influencers | Chris Aldrich

👓 Hackers Are Stealing Influencer Instagram Accounts By Promising Lucrative Brand Deals | The Atlantic

Read How Hackers Are Stealing High-Profile Instagram Accounts (The Atlantic)

In the Wild West of “influencer” marketing, there are few protections and plenty of easy marks.

Of the multi-billion dollar business and the issues with needing to give away one’s password to be tracked within this field, the real loss here seems to be that Instagram isn’t building infrastructure for their users to take advantage of these opportunities. Even if they were only taking a small fraction of the income for facilitating the market, they’re missing out on hundreds of millions.

It’s not mentioned here, but the fact that there are businesses built around the idea of “link in bio” means that Instagram really isn’t innovating on their platform.

Is Instagram really so deaf to the needs of their userbase?

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👓 Teachers Are Moonlighting As Instagram Influencers To Make Ends Meet | BuzzFeed

Read Meet The “Teacher Instagrammers” Who Moonlight As Influencers To Make Ends Meet (BuzzFeed News)

One teacher in Texas told BuzzFeed News she makes a $50,000 a year, but made over $200,000 in a year through Instagram.

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👓 Instagram’s Wannabe-Stars Are Driving Luxury Hotels Crazy | The Atlantic

Read Instagram’s Wannabe-Stars Are Driving Luxury Hotels Crazy (The Atlantic)

Hotels are being forced to figure out how to work with a new class of brand-peddling marketers.

Just because you’ve got the desire to be a social media influencer doesn’t mean you don’t need to treat it like a serious business.

Social platforms have such huge scale now, I’m surprised they don’t crack down on bots and fake accounts so that it’s more transparent what kind of true value accounts actually bring to the table. They could even leave them in the system so they can show to investors that they’re getting the traffic and “engagement”, but they’re throwing away a lot of actual value by not disclosing actual accounts and real engagement by real people (aka potential customers). Bots are second class citizens because other than the veneer of value, they’re really not adding much to the conversation other than a weak form of tummeling.

This makes me wonder if anyone in the social networking space is doing research on bots as tummelers?

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