There is no doubt today that, given how much we were glued to our gadgets, much of the way we live our lives is pretty much influenced by social media. Thus it comes as no surprise that plenty of brands out there are also choosing to opt for the social media route to get to their target customers.
In their efforts to do so they are reaching out to a new breed of tech savy people to further advertise their goods and services. This new tribe are basically people who have been able to smartly garner a large following on their social media accounts be it Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat etc.
For a long time now celebrities have been at the top of the game in terms of influencing be it in the world of glamour, fashion, music etc. Moving on from advertising on television, brands now reach out to them to promote their stuff through their social media handles.
Similarly social media influencers, depending on their online popularity are able to receive benefits via smartly promoting brands through their posts online. They masterfully effect the “purchase decisions” in some significant or authoritative way. While fairly popular in metropolitan cities in India, the crop of social media influencers in Goa is just about getting its footing in.
“In Goa, it may not be at a large scale but we do have social media influencers taking up the platforms,” says Warren Viegas, who generates content for the Facebook page All India Bakchod (AIB) with 1.5 million followers pan India. He also runs the stand up comedy club called the Las Vegas Comedy Club.
In fact with an aim to find out how many people were in fact doing this in Goa and to figure out what kind of content was being generated, LVC recently organised a Social Media Influencers Meet in Goa. The idea behind this meet, he says, is to create a network of people who are generating content on social media so that they can be tapped on in future for any project that comes up.
Some of these are doing it part time while others have hopes of taking this up seriously. Among some of the influencers is Bhakti Hirani who runs her own Youtube channel where she discusses fashion. “I feel with regards to brands paying you for their promotion, it needs a lot of time and it requires a crazy amount of following. When you start off you get into barter system with the firms. For eg. Stock by Luck sent me clothing to do a review on my Youtube channel. So initially it’s the barter that works out,” she explains.
But once you gain a footing it can be quite exciting, she states. “Right now for me, sometimes I approach the brands with the kind of the work I do but most of the time I do have establishments coming to me to promote their product. So it is a two way thing,” she says.
Currently, Vlogging is a part time thing for her but she is working on the pace and the following to make it a full time job as she loves making videos. She has also done photography course which does help her in creating youtube videos and other technicalities are self taught using various Youtube tools, she says.
In Goa, the general trend is that people do not want to work with what they don’t understand, believes Silverio Souza, who develops the content for the popular Goa.me blog which has massive 2million followers. In other metropolitan cities, the firms there have a website of their own or atleast a Facebook page. For them it is lot easier to understand about social media and what is happening in other places through their online presence, he explains.
“Although the scene is changing, in Goa a very small percentage see the importance of an online presence,” says Souza. “Social media influencers here have to go out of their way to get in touch with brands to initiate a deal and actually explain to them about the advantages of an online presence to promote their brand. And not the other way round where brands contact influencers to do the branding of their product.”
“ I see that times are changing. It is better today than yesterday but its a long way to go. People are getting aware of internet,” adds Souza.
And Viegas too believes that, social media influencers is a field that is only going to get better. “Not many people were doing social media like two three years back, but now more people are coming forward and taking the social media platform seriously,” he says. In fact, Viegas has plans on organising a Goa centric tech show sometime soon. “By then hopefully there will be more people doing social media influencing,” he states.
