influence – Almost An Author

Understanding the Shifts in Influencer Marketing: Predictions for the Future

Introduction

In the process of digital transformation, influencer marketing can be seen as the navigation that points brands to better awareness and engagement. It has engulfed digital strategies and has gained much influence in the myriad of channels. Currently, it is like a chess game where people are making their moves on social media platforms.

Understanding these changes is not just good business sense – it is vital. This article is a light in the fog of future trends and the possible scenarios for the development of influencer marketing. To do so, we will employ an analytical approach to examine the current and future state. Emerging platforms for partnerships, and the complex dynamics of authenticity.

The Rise of Micro-Influencers

The recent discussion regarding micro-influencers has been widely discussed in the context of digital marketing. Despite the fact that they have a small number of subscribers, they are more efficient and honest. These are different from the conventional in that they have a devoted and targeted following. Such users are more engaging than other types, providing content that can be perceived as more real and credible.

Deeper Audience Connection: Thus, they often have a more selective audience, who can provide a higher engagement rate and impact the consumers’ behavior more significantly.
Authenticity: This is because they tend to create content that is less general and more specific to their lives. This helps their audiences more easily identify with them and trust their opinions.

Thus, brands, aware of these benefits, are gradually engaging micro-influencers. This has been seen as a trend with statistics also supporting it. Examples of impressive campaigns that were created through these partnerships also prove this.

Influencer Marketing on New Platforms

The market of influencer marketing is not limited to social networks such as Instagram or YouTube. Current pioneer brands are already venturing into the uncharted frontiers of new social media platforms such as the young and vibrant TikTok. The gamers’ paradise Twitch and the professional networking site LinkedIn. These platforms have, therefore, provided new means of engaging each of the platforms. It has developed a strategy to woo the hearts of audiences across the globe.

TikTok – This is another social media platform that has gained popularity through dancing and challenges. It is an ideal platform for creative influencer marketing campaigns of the youth.
Twitch Streaming is no longer just for gamers; everyone can join and have a go at it. On Twitch, they interact with the audiences in real-time and thus are able to create better relationships.
LinkedIn – This is not only a tool that we use to search for employment. It is an excellent source for B2B relations and thought leadership initiatives.

These platforms are not just new playgrounds; they are future prospects regarding the further development of the influencer marketing industry. It paints a picture of a shift towards the platforms that involve their audience not only as consumers but as creators.

Authenticity and Transparency in Influencer Marketing

In the scale of influencer marketing, the colors of authenticity and transparency can be considered to be the most bright and eye-catching ones. As more recent scandals affect the virtual space, these two have remained the pillars of consumer trust. The modern online consumer, who has become more and more sensitive to sponsored content, requires the standalone identification of brand associations. You can make some exceptions for those who integrate truth-telling into their story-telling and, as a result, get a devoted audience.

In particular, authenticity plays a crucial role in the process, as it helps to address the audience directly.

However, transparency is the complete opposite of integrity because it gives the viewers confidence that they are indeed promoting a product voluntarily.

Thus, brands need to work together to create meaningful campaigns that are firmly based on the principles of authenticity. As a result, they establish a permanent connection with their viewers, which can be deemed the cornerstone of influencer marketing.

The Future of Influencer Marketing

To sum up, influencer marketing is not only evolving but also growing and developing fast, making the future look rather promising. Some of the key industry players are preparing for the future in which agencies will become the go-to middlemen. Controlling the relations and introducing the new management approach to the field. This shift towards agencies points to a maturation of the market is no longer a one-time tactic.

However, we can also observe the shift towards long-term collaborations and brand endorsements. Brands are not in the market to just get a celebrity endorsement; they want somebody who can represent their brand. This approach not only builds trust and ensures that the customers get a consistent experience. But also helps in creating a better brand story in the cluttered online world. It can be expected that it will be associated with brands. Bring your post on the Explore page with Reels likes that reflect your content values and engage with the public. It is evident that the foundation of honest and clear relations would still be the key to great campaigns.

The Impact of Technology on Influencer Marketing

The virtual runway of influencer marketing is being lit up brighter and brighter by technological advancements. For instance, consider the shift towards the use of AI writing and the emergence of virtual creators. These pixelated characters are not only shaking the fundamentals but also welcoming a new age where human and digital endorsements become intertwined. Campaigns are more specific and efficient, but this also poses issues of authenticity and the concept of human influence.

Benefits: The use of technology makes it easier to coordinate campaigns, allows for the right people to be reached. It offers quantifiable results on the effectiveness of the campaign.
Challenges: Some of the challenges that come with the ethical issues of authenticity. Dealing with the audience’s skepticism and balancing the one on one relationship that is the basis of influencer marketing.

Conclusion

Thus, we have come from micro-influencers, new platforms, and the concept of authenticity. In the future, it is safe to say that those who will adapt well to these changes will do well.

Brands must build real and honest connections as these form the foundation of long-lasting success; thus, as we prepare to embrace the future, it is likely to bring many interesting changes. It is prepared to adapt and ready to embrace new ways of creating and sharing digital narratives.

This article was written by Rebecca Clarie, a content writer at Instazoon.com. On numerous websites, she writes about all aspects of business, marketing, and entrepreneurship. Her enthusiasm includes exploring every corner of the globe.

***DISCLAIMER: Almost and Author does not promote or support buying likes, comments, or followers for social media. As authors with a Christian world view, we believe in growing platform with integrity and hard work using proven methods taught by Serious Writer.

Sarah Hale, Heroic History-Maker: The Pen that Perseveres and Persuades

With the November holiday season upon us, turkey tops the menu lists for traditional American fare at family gatherings. The iconic bird remains undivided from thoughts of Thanksgiving Day, even though the original celebrants in 1621, at Plimoth Plantation, enjoyed more fish and venison dishes as opposed to turkey.

Thanksgiving Day on the November calendar—turkey or not—exists these 150+ years thanks to the historic efforts of American author and style-setter, Sarah Josepha Buell Hale. This patriotic Christian and daughter of the revolution lived an amazing life through the course of the 19^th century, serving heroically as wife, mother, widow, writer, publisher, opinion shaper, and history maker.

Sarah Josepha Buell entered the world in 1788, born to Captain Gordon Buell, a veteran of the War of Independence, and Martha Whittlesay Buell in Newport, New Hampshire. Sarah’s love of learning and literature sprouted early and blossomed under the homeschool tutelage of her mother and older brother. She reveled in the grand, patriotic stories she heard at her father’s knee, who passed onto her—through the power of story—a love of God, country, liberty, and truth.

Sarah sought out opportunities for self-learning in many disciplines until she earned a teaching certificate. She accepted a position near her home where she gained a reputation as an engaging storyteller.

One day, a lamb followed a student to school and waited outside the schoolhouse for its owner until Sarah dismissed the class. She thought this was charming and wrote a story in verse about it. That little rhyme has been charming generations ever since. Perhaps you remember the sing-song ditty:

Mary had a little lamb, little lamb, little lamb.

Mary had a little lamb, its fleece was white as snow.

In 1811, Sarah met and married a lawyer named David Hale. Over the next ten years she gave him five children before he died in 1822. She wore black mourning dress for the rest of her life.

As a widow and single mother with strong skills and a resourceful spirit, Sarah used her academic and writing gifts to provide for her family. She first published a collection of poems in 1823. By 1827, she published a novel titled, Northwood: Life North and South, addressing an abolitionist view of slavery.

This so impressed publisher Reverend John Blake, that he invited her to take a full-time staff position for The Ladies Magazine in Boston, the most popular magazine for American women in the 19^th century. Eventually, The Ladies Magazine was acquired by the periodical journal Godey’s Ladies Book, with Sarah promoted to editor.

For the next 40 years—until she was 90 years old—Sarah Hale’s editorial pen proved a formidable weight of authority on every-day American life for women and families. Her Christian faith, intelligence, strength of character, and literate lifestyle exacted tremendous influence over fashions and homemaking.

Reflecting a strong biblical worldview, Sarah’s practical, persuasive words wielded a powerful sway on public opinion. If Sarah said it—American women were doing it. She eagerly pursued the advancement of higher education for women writing:

” . . . not that they may usurp the situation or encroach on the prerogatives of man; but that each individual may lend her aid to the intellectual and moral character of those within her sphere.”

Helping women to impact “within her sphere” would eventually result in women—through the work of their pen—making a unifying, permanent mark on the American calendar and tradition during a critical moment in history.

Thanksgiving: The Founder of the Feast

Sarah’s most famous editorials centered on her personal mission to see a national Thanksgiving Day officially declared by the president of the United States. She longed to see a day set aside where every American gathered with their families, on the same day, in praise, with grateful hearts for the many blessings of God bestowed upon a growing nation. Sarah was burdened by the cultural divide between the American North and South. The slavery issue fueled this rift, and unrest settled across the country, stirring the people to prayer. Sarah believed the problem required a return to the heart of America’s founding principles in the spirit of our Pilgrim forefathers, seeking peace and unity in a shared country under God.

Inspired by the well documented thanksgiving feast of 1621, celebrated by English Christian settlers and Native Americans, she began to do more than just address this in editorials. She started write letters hoping to persuade political powers to proclaim a Thanksgiving Day for everyone in the nation.

Sarah’s pen was not a lone ranger. She instigated an army of quills in the hands of American women through an ongoing letter-writing campaign in the course of five presidential administrations over fifteen years. Her crusade for the proclamation of an official American Thanksgiving Day never wavered. Her influence on America’s God-fearing women, praying for God’s peace and national unity under the cloud of unrest between the North and the South, culminated in blanketing the nation’s capital with petitions to the purpose.

Sarah’s faith undergirded a belief in the importance of her quest. She heroically persevered through years of disappointment until she and her legions of petitioners succeeded. At the height of America’s Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln issued his Thanksgiving Proclamation on October 3, 1863, including these words of note:

No human counsel hath devised, nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the most-high God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy . . . I do therefore, invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and those who are sojourning in foreign lands to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens . . . it is announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history, that those nations are blessed whose God is the Lord . . . it has seemed to me fit and proper that God should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged, as with one heart and one voice, by the whole American people.

It is important to note that prior to the Civil War, each state considered itself its own country. Many issues divided them one from another. Loosely uniting together to defeat a common enemy in the War of Independence some 80 years earlier, 1860s America had reached a threshold of decision on the battlefields of the Civil War. Lincoln, as president, had to be able to unite the nation and bring peace. The path to do so was bloody and traumatic, shifting the nation with rippling effects still felt today.

Time-honored, cultural traditions often prove a powerful stabilizer in unstable times.

For over 150 years, on Thanksgiving Day each November, the stabilizing effect of tradition continues to minister peace and unity within our currently fractured society. American families from sea to shining sea gather around a table of customary foods such as turkey, stuffing, potatoes, vegetables, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie. The effect of Sarah Hale’s personal mission, perseverance, and influence upon the average 19^th century American woman nationwide is directly responsible for this chapter of American history being written and relevant to us today.

May we consider well the words pouring forth from our pens as women and writers, wielding them, for all the good things and beauty the Lord would use, to invade the self-destructing habits of human nature and nations.

Journal Prompt: What kind of history-maker mark is your pen leaving for future generations? Is your pen’s passion influencing within your sphere for those things that work to unify and bring peace? Who is the sphere of society you seek to influence most? What is your message? Do you have perseverance to continue writing even when if seems you are not having the effect you want to have?

[bctt tweet=”#SarahHale teaches us to use our pens in perseverance and persuasion to affect the generations; Women Writers in Life and Letters Series @A3writers @misskathypwp” username=””]

[bctt tweet=” #Women Writers in Life and Letters— #SarahHale, Heroic History-Maker: The Pen that Perseveres and Persuades @A3writers @misskathypwp” username=””]

Learn more about the history of the Plimoth Plantation Thanksgiving story dramatized on The Writer’s Reverie Podcast, Episode 3, by Kathryn Ross, From Leyden to Liberty, including The Ballad of Plimoth Plantation.

Writer-speaker, Kathryn Ross, ignites a love of literature and learning through Pageant Wagon Publishing. She writes and publishes homeschool enrichment and Christian living books for home, church, and school. In addition, she shepherds writers through the steps book development and production. Her passion to equip women and families in developing a Family Literacy Lifestyle, produces readers and thinkers who can engage the world from a biblical worldview. She blogs and podcasts at TheWritersReverie.com and PageantWagonPublishing.com. Connect with Miss Kathy on Facebook.