Social media influencers arrived as fast as social media came online, attracting attention to restaurants, businesses and products with pretty pictures and pithy phrases.
There’s no denying the impact that an influencer can have on advertising a business. According to Insider Intelligence’s report on marketing during COVID-19, influencers are on track to be a $15 billion dollar business by 2022, nearly double the $9 billion they generated in 2019. With the pandemic, social media saw a rise in daily use, which heightened influencers’ power.
Amid a pandemic and a fraught political landscape, how social media is used has changed for many, whether it’s adapting to working around COVID-19 or talking about the many social issues that headlined 2020.
“When the pandemic arose, we really had to start thinking about, ‘What do the client's key audiences need as the client adjusts its operations to COVID-19,’” said Tracie Broom, co-founder and chief strategy officer at Columbia’s Flock and Rally, a full-service creative agency focused on assisting clients with branding, marketing and communication.
When the pandemic began to shut down the local economy, Flock and Rally had to quickly pivot not only their day to day operations, but their marketing strategies with clients, putting a new emphasis on safety.
“For our restaurant clients like Motor Supply and Cantina 76, we have prioritized being transparent and honest with guests about things like precautions being taken, owner responses to the pandemic and the need to support local businesses,” offered Hailey Covell, communications strategist for Flock and Rally.
“Being a hub for information on restaurant hours, precautions, to-go hours and more has also been incredibly important during this time, because people look to social media just as much as they'd look to a website for that type of information these days.”
While marketing firms like Flock and Rally focus on dialing down messages for clients, influencers had a different challenge during the pandemic: figuring out how to continue their day-to-day work in lockdown.
“My view on the responsibility that comes with any amount of influence has definitely changed,” said Emma Waugh. She runs the Instagram account girleatscharleston, where she talks about food and culture in the Lowcountry.
“First with COVID, I was hyper-aware of how sharing about going out to eat could be adding to the problem, so I did my best to spread helpful information about what was/wasn’t safe while also encouraging people to still support local restaurants in other ways,” Waugh reflected.
“It was hard knowing I might be hurting a business by dissuading people from being out in crowds, but the idea that I could cause people to get sick and die on the other hand was even worse.”
While COVID-19 played a big role in reshaping work for food influencers on an everyday basis, the Black Lives Matter movement during the late spring led Waugh to reconsider how she used her platform. She began incorporating activism and voicing her support for the movement into her everyday work, which led to some mixed reactions among her following.
“When I started speaking out about it, the way some of my former audience responded to me in direct messages was really upsetting, not because of my own hurt feelings but because I realized how full of ignorance and racism Charleston really is.
“But at the same time, that realization was the turning point: I didn’t want my page to be a safe space for racists. I would rather lose half my followers than silently send a message that I was OK with what was happening to the Black community, or have anyone assume I shared their bigoted views. I also wanted my Black followers to know they had an ally in me, definitely not a perfect one, but someone who was trying to learn.”
Broom is supportive of influencers like Waugh who have used their platforms for advocacy, but understands the challenges in doing so.
“I think that every influencer has to consider their brand and what their audience wants,” Broom reasoned. “It's up to each and every influencer to decide whether they can layer activism in terms of advocating for pandemic safety in a very overt way. I think that we are in ... an era plagued by polarization and I have compassion for those who feel they might be subject to negative consequences if they were to add some sort of component to their presence as an influencer that would jeopardize their following or their sponsorships.”
For Waugh, speaking out has become something of an imperative.
“Influencers for the most part aren’t going to be thought leaders and experts about social issues,” she said, “and maybe some were feeling pressure and worried they didn’t know enough to speak on a topic, and kept silent. But really I think for a lot of them, the real reason was that they didn’t want to alienate parts of their audience.
“I lost respect for a lot of influencers this year. I couldn’t fathom how someone could post about everyday stuff when the country was in a social justice crisis, or promoting unsafe activities when there was a global pandemic. I think maybe three years ago influencers could get away with just ‘staying out of it,’ but not anymore.”
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March 03, 2021 at 12:00PM
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What is the social responsibility of social media influencers? - Charleston Post Courier
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