Is deinfluencing the new influencing?

Welcome to Alt Text - a bi-weekly newsletter from Methods+Mastery about what’s trending on the internet right now, and why marketers, like you, should care. We’d love to hear your thoughts on what you’re about to read - you can drop us any feedback at [email protected] 

In today’s edition:

• The Rise of Deinfluencing 
• The Social Scoop: Instagram cares about images again, Twitter doesn’t know why your engagement has reduced & more
• Graph of the Week: TikTok for search is booming

The Rise of Deinfluencing

“Do not let anyone, including me, make you feel pressure to go spend money and live beyond your means, just to keep up with all the new makeup and all the new products that are constantly dropping. If you have a product that is beautiful and works for you, stick with it.”

This is what makeup artist and content creator Dara Levitan told their 200K+ TikTok followers in September 2022. And while that may sound controversial, it clearly paid off: their comments section quickly blew up with praise emojis and supportive messages.

Did Dara (unwittingly) start a movement at that moment? Why is deinfluencing suddenly gaining traction? Could brands get dragged into this? 

Let's investigate ???

Deinfluencing is about Gen Z rejecting being constantly marketed to and embracing things they already own, to protect their money and live more sustainably. 

So far, it’s a conversation that’s mostly happening on TikTok -  but it’s gathering steam: as of today #deinfluencing has been viewed 205.1M times. 

What we’re seeing #1: Rising distrust in beauty influencers set things in motion.

Content creators have long used social to activate brand partnerships through makeup tutorials and product reviews. But since the start of 2023, we’ve started to see people, especially Gen Z creators, regularly calling out inauthentic influencers and sus product reviews.

Think beyond negative reaction videos–this group has now started using a different tact: encouraging their followers to question what they’re being influenced to buy or believe. Enter: deinfluencing. 

What we’re seeing #2: It’s already spreading to other industries and taking on different forms.

From lifestyle influencers Marie Kondo-ing their fridge to travel creators making deliberately controversial videos around #traveltok’s faves, influencers are leaping on deinfluencing and using it as a way to get you to distrust the things they no longer want to push. Deinfluencing has grown beyond just discouraging mindless purchasing; it now covers hot-take sharing and myth debunking. And while some of these videos miss the point of deinfluencing, they reveal a bigger desire to push back against popular social media tropes and influencer culture.

What we’re seeing #3: Deinfluencing might just end up as… another form of influencing.

There’s a lot of love on TikTok for deinfluencing, but some people say it’s actually influenced them to buy more, as creators have used the trend as a way to recommend products worth the hype. This doesn’t surprise us at all, considering 41% of Gen Z and Millennials impulse buy something online every 2-3 weeks (and this number goes up to 48% among daily TikTok users).

What It Means For You & Your Brand

While media outlets suggest deinfluencing is a rejection of consumer culture, we have another take. Deinfluencing isn’t about Gen Z rejecting consumerism. It’s a content strategy from creators. This isn’t about buying less; it’s creators figuring out a new way to signal their trustworthiness, and keep their tastemaker status and livelihoods afloat.

In an era of fauxthenticity, our view is that deinfluencing may quickly lose its initial intent and become just another clever marketing tactic. But tread carefully: brands who lean too hard into it may end up in the awkward position where they pay a creator to recommend their product over a competitor's under the guise of deinfluencing - only for consumers to react allergically.

Where deinfluencing can be genuinely useful is in collecting feedback from consumers. We like to think about social as ‘the world’s largest, unfiltered focus group’ – and digging into the conversation around deinfluencing can help you better understand how consumers talk about your brand or product (or your competitors’ ??), and what they want to see improved. 

The Social Scoop

Get up to speed with the biggest stories on social.

Have you noticed your engagement and reach dropping on Twitter recently? You’re not alone. A heap of users have noticed a sharp decline in engagement ever since Twitter launched its swipeable ‘Following’ feed, and started pushing more recommended tweets into each users’ main ‘For You’ timeline.

Here’s our take: According to YouTuber Dave Rubin, Twitter’s engineering team has found many back-end account penalties and moderation elements that are restricting tweet reach. And some of them appear to have been amplified by recent updates but they don’t know which, or why exactly. 

Our guess is that a significant amount of prominent users have left the platform or are using it less and less (which causes a ripple effect on broader engagement). Twitter engagement has declined drastically from the ‘record highs’ that Elon reported back in November, and if they can’t identify the issues at play, these issues will keep impacting reach and engagement.

Is Reels Meta’s saving grace? Very likely, as Facebook usage actually increased thanks to the format, according to internal insights viewed by The Wall Street Journal.

Here’s our take: While this may seem unusual, Facebook has been able to successfully use the short-form video trend to drive more usage. Reels consumption is up 20%, and has become a key factor in Meta’s resurgence.  

Meta’s systems are getting much better at showing users the Reels content that they’re most likely to be interested in - so people are sticking around. Time to give Facebook Reels a try (if you haven’t yet) or at least switch on the toggle “Share to Facebook” next time you post a Reel.

Instagram purists, rejoice: photos aren’t dead on the platform after all. Instagram chief Adam Mosseri has admitted that the platform has gone too hard on pushing videos and will look to make photos more of a focus once again in 2023.

Here’s our take: While Instagram usage has grown, it’s also become more cluttered, less focused, and increasingly less unique in its value proposition. This is what Mosseri is trying to fix.

Does that mean that we’ll see fewer Reels recommendations, and more still images in the main feed? We wouldn’t hold our breath (as Mark Zuckerberg has said that the intention is to double the amount of AI-recommended content by the end of 2023) but we do expect to see more balance in timelines with images and carousels creeping back in.

Graph of the Week

We're a bunch of data nerds over at M+M, which means we love a good graph. Here's one that was doing the rounds on our Slack this week.

TL;DR: While TikTok may be known primarily for short videos, it’s also becoming a powerful search engine in its own right alongside Instagram and Facebook.

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Disclosure: Methods+Mastery serves multiple clients. Those clients and/or their peers and competitors may be included in Alt Text, if we feel they’re relevant to what’s trending in social. We always disclose direct client relationships and affiliations.