Building Smart Influence Approaches While Instagram Changes its Algorithms

08/08/22 • 39 min

2 Listeners

Winfluence - The Influence Marketing Podcast

Instagram is changing its algorithm and user experience. Kylie Jenner isn’t happy about it. She once critically wounded Snapchat by saying she never goes there anymore. Now she’s created a PR issue for the platform. But the changes to Instagram go far beyond pissing off a Kardashian.

Instagram is now outwardly saying video is better. They’re prioritizing it over the their heritage approach of photography. They’re also testing features that are much like TikTok. This is largely because TikTok is beating them at the game of creating stickier user experiences. Instagram can’t continue to dominate the social media platform usage among a certain population if the Joneses have built a better mousetrap. So they have to keep up.

And these changes change the way influencers and creators have to approach their roles. It also changes the way brands need to think about influencers.

Katie Stoller has been watching the algorithm changes, and Kylie Jenner’s reaction, along with the rest of us in the space. She’s an influencer marketing and public relations consultant and pro. I invited her to come on the show to talk about the layered complexities of the influencer space, how to design the right solutions for brands and clients when its hard to know what size influencer, what type of creator, what type of content and such will work.

But I invited her to do that the week the Kylie Jenner re-post of a meme begging Instagram to let Instagram be Instagram, so our conversation had to include both.

Katie is of like mind. She’s a public relations pro by trade, even worked at some of the major PR firms over the years. She’s currently handling influencer marketing for Fiat Growth, a Silicon Valley based investment and growth company largely in the FinTech space.

Our conversation will be very useful for those of you on the brand and agency side to better understand the complexities of building smart influence approaches, but then we’ll also get into this Instagram UX and algorithm discussion. Katie was the guest, but she asked me a few questions and I jumped out of character a bit to wag my finger at some folks.

An entertaining discussion is here for you today.

This episode of Winfluence is presented by Tagger, a complete influence marketing software solution. Check them out for a demo today at jason.online/tagger.

A full show transcript is available at https://jason.online/katiestoller.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

And these changes change the way influencers and creators have to approach their roles. It also changes the way brands need to think about influencers.

But I invited her to do that the week the Kylie Jenner re-post of a meme begging Instagram to let Instagram be Instagram, so our conversation had to include both.

An entertaining discussion is here for you today.

This episode of Winfluence is presented by Tagger, a complete influence marketing software solution. Check them out for a demo today at jason.online/tagger.

A full show transcript is available at https://jason.online/katiestoller.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Previous Episode

Leveraging AI to Find Micro-Influencers

1 Recommendations

We’ve gotten into a little bit of a pattern here on the show. Seems like every other interview or so is with some founder or executive at an influencer marketing software company. There are lots of reasons for that.

First, they’re anxious to mention their platform to you since they know the people who listen to WInfluence are interested in and often shopping for solutions to problems with influencer marketing. That makes this group of people easy interviews.

My goal in having them on the show is to certainly talk about their platform so you might have a good idea of something else out there, but then I try to dive deeper into their worldview, at least as it pertains to influencer marketing. We discuss and debate issues and such. That gives you more than just a veiled ad for their thing and helps us push the thinking.

By the way – no one pays to be interviewed on this show. The editorial part of it is just me deciding that person has something worth sharing and talking about. Sure, I’ve interviewed Pete Kennedy from Tagger, who is our show sponsor, and some folks from companies that sponsor the Marketing Podcast Network, of which Winfluence is a member, but being interviewed on Winfluence is not part of any ad buy for them. Just so you know.

Austin Rosenthal actually caught my attention recently by saying he didn’t agree with my conclusion from an earlier conversation. If you’ll remember back a few episodes we talked to Aaron Bruce of Posse.io. His platform allows brands to tap into an influencer’s audience by targeting advertising to them with the creator’s permission, but for a CPM payout to the influencer and no need for content creation.

My headline / conclusion on that episode was “Are we doing influencer marketing all wrong.” So Austin took issue.

It’s no surprise. Austin Rosenthal is the chief operating officer at Lionize.ai. It is an influencer marketing software platform in the traditional sense. You use Lionize.ai to search and discover, then engage and manage influencer campaigns. So I could see why he would object to me inferring that we might be doing influencer marketing wrong by not focusing on just ad buys against influencer audiences.

I welcomed the pushback and knowledge about Lionize.ai, but only if Austin would come on the show and explain both. So, a new tool and a little fun discussion is in order today on Winfluence.

This episode of Winfluence is presented by Tagger, a complete influencer marketing management solution. Try a free demo at jason.online/tagger today.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Next Episode

Are Talent Managers & Managed Services Gouging Creators?

At the end of each show, I offer you up the opportunity to ask a question or throw out a topic you’d like my take on to inspire a show. You’re always welcome to do that by emailing me. The address is [email protected]. I love it when you do because it gives me a good topic to talk about and it probably helps your fellow listeners and Winfluence community folks learn, too.

I also have people in the industry reach out about trends and problems they’re seeing. When one piques my interest, that topic becomes a show as well. Today’s is one of those.

Sam Mendel and Saranga Pagadala are two young whippersnappers who have dreamed up a different take on an influencer marketing platform, but one that is informed and inspired by what they see as an industry issue. They reached out and said talent agents and managed services are taking too much of an influencer’s earnings.

As you can imagine, that raised an eyebrow on this face. I work with talent agents all the time. They provide a valuable service to their clients, the end creators, so they can focus on creating. But when Sam and Saranga said they’ve seen up to 40% commission rates, I asked them to tell me more.

We spent some time going through the issue and touched on CashU which is their new entry into the influencer marketing space. You can find it at textcashu.com. As you can probably guess, it’s an influencer marketplace and discovery platform that operates mostly as a text platform. Worth checking out if you’re a creator or company looking to engage micro- and nano-influencers.

They had some interesting things to say. I’d be interested to hear if your experiences align with theirs and what you think after you listen today.

We have two new sponsors to welcome to Winfluence this week. Today's episode is brought to you by Zencastr and Basecamp. I'm excited to tell you more about them, because I use them both. All the interviews I record for this show are captured with Zencastr. I've used it for years to capture high-quality audio over the web. It does high-quality video, too.

Zencastr records each guest locally ... the file is saved to their computer ... then it uploads the crystal clear audio and video right into a cloud folder and the Zencastr suite so you have high-quality raw materials to work with.

Get 30% off a pro account at zen.ai/winfluence.

And if you’re wondering how I keep all my work organized for this podcast and all the influence marketing strategies I’m working on for clients out there? That’s easy. Basecamp. I’ve been using it for project management and team communications for almost two decades.

Basecamp is all about simplicity. It’s designed to give you and your team the tools you need to get work done. Messages, to-dos, file storage, chat, calendar and more. Bring all-in-one project management to your business. There’s a 30-day free trial. You do not need a credit card to try it.

Go to jason.online/basecamp.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices