Being an influencer on social media is not a joke

Not only India, teenagers, youth and adults around the world are in the grip of social media. Once entering this rat race, one cannot escape easily. On the contrary, the users find themselves more entangled in it. Social media has been designed in such a way that it becomes addictive. This is the reason why founders of social media companies keep their children away from their own social sites. They know that it is like opium, once addicted it will not go away. The desire to get more likes, comments, friends and followers never leaves the users. Recently, a male family member of a historical political party shot a letter to the management of twitter regarding his complaint of decreasing his followers count. He blamed the social site for reducing his followers under government pressure. The micro-blogging site clarified that to prevent spamming and manipulation, their system has automatic filters, which take action automatically, and it has nothing to do with politics. Earlier, a veteran actor had tweeted that his millions of followers ran away overnight. He was told that the followers of many people have decreased due to the removal of fake accounts and bots, so don’t worry.
   
Most of the celebrities and top leaders have made their Twitter and Instagram accounts mammoth by buying millions of fake followers, however buying followers on Twitter is no longer easy. But on Instagram, YouTube and Facebook pages, you can still make yourself look like an elephant by buying as many followers as you want. The more money you invest in this game, the bigger dinosaur you become. But there is no alternative to organic growth. For that, your content should be magnetic enough to pull the social media users automatically. Social media content creators who specialize in the game of magnetic content are called influencers. According to the Influencer Marketing Factory, there are about 50 million online creators in the world. Children and adults are present in large numbers in online content creation. In the year 2021, the value of the creator market was more than 7.44 lakh crores. This army of creators has come into existence especially in the last ten years. Twitch started in 2021, when the foundation of the creator economy was laid. Platforms such as OnlyFans, Twitch, Patreon and Substake offer creators the opportunity to earn from the subscription model, while also charging commissions ranging from 10 to 50 per cent of their total earnings.
 
Meanwhile, Facebook is troubled by the decline of its 1 million active users in the last quarter of 2021 . As soon as this was announced, Facebook's shares fell 25 per cent in the US stock market. Facebook has changed its corporate identity to Meta. Its products – Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp have the same name, but the parent company is now known as Meta. Facebook has been facing a lot of notoriety around the world for a long time. It has been accused of putting the privacy of users at stake, and spreading fake news. To get out of this vortex of notoriety, the company made a bet to change the name, but it is never easy to maintain the position on social media.

(Author is a senior journalist and columnist)