If your company sells anything at all to the public, you’ve heard about Instagram influencers — the hottest topic in advertising since, well, advertisements. As social media has begun supplanting TV, newspapers and magazines as a primary entertainment source, companies have been forced to seek new ways of getting their products in front of the eyeballs of the coveted youth demographic. Businesses can, of course, just buy ads that Instagram slips into the streams of its users’ photo feeds. But younger consumers are alarmingly adept at ignoring those.
The ideal solution would be to infiltrate those streams not with ads but with the familiar, trusted voices of friends — who are also, as it happens, pushing the exact message you, the entrepreneur, want pushed.
