Not helping matters, a number of social media services, including Viralyft and Twicsy, sell followers, likes or views directly to creators and businesses wanting to boost their clout. Some of that traffic is made up of bots.

So how do agencies know what’s real?

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Molly Burke and Tyler Oakley joined YouTube more than a decade ago and built their respective online followings by advocating for the causes and communities of people that were important to them — even if it wasn’t always the easiest way to rapidly grow given the platform’s algorithm.

Since then, Burke and Oakley both expanded to additional platforms, like Patreon and Twitch, to continue garnering meaningful relationships with their followers. While Burke said she’s been able to learn a lot about her viewers personally through Patreon, Oakley said that two-way direct communication on Twitch has been instrumental in how he creates content in the moment. 

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In a world where video has become the predominant medium for content creators, Substack offers a reprieve in the form of the written word.

The subscription-based newsletter platform received a surge of interest during the pandemic, garnering hundreds of new creators — including Hunter Harris and Caroline Chambers — who were interested in monetizing their ideas without always needing to jump in front of a camera. And less than four years later, the platform has enabled these creators to monetize their content via thousands of paid and unpaid subscribers — not to mention advertiser sponsorship, affiliate links or even book deals. 

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What started as a part-time, pandemic-induced pregnancy journey vlog has turned into a family business for social media creators Ben and Lazara Martin, and their three boys.

Since 2020, the couple has racked up nearly 8 million followers across social media, boasting family-friendly content to strike deals with brands like Huggies, Flexcar and Applebee’s. But even as the influencer and content creator landscape continues to grow, changes in platform algorithms, the looming TikTok ban and more put pressure on creators.

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“Gen Z has a deep connection to impactful advocacy, and the associated content seems to make waves with other demographics on the platform as well,” said Nickey Rautenberg, director of content performance at influencer agency HireInfluence.

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The Swell Audience Network aims to integrate data insights and help brands work with all different types talent, from celebrities to influencers, and manage their audiences programmatically. Increasingly, agencies and influencer agencies alike are building tools and partnerships in order to match brands and influencers — often using artificial intelligence and data-focused applications as a means to sort accurately through an expanding sea of options.

From the agency perspective, adding measurement injects a vital element to justifying their clients’ investments, including showing metrics like awareness or conversions, said Sarah Bachman, head of Blue Hour Studios, a Horizon affiliate formed in 2019.

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Food influencers aren’t the only ones who combine brand partnerships in their content. The same can be said for beauty influencers, for example when they post a Target haul or beauty routine, or fashion influencers, when they post summer outfit inspiration, or myriad other influencers in various niches. Marketers are increasingly recognizing the benefit of collaborating with other brands on influencer marketing efforts and are anecdotally more keen to do so this year, according to five influencer marketing executives.

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As a platform, X (formerly Twitter) has seen better days. After Elon Musk took over back in 2022, the platform has fallen from grace with advertisers and creators alike, due to the reinstatement of previously banned accounts, an increase in bots and simultaneous decrease in brand safety. However, X hasn’t managed to scare away everyone.

In fact, Jessica Davis, a part-time creator who focuses on career content, has managed to build out a following of more than 40,000 people since starting her account in 2021. Since then, she’s been able to convince subscribers and brands to shell out for her tweets, pulling in revenue from monthly subscriptions and funds from the platform’s ad revenue sharing program, which launched last summer.

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The agency hopes to build the new service, called Prime Influence, into a consultative strategy so it can expand beyond the day-to-day execution of briefs and campaigns for clients. As the influencer marketing sector grows, more agencies in the space are now expanding their creator-facing and client-facing offerings, from providing membership, creating events and opening meeting spaces to access to tools and business consultation.

“[Influencer agencies are] not just connecting brands with influencers anymore,” said Stefanie Beach, founder and CEO of SMB Media Consulting. “They’re offering comprehensive strategies, from content creation to campaign analytics,” or influencer matchmaking based on niche audiences.

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During the third quarter of 2023, influencer marketing shop Obviously started to spend more time talking to clients and pitching new business on its “predictive modeling” capabilities, according to Mae Karwowski, CEO and founder of the company. That process includes analyzing spending habits, influencer relationships and the overall share of influence of the market that a brand’s competitor may have on a monthly or quarterly basis and then devising a strategy for their client brand based on that knowledge.

That intel can give potential clients a better idea of the “white space” available, explained Karwowski, who added anecdotally that throughout the first quarter of this year the shop has been “winning more pitches,” but did not provide specific new client names. Let’s say your competition is “really crushing it with this segment of Instagram Reels and it’s all funny content,” said Karwowski, adding that understanding what a competitor is doing allows marketers to find points of differentiation. “If you want to be funny, you’ve got to be funnier than them. Or we can go with something more educational or do story times.”

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Enter virtual influencers. That’s right, digital characters if you will, which are in some cases used instead of human influencers as a means to reach new audiences and showcase new levels of innovation that companies have to offer.

While this isn’t a new concept — virtual influencers have been around since the early 2000s — the rise of AI and the growth of the creator economy have sparked a resurgence in marketers’ interest in these digital personas.

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Despite strict regulations around advertising and brand partnerships, marketers and specialist agencies have been working to carefully select rosters of Olympians in the hope of piggybacking their rare organic reach in the run-up to, and during, the Olympic and Paralympic Games.

Samsung, for example, began sponsoring the governing body for skateboarding in the U.K. (imaginatively titled Skateboarding UK) last September. The brand hopes to capitalize on both the novelty of the sport, only a recent addition to the Olympic Games, and the profile of skateboarder Sky Brown.

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In this edition of the Digiday+ Research Briefing, we examine how influencers see more Instagram engagement with still images than Reels, how publishers aren’t yet worried about the impact of a potential TikTok ban on their revenues and what types of first-party data are most important to marketers for ad targeting on streaming platforms, as seen in recent data from Digiday+ Research.

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These days, it can feel like social media is a bit obsessed with the short-form video format. But recent research on influencer marketing conducted by Digiday came to a bit of a surprising conclusion: When it comes to sponsored posts featuring influencers on Instagram, images actually perform better than short-form videos.

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Brand advertisers in the health and pharma sector are some of the biggest-spending clients on media agency books. In the past, though, they’ve steered clear of influencer marketing. Now, despite uncertainty over the future of TikTok, industry experts say that influencer marketing has matured enough that healthcare clients are embracing it. And with the third-party cookie on its (albeit delayed) way out, pharma brands are hoping it’s an alternative means to target key audiences.

“I’ve always found pharma, as an industry, to be a couple steps behind,” said Klick Health executive creative director Tim Jones. Now, he said, “it’s getting in lockstep with [consumer brands], as we get braver and braver clients.”

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