This blog post on social influencing was written by AI – learn more about AI blogging for your business.

Social influencing is more than just stable job; it’s a stable and growing industry. According to Statista, Influencer Marketing grew from $1.7 billion in 2016 to $13.8 billion in 2021.

That’s more than a 10x return in five short years.https://www.statista.com/statistics/1092819/global-influencer-market-size/

You wish your business had that multiplier over the past five years. Comparatively, here’s the five-year return on the S&P 500.

It’s about a 2x return, so basic math tells us Influencer Marketing is growing as an industry more than 5x faster than the general market.

Of course, these numbers can be deceiving. Influencer marketing is just one revenue stream for influencers, who also sell merchandise and participate in affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing is a $12 billion industry of its own that’s starting to cannibalize influencer marketing. How those two interact will affect influencer revenue.

The big variable is how many influencers that money is divided amongst. Estimates range widely between 3 and 40 million active influencers, and which platforms count is up for debate.

Only the top percentage of influencers make a large amount of money sustainably. And they’re typically running as businesses with a team behind them. The rest is distributed among a lot of people making very little.

And this doesn’t account for money spent on YouTubers, bloggers, and other forms of marketing. That’s in the budget for content marketing, display advertising, SEO, etc. 

Influencer marketing is typically used to discuss social media platforms with social media influencers. And it really doesn’t matter which platforms you’re influencing.

What matters is you have at least 10,000 followers somewhere. That makes you a microinfluencer in most circles, although the bar can be lowered. At that point, you can expect to earn enough to pay at least one of your monthly bills.

If you want to live off it, you’ll need to get up to at least 100,000 followers. And you’ll struggle to build a business that supports employees off fewer than one million.

And you can’t succeed by focusing on just one platform. It takes an omnichannel strategy to truly exist in this business. You have to be on top of all platforms and make your presence known. 

Sure, there are homegrown success stories on each platform, but even they will tell you diversifying across platforms is how they stay in the game.

Both on- and off-platform discoverability is hard on sites like Twitch, Instagram, and TikTok. You’ll need to engage people everywhere you can, and that means building a website, starting a blog, showing up as a guest on other’s channels, doing podcasts, and more.

It’s a lot of work, and sometimes you build a presence on something like Vine or Periscope that ultimately dies. Other times, an app like Snapchat rises from the grave to provide great e-commerce opportunities.

Something to keep in mind is that MySpace is still around and gets 5 million views each month. Its long, slow death is still outperforming most social media influencers.

I have a Pinterest account that does 500k a month, which is not even a lot on Pinterest. But comparing it to the most popular Clubhouse accounts would put my reach and engagement in that one account higher than the top 100 Clubhouse users combined.

Neither Pinterest nor Clubhouse are names you usually hear when discussing the industry, but you should. They’re multi-billion dollar companies and only a small sampling of the total of social platforms.

If you want to be successful as a social media influencer, you need a presence anywhere you can get it. There are billions of people in the world, and you’re not reaching any of them in a noticeable way even at 100k followers.

But with the right strategy, talent, and discipline, it’s possible to make money as a social media influencer. It’s definitely possible to make money paying them for your business. And it’s also possible to make money working as an employee of an influencer.

The game is profitable. How you play it is up to you.