The Dark Side of Being an Influencer: 3 Ways Influencing Weighs on Your Mental Health
A former “influencer” with almost 10k followers shares 3 reasons she quit being an influencer and the hard side of the influencer industry.
It’s so easy to be filled with envy when you look at an influencer’s feed. They always seem to be jet setting, laughing with friends, eating at the best & boujiest new restaurant — all paid for by brands. It seems absolutely lovely to wake up whenever you want, doll yourself up & go to the most fabulous spots in town, right? Admittedly this was my perspective when I started an account for my dog, Watson & Walls, in late 2016.
At first it was invigorating. 100 followers in only a few days? 100s of likes on every post in the first hour? Your serotonin naturally goes through the roof to get this kind of “engagement.” But as time passes and you gain followers, your engagement dips. Then Instagram pushes an algorithm update and your engagement majorly dips. And then you spend hours a day scrolling endlessly trying to get it back.
I will admit that there were some seriously fun times wall hunting, I met some wonderful people through the platform and who doesn’t love free stuff? None of that outweighed the significant downsides, though.
Here are three main reasons I’m backing off this year:
- The opportunity cost: I felt like I gave up enhancing my brain for scrolling through a feed.
- Isolation from your IRL friends: Unless all of your friends are influencers, you become “that friend” always needing to stop to take photos first.
- It’s unsustainable: the platform is ever-changing and counterintuitive to your goals.
Let’s get into this further.
The opportunity cost
Instagram’s current algorithm is quite a mystery to most, but those in the “influencer” sphere try to learn everything there is to know about it. I’ve been out of the game for 3 years now and it sounds like it’s only gotten worse. Here’s what I do know: you get the most engagement in the first hour of your post, your content does not get served to your audience when you are not engaging in the platform, and even when you do engage only 10% of your followers will ever see your content unless it’s marked as going “viral” in that first hour. Insert carpal tunnel here.
It makes complete sense from Instagram’s perspective, especially once they got bought by Facebook and started serving ads. The more time spent in the app = the more interested brands = the more ads they can serve to each user. But what does that mean for influencers? You can’t just post something incredible, you have to post something incredible, curated, with the right hashtags AND THEN like / comment endlessly for at least one hour to start. I haven’t polled my influencer friends, but I would guess they spend 4+ hours in the app per day (I know I was at my height).
Do you know all the things you could do in 4 hours? You could attend 4 Soul Cycle classes, you could go enjoy a full concert, you could cook a turkey, you could read 3/4 of a 300 page book (especially with a Library card!), you could watch 2 movies with your significant other, and if you’re fast enough you could run a gosh darn marathon.
Working an office job like me, you already work 40 hours a week, and if you sleep 8 hours a night, that leaves you 172 hours of free time to do whatever. Can you imagine spending 28 hours (16%) of that precious time just scrolling endlessly, liking and commenting on cute dog photos? Writing this out neither could I, but this is what I did for an entire year. When I looked at my abysmal goodreads list from 2018, I knew I needed to cut this out.
There are some positive moments of real connection on the gram, and major shout out to the great friends I made through comments (looking at you Sheepish Addie, Arnedoodle, Danzigbros, Otis_unleashed & Fezziktheakita). However for me, when I look back at my life, I want it to be much more about real connections and harnessing my brain, and much less about those fake connections, likes and comments for engagement sake.
Isolation from your IRL friends
When I started Watson’s account, I knew I did not want to be on it as a human. I’m average looking, but don’t really care to do my hair & makeup most of the time. I was also terrified of being scrutinized for every wrinkle in my face or clothes. Having a dog account definitely makes this less of a factor than a person influencer.
However, I still needed to take photos of Watson all the time for stories & feed planning. He needed to be brushed daily so my stories always looked consistent and cute (tbh, I still brush him daily #bichonproblems). I needed to take time out of my work day to pose him for his followers. Out to lunch, shopping, driving, hiking — it was all being documented for his followers. Nobody was allowed to eat until I had the perfect shot, of course! Trust me when I say it’s really annoying to be that person stopping everything for the perfect photo.
Then I had to find all those murals, which was honestly my favorite part of the account, but probably my friends’ least favorite. I’d go on trips to Denver with my friends and fly in a day early to just wall hunt with Watson. Sometimes I would still run into an ideal photo location when out with friends and then I would have to divert everyone for 15 minutes to get the perfect shot. Not to mention all the outfit changes ;). Can you imagine this on the scale of some of your favorite influencers?
If you work a traditional 9–5, you get to shut your work-brain off when you get home. When you’re an influencer, your work brain is on 24/7. If you’re not endlessly scrolling and “engaging,” you are constantly trying to +1 the shot and the moment for your followers. For your friends who don’t care about social media, this becomes very draining and uninteresting real fast.
It’s unsustainable
This last one is the real kicker here. No matter what you do, it’s unsustainable. My friends got used to me being annoying AF and I did theoretically still have 144 free hours to enhance my brain. But what is the point of all that if you’re constantly on the losing end of the deal?
Raise your hand if you’ve seen an influencer you follow complain about “the algorithm” in the last year 🙋. Most of the market is filled with bots and scam tactics. I was shocked to discover how many people just bought likes and / or followers. Another tactic was to massively follow up to 7500 people at a time (Instagram’s cap) just to unfollow them 3 days later. You’re also practically required to be in these “engagement groups” where you band together with similar accounts and vow to like and comment immediately when they post.
And that’s just the minimum to get followers. Then you have to keep them, and keep growing! The goal of having more followers initially is to score brand deals and partnerships. The more followers you have, and the better engagement you have, the better brand deals you get. Most influencers gain a true following in the beginning by being authentic. But lifestyle creep hits with the more money they make. In order to keep up with revenue growth, the more “off brand” partnerships they need to take on. Now their followers can’t trust them for authentic recommendations and their recommendations become unaffordable, anyway.
People love to blame Meta (and it is their fault), but Instagram is not what you used to love any more. It’s not coming back, either, when 30% of your feed becomes AI-driven content vs. people you follow. Instagram is officially just a numbers machine. In the beginning it was a lot easier to have a solid hashtag strategy to get new followers. But now unless you get a killer re-post from someone like Instagram or Dogs of Instagram, you have to seek out new people to follow you and engage with them using the scammy tactics above.
The most authentic way to do this is to search via hashtag or followers of who you follow, find their latest post, give it a like and write a really thoughtful comment that makes them want to click back to your account. That takes a lot of time and energy, though. I mean seriously think about it — if it takes 30 seconds to engage with one new person, and you’re trying to grow to 10,000…
If you catch my drift, running the rat race of trying to keep up with Instagram is downright unsustainable.
It’s truly disappointing that Instagram went in this direction. It used to be a wonderful platform to engage with your friends and find new recipes, fashion ideas, cute animals, and travel destinations from people just like you. Not fueled by brands. Now it’s just the new Commercial break, in my opinion.
So next time you find yourself feeling envy and FOMO when you look through your feed, have a little solace knowing your life is your own.
If you’ve hit the same conclusion as me, check out my 5-step process to get off social media.