Let me start by explaining what an Influencer is...

Influencer:

There are many definitions out there, but the shortest possible definition I can come up with is this:

An influencer is a person, who is considered to have the ability to influence others as a result of this person's popularity, which roots in either the specific knowledge, talent or skill of this person, or the relationship that this person has with others.

In my case, my photographs on Instagram received so much positive attention from other users, that I now have accumulated a follower base of over 500.000 people and am considered to be an influencer.

Instagram:

Instagram is a social media platform available as an app to your smartphone. It is an online community centered around photo sharing. It allows you to write a short text to each photo post, but the photo is your main source of communication. Unlike Facebook and LinkedIn, which take departure in your real life acquaintances, Instagram takes departure in your interests and users primarily follow each other as a result of interest in each others photo feed.

Facebook bought Instagram in 2012 and opened it to android users as well. Now Instagram has over 400 million active users and the numbers seem to only be increasing. Along with the Facebook acquisition came a number of new features to the platform. For instance it is now possible to share video posts as well.

Adding it up: Instagram Influencer

To sum up on what an Instagram Influencer is, I will tell you the story of how Instagram changed my career:

Instagram opened my eyes to sharing my passion for photography with people who enjoy my photographs. It gives me great pleasure to be able to share my work and it also challenges me as a photographer, as I am constantly needing to improve my photographs and skills in order to maintain the interest of all these wonderful people, who enjoy my work.

With over half a million followers I am now also somewhat a channel of my own - I like to explain this to people by comparing my Instagram account with a magazine - in my case, my 'magazine' (instagram feed) has a subscription base of half a million 'readers' (followers). This has made me an attractive partner for a lot of international brands, that would like to advertise on my feed.

 Advertising on Instagram

As my follower base on Instagram started to grow and I became an Instagram Influencer I pretty soon received offers from companies on a daily basis. Everyday, I am offered a lot of money to advertise for all sorts of things on my feed. However, you can possible imagine what would happen, if I suddenly turned my Instagram feed into one big advertising banner for various companies? - Your'e right - this was not the reason I started instagraming and definitely not why my followers stay around...

I must stay loyal to my passion for photography and my loyal followers. They are the reason why I am, where I am. But at the same time, it is difficult to find the time to keep producing good photo content to make them happy without this being my full time job. The money from advertising would allow me to be able to make the photo content, my followers enjoy seeing on a full time scale. So I decided to try and find a way for all ends to meet...

I came up with the idea of creating unique photos for companies, that want to advertise on Instagram. This way, I am able to keep sharing unique photos of my style with my audience and offer a creative and original photographic content service for brands at the same time. Typically, companies will pay me to shoot a number of photos, that they can share on their social media and I have the artistic freedom of deciding motive and content of the photos and am allowed to use them on my own feed as well.

So, Instagram has changed my career as a photographer and now the whole world is my working place as I travel to work with international brands to create unique and original content for their advertising as an Instagram Influencer.

Thank you for reading.

-Fedja S.