker 1 (0:38) Hello and welcome to The Debris from the Business of Fashion, where each week we delve into our most popular BOF professional stories with the correspondents who created them. I'm Senior Correspondent Sheena Butler-Young. Speaker 1 (0:53) For years, the clearest sign that an influencer had made it was the number sitting at the top of their profile, follower count. More followers meant more reach, more brand deals, and usually more money. But social media doesn't work that way anymore. TikTok's For You page, Instagram's suggested posts, and other algorithmically curated feeds mean creators can reach huge audiences without those people ever following them. At the same time, affiliate marketing is giving brands a clearer picture of who actually drives engagement and sales, with smaller creators often performing particularly well. So if follower count is no longer the defining measure of influence, what replaces it? BOF's U.S. editor Diana Pearl has been reporting on how brands and creators are rethinking the value of an audience. Welcome back to The Debrief, Diana. Speaker 2 (1:40) Thanks for having me. Speaker 1 (1:43) So we should start probably with the metric itself, follower count. For a long time, that was the defining shorthand for a creator's value. Why was that so important? Speaker 2 (1:53) You have to remember influencer marketing is still a relatively young industry. Like it's only been, you know, a thing at all, I'd say for like a little over 10 years. And then it's really only become this huge behemoth in the last, you know, five to six years. So because of that, they're just at the beginning, there wasn't. many like options available when it came to determining who the best creator was to partner with, how effective a certain creator could be. The follower count is like right there. It's at the top of your profile. And, you know, advertisers do a lot of times think about reach. You know, you think about, you know, television advertising, and obviously you think about the demographics of the audience you're trying to reach. But like, there's a reason the Super Bowl is the most expensive ad slot in. a novel of advertising. It's because it's Speaker 3 (2:38) a Speaker 2 (2:38) big audience. So usually it just sort of goes with the standard thinking of big audience means they make more money, more success, et cetera. So really it was more a product of, you know, the fact that the industry hadn't really matured yet. And obviously it's still going through that maturing process, but we're in a very different place in the industry now. And I think it's just caused influencer marketers, brands to just think differently about. you know, how do we really determine and judge success? Speaker 1 (3:06) And there's probably a more basic factor at play here. It's like being in high school, the popular person, like even if there was, there were probably a lot of people that never thought they were going to make a business out of it to your point that it's about 10 years into being a full-on industry. It was just, you looked cooler if more people were paying attention to your page, regardless of anything else. And fashion and retail obviously care a lot about who's cool and popular. Speaker 2 (3:28) Totally. And I don't think that's fully gone away. Like there's a cachet in having a lot of followers and that that still exists. But now I think that just the business reasoning behind just choosing, you know, for a partnership or a campaign, choosing the influencer with the most followers, it's just a little weaker now that there's so much more data that brands can look to to determine who to partner with. Speaker 1 (3:51) And that's sort of a nice segue into my next question, because something I've been saying sort of anecdotally to friends in the industry, but also just like in my personal life, there's a lot of people with a lot of followers now. At some point, you've got to start to filter out what kind of or the value of each number across the board. Like if 10 people have a million followers, you have to now qualify that one million. So the chatter around a macro influencer versus a micro influencer, I remember that existing very early on, even if we weren't labeling them as such, it was based on conversion. Like someone can have millions of followers, but if you are a fashion brand or retailer, that million doesn't mean that those people are going to convert. What's actually new today about, you know, making the number less important? What are some of the things that are newer? Speaker 2 (4:39) You know, for a long time, it was just hard to determine which influencers were the top converters for you. You know, LTK, which is the incumbent influencer monetization platform, for a long time, they didn't offer a ton of data around who was driving sales for you, just that influencers on the LTK platform were driving sales. But you couldn't see which individual creator that was unless you were running a paid partnership with them. ShopMy really changed that. They offer brands a lot more insight into which creators are actually driving sales, even if they're not running a paid partnership. So you can just notice, oh, this one girl is linking to us a lot. She's driving a lot of sales. She only has 40,000 followers. It's maybe not someone that you would have come across organically or found on your own, but she's a really big, strong advocate for our brand and an effective advocate for our brand. Speaker 1 (5:26) The other thing that's a factor here is the affiliate marketing of it all. For the uninitiated, assuming that everyone listening is not an influencer, what is the TLDR definition of affiliate marketing and what's the role of that in all of this, in this shift, I should say? Yeah. Speaker 2 (5:41) Affiliate marketing, I would say, has always really been the backbone of the influencer industry, the creator economy. You know, it's when you share a link to a product, someone clicks on it, they make a purchase, and then whoever's link that was, they get a cut of that purchase. So I think that that availability of data, you know, ShopMight really changed the game. LTK now offers a lot more data to brands because, you know, ShopMight kind of just changed the standards and the norms. But there's so many more platforms out there now that allow you to get a better picture of how effective an influencer marketing campaign is. And I think that that has just opened things up a lot in terms of, you know, what brands are looking for in terms of who they want to partner with. I think creators now also have more data to back themselves up and say, like,