The Number Of Social Media Followers That Makes You A ‘Celebrity’
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Ask anyone what their favorite application on their mobile phone is. They’re bound to answer “Instagram.” If you were expecting a gaming app as an answer, now you know that it’s this social media application that is ruling.
Instagram might have started off as a fun app for uploading images instantly on the social media. But now, this social media application has outrun it’s very own foundation. It’s evolving rapidly with not just the number of users, but also in the number of ways it’s being used by its users. You must’ve just created an account on Instagram to post what you love seeing in the world around you. Over time, your vision of uniqueness has caught the eye of fellow-Instagrammers and you begin to influence their way of visualizing what’s in front of their eye differently.
If you still didn’t understand what we’re trying to tell here — we’re talking about the game of “influence”, which is what Instagram has become all about now! You could be a travel couple influencing couples to travel, you could be a Brandon Woelfel teaching what bokeh photography is all about. A poet influencing people by the power of your words. You could be a food influencer making people drool over your food pictures. You could be just you on Instagram and still influence its users. That’s the power of influence and this has been what Instagram is all about these days. And, how does influence work? It works on the basis of what content is being uploaded on Instagram. Right now, Instagram has become a tool for serious content making/marketing, networking, audience building, and selling platform for various brands and individuals worldwide. It’s also the most popular and loved social networking application on this planet at present. If you’re asking, “how?”, well, here is the answer. With 200 million active users who keep multiplying monthly, nearly 60 plus million images are being posted, and close to 1.6 billion likes generated each day. You definitely cannot argue with numbers like that, can you?
The Celebrity-Tag Problem
Social media is all good. It’s entertaining, it’s fun, it’s a communication platform to many as well, but all of this is good until one thing enters this world — the celebrity tag! Users of social media platforms start tagging themselves as a celebrity owing to the number of followers they’ve amassed. We have often heard and even seen how normal individuals turn into celebrities overnight owing to the viral content they post, right? So, does having your content going viral make you a celebrity? Or, garnering a minimum of a thousand likes, does this make you a celebrity? Or having thousands of followers makes one a celebrity? We all never knew the criteria for being called a celeb with respect to one’s social media presence or influence, right? We just call a person a celeb if he/she is a popular personality on social media — that’s how we all associate with the celebrity tag on social media.
This Is The Number Of Followers That Can Make You A Celebrity
30,000! Yes, people, if any of you have 30,000 or more followers on Instagram, then congratulations, you’re a celebrity now! Heck no! We’re not just saying this — The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) says so. It’s the ASA that is responsible for making guidelines, which the social media influencers are obliged to follow, and they have announced that any individual with 30K plus social media followers can be officially regarded as a celebrity according to a report published on Telegraph (1).
How Did This Happen?
What triggered this decision was a case that involved a British mom-cum-lifestyle blogger and Sanofi, a pharmaceutical giant. Sanofi reportedly paid the mom lifestyle blogger who has 32,000 followers on Instagram to endorse its sleeping sedative. In this particular endorsement post, the blogger mentioned that she was usually a “night owl” and that this particular over-the-counter Sanofi product served as a short-term solution to her insomnia problem. When this particular Instagram post came out as an ‘#ad’, the ASA said that any kind of celebrity endorsement involving medication isn’t allowed in the United Kingdom. So, when the brand opposed this saying that the blogger who had 32K followers wasn’t really a celebrity, the ASA declared that anybody with 30,000 followers or more come under the “celebrity” bracket.
This ruling is first of its kind and has clearly helped solve the debate between who’s an influencer and who’s a celebrity on social media. While people like us struggle to even reach the mark of a thousand followers, we really wonder how strong the content game must be of those who’ve earned 30K followers. However, at least in the UK, we know there is a chance of becoming a celeb if we get our Instagram game strong and reach the 30K followers mark, don’t we? (wink wink)
