INSTAGRAM DOMINATES INFLUENCER MARKETING

99.3% of influencers said Instagram was a great place to connect with community and brands

Influencer marketing is one of the few areas of digital marketing with the power to sidestep the increase of ad blocking. But there’s a lot more to influencer marketing than that. An annual report from Hashoff, a micro-influencer marketing platform, examines the recent changes in the field.

The 300 influencers who responded to the survey are heavily engaged on social media. 56 percent spend at least four hours per day on social media, and more than 20 percent spend in excess of seven hours per day on social sites.

Only 12 percent of influencers surveyed indicated that influencer marketing is their only form of employment. Most others reported having a full- or part-time job in addition to their influencer work, and more than one-quarter of the respondents were students. This indicates that influencer work is contract-based and short-term.

However, the part-time nature of the work is not an indication of the quality of content. More than one-quarter of the survey respondents spend up to three hours on a piece of content from idea to production, and about 10.5 percent spend up to five hours per piece. More than one-half of the survey respondents percent spend 10 to 60 minutes per piece of content, likely because of the style and limitations of the platforms most influencers use.

Nearly all of the survey respondents said Instagram was their No. 1 platform for influencer work, citing community and opportunities to connect with brands as the driving factor for this choice. In fact, Instagram and Facebook seem to have consolidated as the main hub for influencer marketing, and Hashoff expects this trend to continue into next year.

Still, there is some indication that influencers plan to reduce their dependence on Facebook and Instagram and use other platforms even less. Instead, more than 8 percent of influencers plan to make YouTube their No. 1 platform next year—perhaps a reflection of the growing influence of video in digital and social media.

For more information on the future that influencers foresee and other thoughts about what they want the future of the industry to look like, check out the full report.