Is Everyone On Instagram An Influencer?

Exploring influencer culture and the connotations of the word

Photo by Steve Gale on Unsplash

I recently noticed people talking about a trend of ‘photo dumps’ that started on Instagram. In short, photo dumps are when people post regular photos of things they did over a period of time like hanging out with friends or walking their dog, etc. The images tend to be unfiltered and candid in style.

When I looked a bit more into it, I realised that the trend was started to make Instagram ‘normal’ again. This raised the questions: Is Instagram not normal anymore? Is everyone on Instagram an influencer?

The Facts

According to InfluencerDB and as of March 2019, there were over 500,000 influencer accounts on Instagram. In 2018, 81% of all influencers had a following between 15,000 and 100,000, which is quite significant. This is shown in the graph below.

Instagram influencer share as of July 2018 (source: eMarketer)

March 2019 was over 2 years ago! Unfortunately, I couldn't find more up to date data but it is safe to say that the number of users has grown significantly and so did the number of ‘influencers’.