Why I left Influencer Marketing campaigns...

This is my story as to why I left social media influencing. I started doing social media influencing during the peak of blogging time initially but then later on when I was unemployed for almost one and a half years during the most difficult phase of my time, social media influencing for me was an important source of employment. Please do bear in mind that I was and I am a newbie in this field so don’t expect that I had been taking moolahs in it. 

For one campaign as an influencer I was getting just under 100 bucks and that time because my preferred mode of influencing was just Twitter. I was not a youtuber, did not want trade the professional line to shift to Facebook so that time it felt like gold dust. The problem however remained the same which is even now for quite a few of my friends – payments. We all did our work in accordance with the various terms and conditions and time limits but payments are an issue even today. You have to run after agencies for the timely release of the funds once after the said campaign has ended. 

Due to the fact that I’m a blogger first so I continued that mindset to influencing also. Finish the work and logout..that it. There are many interest which I would like to follow in the free time after that and I can’t stay in front of the computer the whole day and wait for the campaign updates to come. That’s just not me. You give me work, I complete and then log off. Can’t expect me to process the updated work again and waste one full-day. 

Somewhere in the back of the mind that dialogue from 3 idiots said that no father would give his daughter in marriage if there is no job rank at the back of my mind. Social media influencing is not a stable career choice according to a lot of people. Those people are doing great who have made it a permanent career choice but when I think of it, it would serve no brownie points in the matchmaking prospects. 

There is always a clash of your ethics and working culture with the kind of campaigns available. With extreme shortage of money you are sometimes tempted to take up that campaigns also which you wont take up in the normal course of business. Alcoholic beverages, tobacco, cigarettes... The promotion of these just for the sake of money didn’t feel right at a lot of times. One friend of mine who is a social media influencer tweeted and made anti-Congress political tweets for one handle one day and two weeks after that she did anti-BJP tweets. That got me thinking that for the sake of money you have no ethics a clear mindset as to what you want to do on social media. 

Unresponsive and irresponsible agencies were another factor where some of the biggest names in those days operated. Quite a lot of campaigns with no clear-cut instructions at troubleshooting and day of campaigns and then making false accusations to deny us our hard earned campaign payments. The good thing was that I decided not to trust any of the agencies and the seven months down the line quite a few of the biggest names just shut shop. The saving grace was that I had never thought of influencing is a permanent career of my life and was always testing the waters and was great that I did not burn more fingers.

Some years back a lot of influencers were doing paid tweets on some international sporting event and their main aim was to get it to trend asap and at the same time cricket world cup for the blind was also going on but no one was talking about it. I knew that when it comes to money, even good causes can go down the drain and at that time I had tagged and challenged quite a big names in influencing industry to tweet in support of the blind heroes if they were so sure about their trending skills...as expected no one had the guts to respond or tweet..

Having secured a job few years back, I tweet now on matters and issues which I feel are close to the heart (for free).