There’s no escaping the self-professed ‘social influencer’.
You can’t avoid the social influencer’s mindless Instagram reels, egocentric Facebook ramblings and cringy lifestyle postings, but you can be sure that their most-used words will be ‘me’ and ‘I’.
Whether you love them or hate them, there’s no denying that their effort is to make you want to be them, or at least live their ‘glamorous’ lives.
Hyping their favorite brands, eating at restaurants, spending their weekends in rich surroundings, and in general trying to be something they most always are not, the social influencer cannot help but comment on every social media post and make every person’s story- good or bad- about them.
A 2021 study at Halmstad University in Sweden focused on how a social influencer’s behavior impacts consumer behavior and concluded that brands irreparably end up losing credibility if they associate themselves with ‘influencers’, especially those self-professed.
So the ripple effects of such influencers, it seems, go far beyond Instagram and problematic, if not outright untrue, social media posts.
An important aspect of the lives of social influencers that people ignore is the price their friends and family have to pay, particularly for the times when they will go out of their way for content.
This becomes quite disturbing when you have been friends with them well before they became self-professed as an ‘influential’, and see the manic attempts at self-promotion.
But wait- lean in and let’s do a selfie.
