Who are the influencers? How many are they ? How much do they earn and how do they make a living? Many questions revolve around the world of influence on social networks. Magali Berdah, a great representative of this world perceived as opaque, recalled the fundamentals of this environment at the microphone of Dimitri Pavlenko on Friday morning. The founder of Shauna Events, one of the largest influencer agencies in France, has also recently been investigated by the Grasse prosecutor’s office for “misleading commercial practices”.
Influence, from micro influencers to big personalities
Born in 2016, his company connects its influencers, a hundred or so, and brands. “We are not star makers. We take people who are already known, who already have a base of followers whatever it is, from all different fields, so not necessarily only reality TV”, she begins. by explaining. “From the moment the person has a so-called engaged community, he becomes an influencer,” she adds.
A committed community is a set of Internet users who follow a person, listen to him, comment on his publications and this in the long term. And this loyalty is paid for. “For brands, a publication can cost 100 euros, but some can go up to 5,000 euros for example. It all depends on the commitment generated by the influencers”, specifies Magali Berdah.
“It’s not about having millions of followers anymore, it doesn’t mean anything anymore even if it was the case at the beginning. You have today super influencers who have 100,000 subscribers and who are much more engaging than some, who have 3 million,” she adds.
Content that is cheaper and more effective than traditional advertising…
And according to new marketing studies, the price for brands is very attractive and above all very profitable. Social networks also allow a new strategy, that of the “promo code”, in collaboration with influencers.
“This allows a brand to quantify its return on investment. That is to say, when customers go to buy, they will enter the promo code” and therefore indicate the effectiveness of its advertising in real time, says Magali Berdah .
…but a lack of regulation denounced by the authorities
If this image business is lucrative, it does not yet obey the same rules as other sales systems and legal uncertainty persists. Many scams have been identified, sometimes with a health risk, such as shampoos that cause hair loss. Sometimes it’s drop shipping, a technique to sell low-end foreign items at a higher price.
And Magali Berdah, after a media turmoil around her company, is now calling for better regulation. “I think everyone participated in this in their own way,” evades the business manager. It’s time for there to be “supervision, continuous control. There are a lot of things to put in place and I think it’s a profession that is going too fast. The Internet is going fast, going faster than the world normal and it deserves to be framed as well as the real world,” she said.