So You Want to be an Influencer? Know the Pros and Cons — and the Hard Work it Takes to Make it Pay

Written By Norma Rey-Alicea

So You Want to be an Influencer? Know the Pros and Cons — and the Hard Work it Takes to Make it Pay

Posted on 5/13/2024

Social media platforms including TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube have been leveraging the popularity of influencers for years now. Influencers are people who entertain, engage, and have the power to influence their social media followers to do, buy, or use the same things they do. You may be familiar with Drea Okeke (“Drea Knowsbest”) who shares content about Nigerian culture with her 6.6 million+ TikTok followers through comedy sketches about everything from food to slang. Or maybe you’ve seen one of MrBeast’s wildly popular videos, an entrepreneur and philanthropist with over 255 million YouTube subscribers. While these social media personalities have amassed a lot of fame and wealth, their level of influencing requires as much hard work and business strategy as fun.

Making a career and good money from influencing is not easy. In fact, only 12 percent of influencers make more than $50,000 a year. To make more, influencers must continually work to increase their social media presence and following, promote products and services by partnering with brands, increase follower engagement, etc. If you are interested in becoming an influencer as a career or side hustle, it’s important to understand what it really takes to make money doing it – and the pros and cons of this kind of work.

Pros of Becoming an Influencer include:

  • Being able to express and brand yourself creatively. Turning your passion into a profession can be exciting and fulfilling. 

  • Having a flexible work schedule.

  • Making money from posting on social media and getting free products/services from brands you partner with to review or promote.

  • Building a network within the social media community.

  • Using your platform to raise awareness for important causes to positively impact change.

Challenges to Becoming/Being an Influencer include:

  • Lack of job security and benefits. The social media-influencing world provides no guarantee of long-term success. Trends change meaning that influencers must continually adapt to stay relevant and with the potential bans on platforms such as TikTok, it can mean that influencers won’t have access to do their jobs. Being an influencer may also come with a lack of work benefits such as healthcare, retirement plans, or paid time off that employers commonly provide.

  • Pressure to meet thresholds to make money. For example, to get paid on TikTok, generally, you must have at least 10,000 followers and 100,000 video views in the last 30 days. YouTube requires at least 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 valid public watch hours in the past 12 months to get paid through advertisement. On Instagram, influencers are not paid per view but instead are paid by brand collaborations and affiliate programs. According to a Business Insider survey, Instagram influencers can make anywhere from $100 to $1,000 per sponsored Instagram Story (Business Insider, 2021). To put this into perspective, one sponsored story a day at $100 each is only $36,500 per year. Meanwhile, more successful influencers can make $1,000 per story, making $365,000 a year. With the increase of influencers, this competition only continues to rise. On top of that, there are layers of influencing that add to the competition. Between nano (up to 10k followers), micro (10k-100k followers), and macro (100k to 500k followers) influencers, there are significant ladders to climb to advance in pay.

    It’s also important to know that the social media world is not immune to bias in pay. Almost half of all Black influencers report that their race contributed to below-market-value deal offers from a brand. Moreover, there is a 29 percent pay gap in brand deals between white and BIPOC influencers, which expands to 35 percent when you consider just white and Black creators.

  • Reduced Personal Privacy and Exposure to Potential Online Scrutiny and Criticism. From hate comments to threats, it is typical for social media influencers to live under a microscope in which privacy can be limited, and every word an influencer says or types can be up for intense scrutiny and trolling. It can be emotionally draining to deal with this constant negativity. Many influencers have spoken up about how the constant public judgment, commentary, and pressure can cause mental health issues including anxiety, paranoia, and depression.

Some Final Things to Consider:

  • No matter what career path you choose, you should always have a backup plan, but this is especially important for a path like influencing that has less predictability and stability. Choose a postsecondary path based on your skills and passions that will ensure you are en route to earning a postsecondary credential/degree that leads to a well-paying job, especially if you do not already have a good social media following or have not yet found your social media niche. Routes connected to digital media include marketing, business, communications, graphic design, and entrepreneurship. In fact, digital marketing jobs share many overlapping skills with skills needed to be a successful influencer. It’s a good idea to pursue higher education while you work to build your content, following, and networks.

  • Pay attention to your mental health. Set boundaries and goals for yourself to maintain a good work-life balance and make sure that you take breaks from the social media world by intentionally disconnecting at times.

  • Patience, consistency, and tenacity are necessary characteristics to be successful in the influencer world. Gaining a following in which users feel authentically connected to you is the foundation of keeping an audience. A large, engaged, and loyal audience may lead to monetization, but you also need to make sure that you’re persistent about making connections with people/networks that can help you grow. Keep in mind that all of this takes time, along with passion, creativity, and plain old hard work.

Notes on Data Sources

Norma Rey-Alicea
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