Two-thirds of Central Coast social media influencers are little value to advertisers
LESS than one-in-three so-called social media “influencers” in one NSW region have enough engaged followers to make them valuable to advertisers, a new report has found.
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LESS than one-in-three of the Central Coast’s so-called social media “influencers” have enough engaged followers to make them valuable to advertisers, a new report has found.
The report, conducted by data analysis company Lumio for the Express Advocate, shows no amount of gratuitous gym selfies or chiselled six-packs can compensate for engaging content with the rest just “noise” appearing in people’s news feeds.
With the top 10 of the Most Influential Central Coast people to be released tomorrow, we thought it would be good to have a look at those influential on social media.
We approached Lumio to run the numbers on some of the Coast’s most followed Instagrammers. And the results were surprising.
Lumio chief executive Dan Anisse said he was inspired to create his data analytics business after noticing he wasn’t getting results with influencers he hired for sponsorships for his eCommerce company.
Mr Anisse developed an algorithm to analyse how often a user’s followers actually comment and like their posts and uses it to produce a score out of 100 to rate influencers.
While some social media influencers commanded millions of followers and had companies throwing thousands of dollars at them to post favourably about their products, the Lumio report found the majority on the Coast were “micro influencers” with a few hundred thousand followers.
Mr Anisse said this was not necessarily a bad thing.
“What happens is when you get a higher amount of Instagram followers it’s harder for them to sustain those as valuable followers,” he said.
“If it’s not compelling content it’s not going to keep people interested.”
He said micro influencers were also more likely to “want to impress” brands who hired them and would work harder.
“I think the big take away for me is brands should put their effort into 10 micro influencers with a high Lumio scores than one big influencer with a lower Lumio score,” he said.
“For a brand that’s more valuable, they get more bang for their buck.”
Lumio’s algorithm looks at the types of followers someone has and drills down to see whether they were loyal fans who were highly engaged with an influencer right through to “ghost” profiles, which were suspicious accounts that do not engage in activity.
“What we use for our metric is a term called `valuable’ followers who actually engage. A user can have 1.8 million followers but only a fraction of them really care about them,” Mr Anisse said.
“There might be someone with much less followers but they are more useful to an advertiser because their followers are really tuning into their content.”
Fitness model Laura Amy — who posts copious amounts of scantily clad photos of herself — had the most followers of any we could find on the Coast with 464,100 but the report found only 37 per cent of those were ‘valuable’ for an overall Lumio score of 38.
Mummy blogger Mel Watts on the other hand had just 159,100 Instagram followers but 46 per cent of those were ‘valuable’ for a Lumio score of 73.
Mr Anisse said influencers with a Lumio score of 60 or above would have a high enough percentage of followers to make them valuable to advertisers.
Ms Watts said she started her blog three years ago as a way to connect with other mothers because she felt like she could not “find my tribe here locally”.
She left her job as a hospital nurse to raise her four children but did not think her blog would go anywhere.
“I currently make an income on my blog and its more than I was nursing,” she told the Express Advocate.
“I’ve worked longer and harder hours than I did when I was nursing and pushed myself out of my comfort zone many times.
“I’m just someone who went for it and it paid off — I’m a social media influencer mummy blogger, who is just winging it.
“I’m extremely lucky and blessed to have the life I have because of this, though it doesn’t come without its downfalls like every job. But instead of this just being a hobby, now it's a full-time job, which is hard for people to understand, I didn’t understand it at the time.”
At the other end of the scale was Miss Summernats 2017 winner Jazmyne Wardell who has fewer followers at 53,800 and an engagement rate of just 1.7 per cent for an overall Lumio score of just 18.
Ultimately, Mr Anisse said it was difficult to compare the Coast’s social media influencers because the difference in their numbers of followers was “too large”.
HOW THEY RATED
Mel Watts
159,100 followers
42.7 per cent engaged
2.3 per cent ghost followers
73,1723 valuable followers
Lumio score 73
Sophie Cox
5,500 followers
34.1 per cent engaged
3.9 per cent ghost followers
2,502 valuable followers
Lumio score 73
Abbey Meehan
10,200 followers
34.4 per cent engages
2.7 ghost followers
4,264 valuable followers
Lumio score 61
Madison Chilvers
17,200 followers
40.6 per cent engaged
4.1 per cent ghost followers
6,907 valuable followers
Lumio score 55
Jarred Brown
4,100 followers
41.5 per cent engaged
1.8 per cent ghost followers
1,569 valuable followers
Lumio score 48
Nathan McCallum
337,800 followers
39.9 per cent engaged
6.1 per cent ghost followers
125,973 valuable followers
Lumio score 43
Dominique Cherry
11,500 followers
43.5 per cent engaged
0.6 per cent ghost followers
4,192 valuable followers
Lumio score 40
Monique Craft
24,100 followers
31.9 per cent engaged
2.2 per cent ghost followers
8,776 valuable followers
Lumio score 39
Laura Amy
464,100 followers
36.2 per cent engaged
8.3 per cent ghost followers
168,563 valuable followers
Lumio score 38
Jazmyne Wardell
53,800 followers
35.4 per cent engaged
6.7 per cent ghost followers
17,297 valuable followers
Lumio score 18