“You don’t have to eat it,” she offered. “Just make it pretty.”

November 30, 2016 7:30 AM

After my mom gently inquired about, as she put it, “your male modeling career,” and I told her I was working on a story, she let out a sigh. “Oh,” she said. “I was worried there was some massive insecurity going on.” My baffled friends also had questions. “First, you look boss. Congrats,” my friend Dave wrote in a comment. “Second, what is going on?” Confessions of an Instagram Influencer (Bloomberg)
posted by everybody had matching towels (25 comments total)

This was really interesting, especially to see all of the work and money that went into achieving less than 2k followers.
posted by Think_Long at 7:45 AM on November 30, 2016 [2 favorites]

My favorite takeaway from this is that people can buy stock photos of breakfast to make their account look cooler. Now I'm curious how popular of an account I could create with a bunch of free images.
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 7:45 AM on November 30, 2016 [7 favorites]

Related: Young Instagram star retroactively edits her picture captions to show followers how fake and staged her "perfect" life is. Buzzfeed
posted by FirstMateKate at 7:51 AM on November 30, 2016 [4 favorites]

#liveauthentic. That's perfect. Everything about this is perfect.
posted by Diablevert at 8:18 AM on November 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

#liveauthentic. That's perfect.

I like how he lets the irony of the hashtag just lay there, implicit but unmentioned.
posted by Think_Long at 8:21 AM on November 30, 2016

Great article!
-MyMeFi Bot

I didn't take social media seriously to start with, but that article revealed a level of fake I hadn't even considered.
posted by COD at 8:23 AM on November 30, 2016

This reveals that there are vast swaths of the internet that are both way more popular than most anything I visit and completely foreign to me.
posted by Zalzidrax at 8:25 AM on November 30, 2016 [11 favorites]

I sometimes use the edit window to reword comments and make them funnier.

My whole life is a fraud lie.
posted by leotrotsky at 8:31 AM on November 30, 2016 [2 favorites]

This is absolutely fascinating.

"Now her dog, Bodhi, is a business and is represented by a special influencer pet agency, Wag Society. (The company is owned, improbably, by the New York Times Co. and boasts 150 clients, including hedgehogs, cats, and a potbellied pig named Esther.)"

I think I found Esther: estherthewonderpig

Interesting how important hashtags are for this kind of thing, since without retweets they are the only way to get in front of a larger audience.
posted by simonw at 8:31 AM on November 30, 2016 [3 favorites]

For $10 every 30 days, Instagress would zip around the service on my behalf, liking and commenting on any post that contained hashtags I specified. (I also provided the bot a list of hashtags to avoid, to minimize the chances I would like pornography or spam.) I also wrote several dozen canned comments—including “Wow!” “Pretty awesome,” “This is everything,” and, naturally, “[Clapping Hands emoji]”—which the bot deployed more or less at random. In a typical day, I (or “I”) would leave 900 likes and 240 comments. By the end of the month, I liked 28,503 posts and commented 7,171 times.

Huh. I've started focusing on Instagram over Tumblr as a way of promoting my art and have started to see this sort of like/comment pair come up on my posts. I'm not sure who the people who think targeting #ufo or #alienabduction is worth $10 a month are. Men in Black, probably, right?
posted by robocop is bleeding at 8:45 AM on November 30, 2016 [3 favorites]

This is fascinating. I was vaguely aware that this kind of thing was happening, but it's brilliant to see the actual "how-to" written out so clearly.

I tried the Focalmark app for generating hashtags starting with two tags I do often use for #chicago #cityscape pictures and it offered me this:

#focalmarked #seemycity #guardiancities #theimaged #fatalframes #yngkillers #visualmobs #heatercentral #streetmobs #illgrammers #shotaward #agameoftones #artofvisuals #ig_masterpiece #createcommune #urbangathering #thecreative #urbanromantix #insta_chicago #mychicagopix #chicagojpg #wu_chicago #midwestmoment #chictecture #flippinchi @focalmark

"Urbanromantix"? "Flippinchi"? What even...

Then I got curious about the fake followers so I tried the FollowerCheck. It said I had 4 fakes out of 50, but one of the suggested fakes is someone I know is real. The others - all of them with one sole picture of a woman in fairly revealing outfit - were pretty clearly fake. (I blocked them, what else can one do?)

I have no aspirations to be any sort of "influencer" but even so this article is great for getting to know how "social media" can be a system that you can work to get something.
posted by dnash at 9:02 AM on November 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

There is a Toronto food blogger whom I follow (and she follows in return) who drives me nuts with her hashtags for her stuff. Like, there is a dozen for stupid stuff like #oranges #juice #goodfood, etc. I'm like, I think you think that drives people searching for hashtags of that nature to your feed but it just screams "Please validate my lunch!"

(For the record, I only use hashtags for my cats and the filter I've used. But then I'm private so it's not like any old schmo searching the #catstagram is gonna see my feed anyway>)
posted by Kitteh at 9:15 AM on November 30, 2016

I always wondered how much time people spent thinking up 20 hashtags. It should have been obvious that there was an app for that.
posted by COD at 9:37 AM on November 30, 2016

"And you don’t necessarily have to pay them." - The Story Of The Internet
posted by The Card Cheat at 9:44 AM on November 30, 2016

The hashtag thing is interesting to me because I seem to have trained myself to be completely blind to them. If someone adds a hashtag to the #middle of a sentence, I actually have to go back and reread the whole thing because I will just automatically elide over it and the sentence becomes completely incoherent. I'm actually surprised they are so powerful for attracting views and followers.
posted by backseatpilot at 9:45 AM on November 30, 2016

It blew my brain that GaryVee has created a 650 person company out of his BS.
posted by COD at 9:46 AM on November 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

I enjoyed the article; honestly I'm sort of surprised anyone thinks these accounts represent any sort of lived experience. I follow several of these accounts- It's basically window-shopping. I follow people who post pictures of the kind of products and clothing I'm interested in (and fine, people I find attractive). The pictures are nice to look at, occasionally I see something I might want to buy, and there's a link to the product for me. For every one that you enjoy, there are 10 other 'influencers' who seem ridiculous and cliche and somehow have a million followers- of course someone else thinks the same of the ones I follow, because they are a different target demographic.

The illusion to it is nothing beyond conventional print advertising, only that people aren't (yet) expecting to see it on a social network the way they are.
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 9:47 AM on November 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

Anyway, you are welcome to follow me for inspiration for your next butchering adventures #meatlife #butchering #knivesout #onlycuttinguppigsipromise
posted by backseatpilot at 10:08 AM on November 30, 2016

Justin Bieber has some thoughts: " I think hell is Instagram. I'm 90 percent sure. We get sent to hell, we get like locked in the Instagram server"
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 10:18 AM on November 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

Is this like Amway and other pyramid schemes ? There's a small number of folks who make really big bucks as influencers, some people who maybe break even, and a whole lot of "the rest". And also where the "real" money is in offering the support/ancillary services (instead of motivational talks/retreats/tapes it's curated photos, photography, consulting etc) rather than in the product ?
posted by k5.user at 10:19 AM on November 30, 2016

And also where the "real" money is in offering the support/ancillary services (instead of motivational talks/retreats/tapes it's curated photos, photography, consulting etc

I have to admit, on reading the part about a photographer selling images of meals, I did think "I am both a reasonably good photographer and a reasonably good cook, and I could use some extra money..."
posted by dnash at 11:31 AM on November 30, 2016 [3 favorites]

I, too, am delighted by the factoid that one can buy stock images of granola and lattes (and presumably acai smoothies and live salads and I don't even know what else) to post on one's instagram account.

That reminds me, I should post a picture of my cat hanging out under the xmas tree. She's pretty photogenic, maybe she'll get me some new followers.
posted by quaking fajita at 12:56 PM on November 30, 2016

I must be doing something wrong! I started spending lots of time time on instagram but it's damn hard to build it manually.
posted by growabrain at 1:17 PM on November 30, 2016

I have a (currently on hiatus b/c breastfeeding!) instagram account where I'm cataloging the (historic and semi-historic) houses in a particular neighborhood of my city and I generally caption why I think the house is interesting, and then I hashtag its characteristics so I can search for it quickly when I put together a blog post about 1930s siding or whatever. But it's very amusing to me how many construction companies I'm followed by who apparently search for #bricksiding, or whatever.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 4:34 PM on November 30, 2016 [2 favorites]

But it's very amusing to me how many construction companies I'm followed by who apparently search for #bricksiding, or whatever.

Once I posted about #masonry and got a flurry of likes from around the globe! It was charming!


I am...not an influencer on Instagram.
posted by jetlagaddict at 10:56 PM on November 30, 2016 [1 favorite]