• How Tea Accounts Fuel the James Charles YouTube Feud - The Atlantic
    https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/05/how-tea-channels-feed-youtube-feuds/589618

    The saga began when a 37-year-old beauty vlogger named Tati Westbrook, whom Charles considered a mentor and mother figure, posted a 44-minute takedown of him, declaring him officially “canceled.” Within a matter of days, Charles had lost nearly 3 million followers. His entire career seemed to be in jeopardy.

    Westbrook’s beef with Charles began over something seemingly trivial. Westbrook owns a nutritional-supplement brand called Halo Beauty. Its main competitor is a popular brand called SugarBearHair. Charles posted an ad for SugarBearHair sleep gummies to his Instagram Story at Coachella last month, claiming that it was a last-minute favor after the brand offered him security on-site. Westbrook was livid that Charles would advertise SugarBearHair’s products and not her own, and claimed that there was no way the ad could have been a last-minute favor. Charles posted a tearful apology video to Westbrook later that day.

    If this all seems minor and petty, it is. But that’s the appeal.

    Westbrook argues in her video that Charles wouldn’t be anywhere without her. She says that she and her husband, a former entertainment executive, negotiated higher rates for Charles’s brand deals and leveraged their connections to get him on the radar of Hollywood power players. Westbrook also remained fiercely loyal to Charles in the wake of previous scandals, such as when he joked about getting Ebola on a school trip to Africa and made transphobic comments on video, writing off his behavior as youthful indiscretions.

    But Westbrook said this new betrayal wasn’t the only reason fans should hate Charles. For years, she claimed, she had overlooked Charles’s problematic behavior. She claims that Charles, who is gay, sexually harassed straight men. Westbrook said Charles attempted to “trick a straight man into thinking he’s gay, yet again,” at her recent birthday party. (Charles did not immediately respond to a request for comment and has not addressed the allegations publicly.)

    No one other than Westbrook cared about the gummy vitamins, but this last accusation seemed to stick. And as Charles began hemorrhaging followers and Westbrook began gaining them, influential channels exploited the situation. These drama channels, often called tea accounts, painstakingly documented every incremental update on the feud and shared them live, around the clock, on social media until they became too big to ignore.

    Tea accounts, so called because the word tea is slang for juicy information, are like online gossip magazines on steroids. They are networks of Instagram pages, YouTube channels, Twitter handles, and Facebook groups, many of them run by young fans and observers, though some tea-account admins are in their 30s or even 40s. They have names such as Shook, Spill, What’s the Tea?, and Tea by Ali and serve as real-time news sources for millions. “My channel is Investigations all through the week. Some more serious, some more fun,” the bio of one tea account reads. Many tea accounts are monetized, and Social Blade, a social-analytics platform, estimates that Tea Spill alone is earning up to $65,000 a month. Running a successful channel is also a fast track to clout in the influencer world. Successful tea channels can amass tens of thousands of followers overnight.

    Young people are desperate for news about influencers, a category of people the mainstream press often ignores or patronizes. They also want that news delivered 24/7 through social-media channels.

    For those who aspire to create a tea account, the barrier to entry is incredibly low. In fact, it’s mostly teenagers who run them. “They’re aggregating Insta stories, Snapchats, likes on tweets, monitoring who unfollows who,” says Josh Cohen, the founder and CEO of Tubefilter, a website covering YouTube.

    Influencers such as Westbrook and Charles don’t just follow tea accounts. They interact with them on a regular basis by feeding them stories, granting interviews, and attempting to shape their own narratives. Westbrook says she spoke with two tea accounts, Tea Spill and Here for the Tea, after becoming angry with Charles, only to discover that Charles himself had spoken with them first.

    #Influencers #Beauté #Meme_culture #Tea #Culture_numérique

  • Influencer #marketing: How To Do It Right
    https://hackernoon.com/influencer-marketing-how-to-do-it-right-c569f6997630?source=rss----3a814

    UnsplashThis article is about influencer marketing. I already know that because I’m going to be distributing this article to a few different communities of readers that I will be getting some mixed feedback on it simply because of the topic. Influencer marketing has come into vogue vis-a-vis the mass adoption of social media. People who were just average, everyday bloggers started garnering enormous followings online and instantaneously had more awareness and viewership on their online profiles than TV, billboards and other types of traditional media. IT didn’t take long for brands to clue into the enormous marketing potential that these #influencers had and started paying them huge sums of money to promote their products. Influencers can now receive thousands to hundreds of thousands of (...)

    #influencer-marketing #social-media #tech-influencer-marketing

  • How To Reach Out To #instagram #influencers To Maximize Response Rates
    https://hackernoon.com/how-to-reach-out-to-instagram-influencers-to-maximize-response-rates-16f

    I’ve managed hundreds of influencer marketing campaigns for brands like Depop, Fora Foods, and my own projects, @pinlord & @potteryforall, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that influencer marketing outreach is very different than “traditional” outreach.These days, most influencers A) don’t use email as their main work platform, B) get a lot (hundreds) of potential partnerships opportunities every day/week, C) mostly evaluate your brand based on your Instagram, and D) have very different needs and priorities vs. traditional businesses.So, if you want to maximize the number of content creators who say “yes!” to your next campaign, it’s essential that you re-evaluate your outreach strategy to best fit the current influencer landscape.From experience, there are four essential steps (...)

    #instagram-marketing #influencer-campaigns #influencer-marketing

  • How To Measure What an #instagram Influencer is Worth.
    https://hackernoon.com/how-to-measure-what-an-instagram-influencer-is-worth-cb488f605ffe?source

    For most of us, the process of understanding what to pay a social media influencer for promoting our brand or service on Instagram is still a mystery. How are prices determined? Is the price you are given a good deal or a not-so-good one? Which #influencers should you partner with to get the highest return for your money? Luckily for us, there’s a way to figure this out ourselves, and it’s a pretty straightforward process.So, how do you do it?!In order to measure the value of an Instagram influencer, it’s important that we first understand how influencers decide how to price a promotion opportunity.How influencers price promotion opportunities.Whenever you approach an influencer with a possible promotion opportunity, they usually determine their pricing in two ways.First, how much they like (...)

    #instagram-marketing #influencer-marketing #small-business-marketing

  • How To Search for and Find The Most Valuable #influencers on #instagram
    https://hackernoon.com/how-to-search-for-and-find-the-most-valuable-influencers-on-instagram-df

    I’ve organized and executed thousands of influencer marketing campaigns for brands like Depop and my own small businesses, (@pinlord, @potteryforall, @macramemakers) and from experience, I know that the success of each one depends almost exclusively on the quality of influencers that you work with.If you want to get the best return for your dollar, it’s essential that you know how to, first, measure if an influencer is valuable, and second, search for the most valuable ones efficiently. Your time and money are limited and you don’t want to spend either of them on social media influencers that aren’t likely to give you great results.How to know if an influencer is valuable:When it comes to influencer marketing, value is determined by the number of followers/traffic/sales an influencer can (...)

    #instagram-marketing #influencer-campaigns #influencer-marketing