The successful growth strategy of unskilled influencers building up their digital empire

One of the benefits of social media is that you can stay updated on what is happening in the life of friends and acquaintances without having to meet them. This is especially true for old mates from school, those that you left behind ages ago when you decided to move to another city to pursue your studies.

Photo by Benyamin Bohlouli

Back in the days, at least that was the case for the generation of my parents, if there was a social event you couldn’t miss, that was the annual dinner with your classmates from school. The main two reasons for not missing that dinner were the following. First, how else would you gather gossip material for the upcoming twelve months? By consistently joining the dinner, you would have an insight on how the life of your old friends unfolded, year after year after year after year. And most importantly, you could put your hands on the juiciest news. Did the guy who struggled in school became unexpectedly a successful entrepreneur? Did the fat ugly girl with the brace, thick glasses and a lot of acne became one of the most beautiful and elegant women of the pack? Did the nerd shy guy playing a lot of video games finally manage to see for the first time a real naked woman? Did the pretty-but-slutty girl finish her studies or did she get three kids from three different men by the age of 24? Did the guy who was so talented in sports become a professional athlete as his parents were hoping for? Or did he instead develop a belly, a complacent attitude and end up training the local soccer team of disabled kids? Clearly, gossip like that would feed conversations for the whole upcoming year and certainly you didn’t want to miss any. The second biggest reason why you absolutely didn’t want to miss the annual dinner was that, in your absence, one of the major subjects of gossip that evening would have probably turned out to be you.

Photo by Subhajit Jana

Social media and, in particular, Facebook and Instagram, have made also this type of physical encounter completely obsolete. Why bother organizing the annual dinner when just by scrolling through your phone you have access to plenty of the updates and gossip from your old friends (well, maybe foes) from your hometown? This is especially true for people like me who live and work abroad and that don’t even have the opportunity of bumping into them by chance while running errands. Thanks to social media, I am still informed on classmates and acquaintances’ vacation destinations, evolution and devolution in physical appearance (veeeeeery important piece of gossip), kids count, pets’ death and new jobs.

And speaking of new jobs, it was by scrolling through Instagram one lazy Saturday morning that I discovered that an old school mate became… an influencer. Oh, that was juicy gossip! Last time I had come across one of her feeds, it was a few years earlier. She was promoting herself on Facebook as a dietician. I remember being puzzled at her career choice: given that she was not the brightest in school, struggling with scientific subjects including chemistry and biology and that she didn’t go to university, how come did she manage to become a dietician? My conclusion back then was that probably she was passing a diploma shipped by priority mail and earned out of a 40-hour online course off as a real degree on dieting. And that she could probably fool a handful of clueless clients from our hometown but that her business wasn’t meant to fly. (Yes, as you are rightly guessing, that one feed on Facebook “fed” endless phone conversations with a pair of gals for at least one month).

Photo by Quino Al

Fast forward a few years later and that lazy Saturday morning completely upset the whole situation. Not only she finally understood that if you want to promote anything (including yourself) and market it as a vaguely cool product (yes, including yourself), then Instagram is a better place than Facebook. But also, I found out that she was killing it as an influencer and built a profile counting more than 280K followers. How come did someone prescribing diets without knowing all the names of the 20 amino acids making up proteins manage to get so many followers? I took a closer look at her posts and stories to inspect what type of diet she was basing her business on and if there were any success stories from clueless clients. Keto? Paleo? Intermittent fasting? Vegan? As I scrolled through her profile, I soon came to realize that in fact there were zero posts about food and that she probably abandoned her job as a dietician a long time before. But if she was not a dietician, then those 280K followers (who just by the way turned out not to be clueless clients) were following her for what?

Photo by Diana Polekhina

As I kept scrolling and inspecting her profile, all I could see were posts and stories about her life as a mother of three kids. Wait, what? Three kids! Was it her in the end the pretty-but-slutty girl who fell pregnant with three different men at a relatively young age? I could not believe that in the end my old school from my boring little hometown produced the very gossip I had always dreamed of gossiping about! My body could literally feel the excitement for this juicy piece of news that was unfolding in front of my eyes. My hands became sweaty, my heartbeat raised, and I started compulsively scrolling up and down, left and right throughout her profile in search of the three fathers. She must have posted somewhere these three dudes, right? Who were them? Where did they come from? I scrolled and scrolled and scrolled… and the same muscular guy with lots of tattoos kept popping up. And as I scrolled, I was bombarded with more and more of his muscles and tattoos, which wasn’t unpleasant I must say… It was just disappointing to see my dream gossip fading away because clearly that sexy dude was the father of all her three kids. And it was also disappointing to see that he didn’t care about her shady past as a fake dietician. How come he decided to have kids with someone who sold diets without knowing the difference between glucose and glycogen? Was he ok with that?

After a few minutes where I lost my train of thoughts distracted by the sight of muscles and by the strange mating choices of men, I collected myself again and came back on track with my initial question. What the heck was that old school mate influencing about? I could not see any real product, any real service, any life hack or useful piece of advice in that profile. Zero. Nada. At that point I had an epiphany, one of those were you have chills running through your back. It’s her kids! That is what she is influencing about: she is influencing about being a stay-at-home-mum of three. I went back to all the posts and stories I had just scrolled through and started looking at them under a different light. Whenever in their posts and stories her kids were playing, eating, dancing to the beat of music, sneaking into the pantry to steal chocolate, these were all made up gags sponsored by local toys or food companies where her kids were starring as the main characters. The product she is selling are her kids!

Photo by Sandy Millar

After a few strategic calls to a couple of strategic friends who still live in my non-so-strategic hometown, I got the strategic confirmations I wanted. Yes, her career as a dietician wasn’t successful and she gave up a long time before. Yes, the inhabitants of my hometown are not so clueless in the end as they refused to purchase diets from her. Yes, she was a stay-at-home-mum with no other jobs or career options. Yes, the muscular guy was the father of all her three kids. Yes, his tattoos are tacky but his biceps are remarkable. Yes, she had recently become an influencer promoting and selling her kids as consumable content to the digital world. Yes, the world is full of idiots, including the 280K ones who follow her profile. On top of those confirmations, my friends also told me a couple of juicy news that left me speechless. First, she published a children’s book where the book itself is a means for kids to play as it teaches games or can be used to draw and paint. And she did that with one of the major publishing houses in Italy. Second, she is pregnant again with her fourth child. And her pregnancy and the decision of not knowing in advance the sex were both disclosed live to the muscular dude in front of the camera and posted on Instagram, becoming viral.

I was blown away. What seemed to be a lazy Saturday morning spent doing nothing but mindlessly scrolling through social media became a moment that, instead, hit me hard and got me thinking. And I am not talking here about the surge of frustration I felt upon hearing about the book. How come she managed to write a book without basically writing anything? And me with my wannabe intellectual and curated blog posts I got contacted by zero publishers instead? (Ok maybe I’m also talking about this, but that is for another time). But seriously, what got me really thinking that morning was the fear that maybe that fourth child was conceived as a strategic asset for their business as influencers. In the same strategic way in which gags among the other three kids and discussions between the two parents and, in general, intimate family moments were planned, written, played and published on Instagram.

Photo by Adem Ay

The irony of that is that there is nothing strategic about it. And the tragedy of that is that she doesn’t perceive the irony of that. She, like many other stay-at-home mums trying to build a career as influencers, does not realize that when you can only capitalize on the cuteness and coolness of your kids to bring food to the table, that is not quite a strategy. That is called proletariat. Actually, this is a digital proletariat, which is even worse. The original proletariat makes you capitalize on your kids growing up. The digital proletariat makes you capitalize on your kids staying kids. It traps unskilled women without any professional profile into having, instead, an Instagram profile that brings less and less money as time passes. The beauty of all this is that if you are an unskilled person, you probably not only struggled in schools with the subjects that might have opened up some professional career paths. Like biology for dieticians. But you have likely struggled with the subjects that might have given you some clue in life too. Like history, which teaches the notion of proletariat. That morning, I decided that it was too much for me to process and stopped looking at social media for the whole day. It was supposed to be a lazy Saturday morning after all!

Sometimes I still find myself visiting her profile to check how she is doing. And there she is. My pretty-but-not-as-slutty-as-i-hoped school mate with both her growing belly and growing Instagram profile and the irony and the tragedy and the beauty that come with it. She belongs to the class of the digital proletariat and instead believes that she is an entrepreneur building a digital empire.

Breaking Thirty Quote

Now I would love to hear from you? Does someone in your network have or try to have a career as an influencer on social media? What are they influencing about? Do you believe this a sustainable path? What do you think about having your own kids being the mail driver for your profile growth? Let me know in the comments below and do not forget to subscribe for more blog posts like this one.