Too much of "Influencers"

Dear All,

My name is Amy and I am from Mongolia. I am a senior psychology student at the University of New York in Prague and this semester I am taking a course called Media&Society. Since now, I will be posting issues concerning INFLUENCERS of social media. I will provide information based on my personal perspective and judgement, but I will also provide information from psychological point of view.

I hope you will think twice after reading my posts and become critical when scrolling down social media.


So, here is the introduction.

For my whole life, I lived in the capital city of Mongolia, Ulaanbaatar (except for my 1 semester journey to the US and 4 years in the Czech Republic). And few decades ago, an area called advertisement came in into our society. But it was only shown in TV and heard in radio.

The internet was there, but was not that actively used before 2006, 2007. And only from that time, our citizens just started to browse the net, connect with each other by Yahoo Messenger, and add each other on Hi5 to share photos (not sure if some of you remember this website, but this was popular before Facebook).

Then from 2008, Facebook replaced Hi5 and all of us had at least one account there. At that time, only few used Instagram, but rarely. Mainly Facebook and mainly for browsing photos, videos, without any advertisements.

Now, in 2019, millennials, youngsters, adults, professionals, non-professionals, ALL use Instagram. That is a fact.

If I recall, only 2-3 years ago, it was used for only personal archive. But now, it is hard to say that people use it for their personal zone.

All I can see is advertisements, promotions, reviews. It is a good thing, of course, if I can see it from a marketer's perspective, you know, saving money and being beneficial to both the customer, audience and yourself. Advertisements cost a lot (time, money, energy, creativity, productivity), we are all aware of it. Then comes Instagram and registered people with many followers (10k, 20k, 30k..). Why not to combine these two and promote the product with a low cost, right?



Within any positive thing, there is a negativity. This is an unwritten rule.
This Instagram promotion thing with so-called influencers went too far in my home country. And this area interests me because it gives an idea of easiness to non-professional marketing people. It makes Instagram an advertising platform, where all you can see is ads.

The terminology "influencer" should define a person who is considerate, thoughtful and someone who aims for quality. However, these days, I see too many of these promoting people on social media aiming for nothing but just for fame. They use advertising in a wrong way: too many unnecessary information on their stories and posts, when followers just skip it; too many invitations to parties when the organization mentions an "influencer" in their stories and that "influencer" re-shares it on his/her story;  too many giveaways; too many product reviews, when that influencer just says what is on the instruction, without mentioning proper effect of the product.

So, I would like to discuss how to use the social media account for advertisements without annoying followers and how to keep them by giving proper, effective information about certain product. These days, we judge others by his/her social media profiles, therefore, I think it is a worth mentioning topic.