My Influencer journey for the past couple of years

Over the past few years, a lot has changed. I learned so much about myself but what also changed was my growth as an influencer. When I was starting my journey back in 2017 things were pretty new. I wasn’t sure if this is something that I would do full-time or let alone consider as a career. It all started with one post on Instagram.

I was recently out of college and looking for a side hustle. One of the pictures I posted on Instagram caught the attention of a social media agency in San Fransisco. This is essentially where my career began. Back then this was something so unique and very unexpected. Most people didn’t even know what social media agency or influencer marketing agency was. After a couple of signatures, I was a part of their roster.

I started getting campaign emails from the agency once or twice a week. I would respond with yes if I wanted to be a part of the campaign. It was very simple and straightforward. Once I posted my paid campaign, my DM’s and comments were flooding. It was a very exciting moment. I think it was also interesting for my followers to see their familiar brands on my feed.

In 2018, when I became a part of a big social media campaign as an influencer, this was where my growth peaked. I was getting a lot of followers, DMs from other brands wanting to work with me. It was very exponential. What I didn’t realize this was just the beginning. Even though I was doing this as like my side hustle for about a year at this point, I wasn’t aware where things were going.

Towards the end of that year, everything became more clear to me. Being an influencer wasn’t something that people were laughing about instead they were admiring and even curious about how it worked. It became a new marketing machine that every brand wanted to tap into or even spend their entire marketing budget to test out the results with this new form of word of mouth marketing.

Fast-forwarding to 2020, influencer marketing has been essentially a part of every company’s marketing plan. Although pandemic hit the economy pretty hard, influencer marketing shockingly has been growing thanks to TikTok.

Although Instagram is where started my career, TikTok made me realize what I was missing. I think for a while, video content has been something that I have been very cautious with as it does take a lot of time to make and requires way more effort than creating a single image on Instagram. This is where TikTok came in with all the necessary features including filters and music.

I think video has always been the future for a lot of content creators as it keeps the user more entertained versus a single picture. However, the reason why TikTok became huge is because our generation doesn’t have a lot of attention span like other generations. TikTok solved that need for us by summing up a 15 min vlog or a tutorial into 60 seconds video.