Beware, your social media influencer identity could eat you alive

There are many things I might like to kick in life, but influencers are not one of them. I’ve learned a lot from the ones I follow. My daughter is a fan of ex-NASA engineer Mark Rober and inspired us to donate to his Team Seas initiative. Closer to home, I like the occasional Abbie Chatfield post, and I’m part of the community of people who follow Adrienne Maree Brown around on whatever platform she cares to grace.

The best influencers create content that informs, entertains, and inspires, and many have found solace in the communities that form around them. But for every sun, there is a shadow, and that shadow has a name: audience capture – a phenomenon where content creators become influenced by the audiences they’ve fostered and by what those audiences want to hear or see. Another phenomenon is brandification, where social media forces us to create online personas with which to connect. It’s also allowed branding to permeate parts of our lives it previously couldn’t touch.

The worst examples of audience capture and brandification can be found in the influencer space, where these creators can and do get trapped by the brands they build. For lifestyle influencers in particular, every moment is content fodder and a brand-building opportunity. The problem with that is once influencers build a following around their crafted persona, it can quickly become a beast they are no longer in control of.

Take Nicholas Perry. In 2014, Nicholas was a violin-playing vegan creating harmless YouTube videos promoting the virtues of healthy eating. There was just one problem: no-one much liked this content. So, Nicholas rebranded himself, relaunching as Nikocado Avocado and began creating Mukbang videos, in which the subject rapidly eats vast amounts of food while speaking to the camera. Sadly for Nik, these became immensely popular, and as his audience grew, so did their suggestions for him to get more and more extreme. Though his following has grown to 3.5 million subscribers on YouTube alone, his health has suffered. In consuming huge amounts of food to please his huge audience, Nik’s audience has ended up consuming him.

Increasingly, even those of us who aren’t aspiring influencers are being encouraged to brandify. This, in turn, can cause us to become entrapped by the audience we rely on for feedback, even when that’s just our extended circle of 500 “close” followers. This looking-glass effect means we create an online facsimile of ourselves, churning out content to seek gratification from people we don’t truly connect to. Done well it can seem authentic, but more often it’s a world away from the connections and community most people crave and that got us onto social media in the first place.

The original promise of social media was this: enhanced connectivity, increased human understanding, and the potential for a global community. A virtual tower of Babylon, joined across time zones, backgrounds, languages, and experiences. And we should acknowledge that social media has indeed opened up avenues of expression for many communities and for people who, until recently, had no voice or were shut out of traditional forums altogether. But along with it has come the cost of being chronically online. And that connection now looks like seven billion indie-brands all competing for attention.

It’s particularly problematic when your brand and clout is reliant on the image of happy families and cute kids – a major trend among influencers who made it big in their 20s and have documented their transition into their 30s and 40s by replacing slides of opening-night parties and carefree holidays with content of linen-clad babies playing in Byron Bay backyards and family getaways to the French countryside.

There are legitimate concerns of how safe it is to use images of children in publicly available content, not least because children under a certain age cannot truly consent to participating. And if their entire young life becomes branding for an audience before they’ve even reached their teens, how will they feel when they’re old enough to understand that strangers have had a front-row seat to their lives?