Moderator Christine Philip of Global Glam magazine interviewed a panel of Experts including:

Christine Schott Ledes, Founder of The Beauty Influencers and President of the American Influencer Association

Eldonie Mason, an attorney specializing in entertainment law  at the Mason Law Firm

Parisa Wang, a handbag designer working with influencers around the world

Connie Chi, marketing strategist specializing in influencer branding and marketing at The Chi Group

And a panel of Influencers including:

Tina Lee, Of Leather and Lace, @OfLeatherandLace

Megan Mandell, Honest Twenty One, @HonestTwentyOne

Batsheva Weinstein, Sunnies and Sangria, @SunniesandSangria

Grace Lee, Gracefullee Made, @GraceFulleeMade

TOPICS OF DISCUSSION

BRANDS AND INFLUENCER PARTNERSHIPS

How can influencers gain the trust of a brand?

Influencers can gain the trust of a brand by building a quality, loyal audience of real followers that’s engaged and enthusiastic.  Publish quality content consistently.  Don’t be a diva and act professionally.

What is the best way for brands to get in touch with influencers?

Directly via email or DM.  The email option on must of the platforms is terrible.  Also, because marketers spam the influencers via these platforms, many influencers don’t pay attention to them any longer. Your best bet is to contact them directly.

What is the best way for influencers to get in touch with brands?

Find contact info (usually email) and send a thoughtful communication that spells out your value and why the brand should want to work with you.  Provide creative ideas about what you can do to promote their products and some stats about your audience.

What problems do you most often see in brand / influencer relationships?

Lack of communication about expectations by both sides. I also see brands looking to “control” influencer content and in some cases create it for them – which defeats the purpose of influencer marketing.  Instead, brands should look to cooperate with influencers in order to leverage their creativity and access their authenticity.

Influencers should look to build relationships with brands so they can work with them long term, focus on what really matters: serving their audiences by talking about beauty and makeup.  Instead, too many influencers focus on the money and what they can get out of brands.

What has been the most successful brand / influencer relationship you’ve experienced?

Schott pointed to the introduction she made between Lauren Bush and the UN World Food Programme as still one of the most rewarding and successful collaborations she has ever experienced, FEED Projects.  “What started out as Lauren’s inspiration for a re-useable grocery bag, sold on Amazon for $25, quickly became a hot fashion accessory sold at Bergdorf Goodman for up to $250, and has since grown into a whole line of products sold over the years at Barnes & Noble, Target, Whole Foods, on-line, and now in her own FEED store in Dumbo, which has raised more than $10 million to literally feed hungry children around the globe.”

What are some dos and don’ts for working with brands? 

Ensure the brand’s values align with yours.  Don’t sell out for money as your audience will likely sense it and begin to distrust you.  Realize that a smaller, engaged audience is better than a large, unengaged one.  Have a contract that spells out expectations for the brand as well as you.  Meet your obligations for the brand.  Be sure to specify all sponsored content clearly. 

 THE FUTURE OF THE INFLUENCER INDUSTRY

What do you see as the biggest problem facing the influencer industry?

Confusion and lack of education.  The purpose of influencer marketing is to access your target audience, your ideal consumers by leveraging other people (the influencers) and their content.  Its not about advertising, its about marketing.  See some of my comments above as I’ve already touched up this.

 What are bots and should an Influencer use them?

There are all kinds of bots and not all of them bad.  But when it comes to fake followers and fake engagement, don’t do either. Brands are catching on and starting to say no to working with influencers who have too many fake followers and/or engagement. And if you think they won’t notice, you’re only fooling yourself. 

 How can brands figure out if an influencer is using a bot?

There are some third party tools that can help with this, but it also helps to know what the bots are programmed to do.  Often fake followers don’t have profile pictures and they follow many people but have no followers of their own.  In terms of fake engagement, bots often leave thin comments like “Love this” or “Great post” or “Love your feed.”   Real people ask questions, offer specific observations about the post – bots don’t do that.

 Is using an influencer critical for a brand to grow their sales?

No, there are many ways to drive business, influencer marketing is just one strategy.  However, as a strategy, influencer marketing can get intricately involved in the customer journey where other strategies cannot.  Remember, people like to buy from other people when possible and this is the power of behind the strategy.

What one thing would you like to see change in the Influencer industry?

For brands and influencers to get more educated about the possibilities the strategy has to offer. For brands, its to stop thinking bigger audiences are necessary and to stop throwing money at influencers.

Who are the style or industry icons you most admire and why?

Kylie Jenner of Kylie Cosmetics was noted as just one of the many industry icons most admired. Like her or not, Kylie not only successfully launched a direct-to-consumer line of cosmetics, inspiring thousands of other influencers to do the same, but is now showing that the brick and mortar retail experience is still important by launching the brand in Ulta Stores for the holiday season. She is a clear leader in the influencer industry

What trends do you see coming next in the influencer industry?

The two trends that both Influencers and Experts agreed were important to watch are Influence Marketing and the growing importance of Micro Influencers.

Fashion Mingle is a platform for fashion industry professionals, creating local fashion directories in over 100+ cities nationwide. For more information, please visit: www.fashionmingle.net. 

The post Fashion Mingle’s: Influencers Unscripted appeared first on The Beauty Influencers.

A growing litany of exposés by news organizations about how these platforms are riddled with bots, fake followers and fake accounts and more.  All of this leading to questions about the viability of working with influencers.

YouTube is notable because so many beauty influencers inhabit that platform and have huge followings there.

As The New York Times reported a couple of days ago, there’s an entire cottage industry of small firms and individuals who cater to the impatient people who are looking for a short cut to building an audience.

Whether it’s to boost the appearance of popularity or to leverage that fake following into a money-making scheme by tricking brands into paying them, it’s become problem.

Either way, its underhanded and undermines the credibility of the other influencers who aren’t buying fake followers, etc. Stories like this tend to inflict collateral damage by tarnishing the entire influencer industry.

No matter the motivation, it’s cheating (and possibly worse) and we’re thankful to The New York Times for outing another underhanded practice many would-be influencers are utilizing.

This has gone on for far too long

As I’ve written before, the urge to buy fake followers comes from the desire to “juice” the algorithm, to artificially boost the visibility of content, to get in front of more eyeballs.

This phenomenon isn’t limited to cyberspace and the brick and mortar world has its comparisons.

For example, it’s like driving past a night club on a cold, Friday evening with a long line waiting outside the velvet rope, everyone shivering, waiting to get in.

As you pass by, your immediate reaction is to think “this club is popular,” so you get on line with your friends anticipating that inside it’s hopping with fun and interesting people.

It’s not until you enter the club that you realize you are some of the first people there!

The beautiful people you were hoping to meet haven’t arrived yet, so you spent that time outside, shivering in the cold, for nothing.

You were duped by the appearance of popularity.

Let’s look a more “extreme” example, but one that works in tandem with cyberspace:

Imagine you walk past a shop that appears to be jam-packed with people. 

This triggers a thought in your mind, causing you to believe the place is popular, luring you inside for a few minutes, to look around to see what the fuss is about.

But once you get inside, you find out the place if full of… mannequins.

The shop you thought was packed full of people is instead filled with lifeless dummies standing around.

Okay, I admit, this last example, when you think about it, is creepy – almost something out of the Zombies!

But really, the analogy works when we relate it to cyberspace. 

The mannequins in the store are equivalent fake followers and subscribers online. They aren’t real and they certainly aren’t going to buy anything. 

Now, it also stands to reason that fake followers don’t respond to beauty tutorials by influencers. They don’t engage, share, comment, like and certainly don’t buy product.

So my advice to firms and influencers is this: don’t do it.

Want more evidence that it’s a bad idea?

The Times article is replete with examples of people and organizations who’ve been duped into buying fake views for one reason or another – and all regretted it.

Remember the old adage, “Anything worth doing, is worth doing well!”  Same is true when building an online following.

Keep in mind, YouTube as a social media platform is different than Twitter and Instagram 

The reason is that not only does the number of views factor into the algorithm, but the number of subscribers, comments and time watched counts as well.

Unfortunately, all of these social metrics can be bought to some degree. 

The good news is that their quality is usually poor and easy to spot.

So, what about beauty influencers, are they buying fake views for their videos? Is this something to be concerned about?

Well, as to how many beauty influencers have bought fake followers, I’m not sure (and neither is anyone else). But the problem isn’t any more prevalent in beauty than any other retail category.

So, beauty isn’t squeaky clean because no one is immune from the temptation.

But with news stories like this one by The Times and with company announcements like Unilever’s CMO Keith Weed calling for an end to the practice of buying fake followers, the influencer marketing industry is moving in the right direction.

This is all good for the beauty industry: brands and influencers alike.

The tolerance for bad behavior – like buying fake followers, views or subscribers – is finally on the wane. This is what the American Influencer Association aims to address, as well.

As we learned last week, fake followers are basically impossible to avoid entirely, because bots start following influencers as soon as they get to a certain level. So, even the most legitimate influencers unfortunately have them, but we can certainly look at percentages.

And, I predict that as this trend gains momentum, the beauty influencers who are legit and honest, will benefit even more.  Their reputations will be burnished because of their desire for integrity.

Adding to this, is that the number of tools being developed to determine who’s buying followers and views and who’s not, is on the rise.

This is good news for marketers as it will become easier and faster to determine fake followers.

Platforms like Instagram and Twitter are making an effort to stamp out the fakes, now its YouTube’s turn to step up to the plate.

In YouTube’s case, the administrators make periodic system updates to disrupt the suppliers of the fakes.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t normally take much time before the suppliers are able to adjust and be open for business again.

The suppliers say they get around YouTube’s system updates by making their traffic appear more believable (more human) by ensuring that the views come from users with prior views.

No matter what, the suppliers of fakes views and followers aren’t going away soon.

But with the trifecta of the social platforms getting more vigilant; brands demanding more transparency and accountability; and with honest hard-working influencers standing by their integrity, and the importance of micro-influencers on the rise, I see the battle being won. 

It may just take a while.

The post Another Domino Falls: Now YouTube Gets Outed for the Problem of Fake Views #YouTubePurge appeared first on The Beauty Influencers.

However, the problem of fake followers, and the use of bots in general, has got marketers and brands a little nervous.

They’re so nervous that the problem is coming to a head and some social platforms are taking the initiative.

You don’t have to look any further than the latest #TwitterPurge for evidence.

But what about the other social media platforms, and in particular, Instagram?

Is Instagram in need of a purge now, too?

A recent study by Ghost Data suggests that of the reported 1 billion users on Instagram —up to 95 million bots, may be posing as real accounts. 

The last time Instagram cleaned out fake accounts was back in 2014 as reported by the Wall Street Journal. Back then, Instagram had 300 million users compared to the 1 billion it claims now.

Curious about the possibility for a parallel rise in the use of bots, Ghost Data conducted a survey to determine if fake accounts were growing in use. 

To do this, they purchased 20,000 bots and analyzed their qualities to assist them in identifying similar bots in over one million other accounts. 

The firm found that the bots tended to follow many famous Instagram accounts, but didn’t post much content of their own, other than reposting popular content scraped from other sources.

Therefore, the problem of fake followers is a real one.

The trouble is, however, not all “bots” are created equal and the term can mean different things.

The truth is, some bots are created to perform specific functions –often to save you time and make your life easier, while other bots are designed to trick or exploit the algorithms.

I know one prominent influencer who admitted to me that if you need a little extra something to juice up the algorithm, to get the algorithm to pay attention to you, buying fake followers is a common way to do it.

That being said, my goal here is not to discuss the ethics of buying fake followers, but to show you the many uses of bots and to show you how to spot fake followers – so you are in the know.

So, to clarify things, here’s a breakdown of some of the more popular uses for bots:

• Schedule and post your content on social platforms
• Send automated messages or replies
• Post similar messages over multiple social media accounts to scale your content
• Aggressively follow and unfollow other accounts as a strategy to grow your audience
• Auto-rounds are a bot that likes your Instagram posts (usually from small sized accounts) within 30 minutes of publishing to trick the platform algorithm into thinking your content is popular
• Power-likes are similar to auto-rounds but come from accounts with huge followings (500k to 1mm) prompting the algorithm to believe your content is really good stuff
• Fake followers to pump up the appearance of having a larger audience

As you can see, bots perform many functions.  Some are useful and meant to make posting content easier, while others are developed to deceive the algorithm into giving you more attention.

As we’ve written before, many users, even some notable celebrities, are guilty of boosting the appearance of having a large following by buying fake followers, a move Unilever’s CMO Keith Weed denounced in Cannes last month.

Since Weed’s statement, there’s been a marked reaction by brands and agencies to find better ways to vet influencers.

Even so, the problem will persist for a time until brands, social platforms and influencers come together to squelch it.

This is one of the challenges the American Influencer Association aims to address this year.

Until a solution is developed, we’ll have to make do, so let’s take a closer look at what this fake activity looks like, so you can identify it.

Good news: Fake followers are generally easy to spot. 

Fake followers are generated by small, boiler room operations located in the Philippines, Thailand or some other far eastern country.

These fake followers are created without much depth given to them and often lack profile pictures and even profile descriptions, like this one on Twitter:

It’s important to remember, however, that not all fake followers are purchased.  Some of them are bots that are sent to scrape content or perform other tasks.

I found the above follower on my account and I have no idea why it’s there.

The important thing to keep in mind is that every account has some fake followers present. The question is, how many? 

My goal here is to show you how to vet influencers’ followers so you can determine whether they are buying fakes to pump up their numbers.

But, don’t jump to conclusions. If some of your influencers have fake followers, it might not be their fault.

Now, let’s examine what they look like on Instagram:

Like Twitter, fake followers on Instagram will often have little information.

I’ve noticed a trend recently where fake followers will show up as private accounts like the one above. This is so you can’t see their lack of content or depth as a real person has.

A few details to notice about the example above:

• The profile photo is of a cartoon character rather than a person although fake accounts do sometimes use photos of people (scraped from dating sites)
• The name of the account “tgh_gg” makes it obvious this is a fake
• Lack of a profile description
• The account is private

However, these are the cheap and easy-to-spot fake followers. 

There are firms that will furnish real looking followers that include photos, profile descriptions and some content for a higher price, so this method is not foolproof.

This is where third party tools come in handy. 

One of the better ones is SocialBlade.  Using this tool, you can find information about the history of the account and stats on its followers whether it’s on YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Twitch and others.

Let’s look at one.

Instagram’s luxury niche has many accounts that are guilty of buying fake followers.

I’ll show you how to use SocialBlade and what to look for.

First, review the follower graph for the account you are reviewing and look for spikes in growth and steep drop offs.

The steep rises in followers are a sign of buying followers. Steep drop offs are evidence of purges by Instagram to weed out fake followers. 

Legitimate, organically grown audiences don’t look like this. Now look at the image below:

It’s a detailed look at evidence of fake followers being purged by Instagram.

Notice the daily drop off in followers – which is not necessarily abnormal.  This happens if an account is not maintained with fresh, quality content because the followers get bored.

But the precipitous drop of over 1500 followers is indicative of fake followers being purged from the account.

This begs the question, what do you look for then?

Look for an audience graph that shows a steady growth.  Growth can be rapid depending upon what strategies the influencer is employing to attract attention.

But more often than not, organically acquired audience growth looks like this:

The above chart is what you want to see with your influencer’s audience growth trajectory: slow and steady.

Wrapping-up

Fake follower bots are everywhere.  Therefore, be knowledgeable about how to spot them.  Also, be informed about what a healthy audience profile looks like on Instagram or any other social media platform.

Additionally, don’t cast influencers aside just because you find some fake followers on their rolls.  Instead, determine what percentage of fake followers is acceptable to you.  Is it 5% or 10%?

And one more thing, be sure to let the influencer you choose to work with know you are looking for fake followers.  Ask them to be transparent with you and purge them if they do exist.

Remember, the effort to stamp out the problem of fake followers is everybody’s job, not just the influencers.

The post Is an #InstagramPurge Next? appeared first on The Beauty Influencers.

It’s 2018, and many brands remain baffled about how to work with influencers. 

They struggle with which influencers to work with, tools to use and how to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns.

Rather than establish their own goals and then work to understand which influencers can help them achieve those, many brands continue to choose influencers based on inaccurate measures like number of followers and audience sizes.  Shallow measures like these lead to poor selection and disappointment with the return on investment.

And then there’s the problem of fake followers 

How do brands tell if an influencer’s audience is even real? 

As The New York Times reported, the problem of fake followers is widespread and often pursued even by well know celebrities. Surprisingly, even with the available tools, brands remain blind to this and find out only when it’s too late and the desired results disappoint.

Thankfully, many third-party tools exist for marketers to discover the viability of influencers’ followers, but knowing which ones are effective -and the sheer plethora of them, leaves one’s head spinning.

As I’ve written lately, choosing the right influencers for your brand doesn’t have to be difficult.  It simply requires using a proven method, some help from third party tools, along with that essential, human element of knowing what to look for.

And because the influencer industry is not as transparent as many of us would like, we still have to rely on our own skills as marketers to sift out the good influencers from the chaff.

Brands that don’t use proven methods are either ignorant, not working with seasoned professionals, or simply too lazy.  The result is that many continue to overpay influencers and work with ones who are incongruent.

Are Brands at a Disadvantage to Influencers?

According to some influence marketers, some fashion and beauty brands feel “out of control” when working with influencers and somehow believe the influencers are in charge. This mindset is baffling.

Since brands hold the money, and influencer marketing as a strategy wouldn’t exist without them, how can brands feel powerless when working with influencers? 

I can’t help but wonder where their PR and in-house marketing teams are? 

And don’t they work with competent agencies?

I wonder if the same brands feel “out of control” when conducting a traditional PR or advertising campaign? 

No, of course not.

So why is there a difference when working with influencers?

Brands setting up an influencer campaign need to pay attention to two simple things: relevance and engagement. 

These two basic metrics guide the philosophy and selection process necessary to working with the right influencers every time.

Third party tools and platforms can help you with this process, too, but you must know that none of them adequately vets the influencers or checks for fake followers.

You and your team have to do that on your own and this is where the human element is critical.

Thankfully, social platforms are slowly cleaning up their acts.

Just this week, it was reported that Twitter is cleaning house of fake accounts.

This is welcome news, but I expect fake followers to remain a problem.  Until influencers are held accountable for propping up their follower count by buying followers, they will likely continue.

Fortunately, the movement for influencer accountability is already underway -and being led by Unilever’s Keith Weed, as we’ve reported recently.

Additionally, some social platforms are easy to check for fake followers. 

For example, Twitter can be checked using the tool TwitterAudit, but other platforms like Facebook are more difficult and the human element is still required to spot fakes on most social media platforms.

So vetting influencers can be effectively done, it just takes some time and effort.

Brands that don’t vet influencers carefully can expect uneven or poor results.  Like any other marketing strategy, influencer marketing requires an upfront investment of time and money to be done right.

Any successful influencer strategy should be carefully mapped out and designed to achieve specific campaign goals.  These goals should be measured by specific KPIs used to measure success and to help re-adjust campaign strategy, if and when necessary.

Should brands focus on micro-influencers over “big name” influencers like the Kardashians?

Arguments exist on both sides of the micro vs mega-influencer strategy, but the governing principle should be what the brand wants to get out of working with influencers.

Is the purpose to drive brand awareness?  Or is it to generate leads and sales?

Once this is determined, the decision about what type of influencers to use can then be made.  If the goal is to boost awareness, then working with many influencers is necessary since frequency and repetition are needed. In this case, micro-influencers are the way to go.

An example of a beauty brand doing this well is L’Oreal which reportedly works with up to 20,000 influencers – most of them, micro-influencers. 

But they also work with select “big name” macro and mega-influencers, working hard to develop and maintain those relationships.

After all, don’t forget, many micro-influencers are influenced in their own right by the “big name” influencers they look up to!

Either way, brands are, indeed, in the driver’s seat.  And, the sooner they recognize this and begin to choose influencers based upon congruence while demanding accountability from them, the sooner they’ll start to feel how powerful this strategy really can be!

The post Are Brands Throwing Money Away on Influencer Marketing? appeared first on The Beauty Influencers.

Unless you’re totally unplugged on a beautiful Greek island soaking up the sun, you can probably sense the fundamental changes re-shaping the beauty industry right now…

First is the news that Instagram is setting up a new beauty-partnership team led by Kristie Dash.

Dash was previously part of the fashion-partnerships team at Instagram, a group that acts as a resource for the fashion community to stay abreast of trends and changes on its platform.

Instagram understands the value it brings to certain industries (fashion and beauty) and they want to foster that.

Being more than just a platform means investing in certain business verticals.  Fashion was the first.

Instagram puts a spotlight on the beauty industry

Instagram is a savvy platform and they have no intention of letting leadership slip to another social platform or even worse, an upstart.

Remember Myspace and Vine?  Both are in the “Where are they now?” file.

The beauty-partnership team is a smart move, but even better for beauty influencers.

It proves Instagram understands the law of reciprocity. The platform gives voice to influencers, and influencers propel the social platform by attracting consumers.

They understand their real power is the influencer community.

Over the last several years, influencers have become an integral part of the beauty industry ecosystem. They thrive on Instagram because of the platform’s emphasis on visual content and its friendliness to mobile technology.

Influencers are Instagram’s life blood

Kristie Dash’s beauty-partnership group will keep the industry updated on best practices and new platform features, but more importantly, it will also keep the Instagram development team clued into feedback from the community.

Community feedback is probably the most important element to the beauty -partnership.  The more they work in tandem, the more it proves Instagram and the beauty industry are becoming intertwined, maybe even co-dependent.

But this is not just about a social platform and its relationship with another industry, it’s the rise of a new kind of marketing method, influencer marketing.

The influencers stand at the crossroads of all this. They control the “sweet spot” because they know how to build audiences and how to influence those audiences to purchase.

Instagram alone doesn’t have that kind of power and the beauty brands enjoy the authentic and natural way they can connect with consumers through the influencers.

The point is, everyone benefits, especially influencers.

Instagram is a giant sandbox for brands

Just a few years ago, beauty brands didn’t know what to make of Instagram influencers.

Concerns over how to control the brand message and to ensure that products were used as intended were all top of mind.

Adept brands have learned to embrace influencers and to relinquish some creative control over to them which leads to compelling, authentic content. And the results are positive, good for business.

Influencers such as Cat Martinez -who caters to the hard of hearing, and Make-up Artist Violette – Estée Lauder’s Global Beauty Director – are becoming powerhouses, even brands themselves.

We even have influencers who aren’t real in the flesh and blood sense of the word like the CGI generated influencer, Lil Miquela.  This artificial influencer has over one million followers on Instagram.

Who would believe such a thing could happen just a few years ago?

But the experimentation doesn’t have to go to this extreme.

Brands like Sephora now collaborate with influencers on a strategic level looking to build longer lasting relationships with them.

Taking a page from technology brands like HP, they use their corporate headquarters for tours and deep-dive information sessions.  They also arrange opportunities to brainstorm with the product development team.

I can tell you from experience, great things come out of sessions like these because the influencers feel more enmeshed with the brand and connected with the people behind the products.

Not only will Sephora collect product ideas, but they’ll get market insights and intelligence that is difficult to obtain otherwise. They’ll also be able to bounce messaging and packaging ideas off of the influencers for immediate feedback.

It’s not all roses, beauty brands and influencers still face challenges

A challenge everyone has in common is the ever-shifting landscape of consumer tastes and interests. Social behaviors, too, can change rapidly, seemingly overnight.

What works one season, might not work the next.

But the most onerous challenge is to ensure brands and influencers abide by Federal Trade Commission guidelines for disclosing paid partnerships and gifts.

This remains a problem and is not confined to Instagram. All social platforms are affected.

Beauty influencers, however, can take charge by following the FTC guidelines without being asked by brands.  Its simple and easy to announce a sponsorship, a paid trip, and free product samples. The audiences won’t resent you for it, but instead will embrace you.

Another step beauty influencers can take is to avoid purchasing fake followers, and if they have any, purge them now.

Brands are getting savvier every day.  Soon spotting fake followers will be simple and easy (its already getting easier).

Remember, its better to have a smaller, real, engaged audience than a large one made up of fakes.

It’s an exciting time to be involved, and the future is very promising.  Many influencers will rise to prominence and fame. Some will become bona fide brands, themselves.

Like anything else, the future is written in the present, so actions we take today will determine things to come.

Either way, I can’t wait to see what happens next.

The post Influencers Are In The Sweet Spot As the Beauty Industry Undergoes A Makeover appeared first on The Beauty Influencers.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal exposed how social networks have been reaping the benefits of using our personal data to their own advantage – without much regard for us.

To their credit, social networks (like Facebook) have made advertising to consumers more efficient and effective than ever before.  Running ads on platforms is far more effective than television.

But the Cambridge Analytica scandal blew apart the facade that our private information is kept safe and sacred.

It’s not and that’s what has some many people upset.

The blow back has been intense, enough that Facebook’s Founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, was compelled to appear before Congress for two grueling days of questioning.

And the USA is not the only country looking into this problem.  Europe has already instituted new rules about data privacy known as GDPR, which has companies around the world scrambling.

The upshot is that online marketing is different now.

In the case of Faceboook, Instagram and other social platforms, they decided to yank back access to their APIs from marketing agencies and brands.

Those APIs, you see, track user data, the data you and I give them every time we log on, like a piece of content, share it, comment on it and even what we buy online.

For brands, not being able to access these APIs makes things difficult, but it’s not devastating. It’s not the end of the world.

All it means is that marketers and brands are going to have to work harder (and smarter) to track user data which the APIs made so easy to do before.

Don’t worry, as Gil Eyal, CEO of HYPR Brands noted in a recent article on WWD — because they’ll find a work around.

You can bet they’re already hard at work on it.

What’s the impact on beauty influencers?

Is this something you should be concerned about?

Are the good times coming to an end?

Like I said, it’s an inconvenience — albeit an expensive one, but no, brands aren’t going to stop working with beauty influencers anytime soon.

Not a chance.  You provide way to much value for that to happen.

That’s because influencer marketing still represents the best way for companies to connect with their ideal consumers.

It even beats content marketing and social media marketing for effectiveness.

The reason is simple:

Influencer marketing is about companies connecting with their customers through people who are trusted. People like you who attract active and engaged followers.

Remember that your bond with your audience is yours.  It’s earned by creating content your followers want to consume. The content you create and the bond you forge with your followers is something unique to you.

Because you do this well, your followers trust you.

That sacred trust is the magic that brands wish to leverage by working with you and it’s not going away.

Just the opposite… they are looking to build longer term relationships with you.

Take a look at Activate’s latest study which  confirms this trend:

Source: Activate 2018 The State of Influencer Marketing Study

Something else to consider…

Brands are looking to influencers like you to help them uplevel their mindshare with consumers:

Source: Activate 2018 The State of Influencer Marketing Study

According to Activate latest research study, this objective is now up to 78%, up 2% from last year.  The trend is in your favor.

Is it business as usual for beauty influencers?

For now, yes.  But be aware that brands and marketing agencies are getting savvy.

They’re going to demand greater transparency from you about your audience, what your audience likes, doesn’t like and what works best in terms of content, contests and more.

Also, as the brands get more discerning, they will take a closer look at your account, blog and instagram feed.

Be transparent. Make sure everything is on the up and up.

They’re getting better as spotting fake followers, so purge them from your accounts now if you have some.

If you’re found to have fake followers, brands will likely think twice about working with you.  Better to have a smaller, authentic and engaged audience than a large on that is filled with fakes.

Another thing, be sure to clearly label all of your sponsored posts.  Not just with little hashtags like #sp and #ad, but clearly label them.  Your audience deserves to know which ones are paid for and they’ll thank you for it by continuing to be engaged.

Keep these things in mind and you’ll be well prepared to reap the benefits that are sure to come as we all move forward.

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