What if the number of followers didn't matter?

Social media is changing and forcing brands to rethink their influencer marketing strategies. This shift is great news to athletes, writes Erkko Simsi? from 10.team.

After discovering that influencer marketing works, brands have made it a staple in their marketing toolkit. Many brands want to work with influencers with huge follower counts, preferably in their home market. Many also believe working with one big name is easier than with several smaller ones. The famous influencers are usually talented content creators, further saving the marketer from the trouble of producing content themselves.

This way of doing content marketing has been bad news for athletes. If you're among the best in the world in your sport, most of your hundreds of thousands or even millions of followers are international. Or if you're on your way to the top, you're well-known within your sport but have perhaps only thousands or tens of thousands of followers. Sometimes, athletes also struggle with creating content. This is a shame, as athletes sure could use partners to fund their athletic careers.

But what if the number of followers didn't matter anymore?

Reach is no longer tied to the number of followers

Years ago, social media was straight-forward. We chose the accounts from which we wanted to see content by following them. Marketers and media outlets envied the number of followers influencers had gained by posting texts and pictures and started to amass their own followers.

But, perhaps under the radar, social media has changed dramatically. Algorithms have gotten smarter and platforms have become more tuned to monetization rather than community and conversation. We no longer get to choose what we want to see by following accounts, as the platforms show us content that other users engage with. The shift from the friend graph to the interest graph is nearly absolute.

But, this is actually great news for athletes. Their content has higher engagement on social media than other influencers or media outlets – something marketers always discover when working with athletes. Athletes' content reaches and engages users outside their follower base. Often, the true reach of an athlete's post is several times bigger than their follower count, the metric marketers weighreview beforehand.?

Influencer marketing needs to break its habits

You don't have to be a content creation professional to succeed on social media. People know to expect sleek content from Netflix and other streaming platforms but want different kinds of content on social channels. The trend is towards short stories and entertaining video clips. TikTok's algorithm isn't based on follower numbers, which is why anyone can break through, fast. In response to the Chinese platform's rising popularity, Meta quickly launched Reels on Instagram and Facebook, and Google introduced Shorts on YouTube.

Unlearning old habits is hard, but changing algorithms require a new strategy for influencer marketing. We must ask ourselves why we still obsess over follower count if it's the reach that we're after. Or why we expect professional athletes to publish the same kind of content as professional content creators if it's engagement that we want.