“What kind of job is it at all”: I'm a blogger manager on instagram
Any new professions or work formats at first, cause distrust and misunderstanding. Even those who have the usual eight-hour workday, may not seem to be serious professionals just because they do not sit in the office. If the work is connected with social networks and it is done not even from a computer, but from a smartphone, the probability is even higher that for others it looks like “some kind of self-indulgence.” Anna Rogozhina, Instagram advertising manager and Instagram bloggers manager, told how to cope with misunderstandings of loved ones, what could cause professional burnout, and why the best influenzers are mothers with young children.
Olga Lukinskaya
How I started working with bloggers
“By education I am a pharmacist and after university I worked for four years in the sales department of a pharmaceutical company. Then she moved to the marketing department, and I became much more interesting. At the same time, six or seven years ago, the pharmaceutical companies were not online, they did not promote themselves on the Internet, so we were engaged in offline work, developing strategies, presentations, brochures for doctors and patients, and exhibitions. There was almost no online marketing in this area, and the lack of pharmaceutical companies in social networks did not surprise, on the contrary, it was considered somehow worthless for firms of this level to post in social networks.
Then at the same time I was tired of pharmacy and decided to leave Russia, so I was looking for a remote job. My friend, the designer, asked to take up the social networks of her project - at that time I didn’t understand anything about it, I only had a blog in LiveJournal. I began to study the resources devoted to this, I took a huge course on Coursera - Fundamentals of Digital Marketing. SMM is a new field and a new profession, and a few years ago there was almost no information in Russian. In general, I studied all available sources, started working with my girlfriend's social networks, then new clients appeared - small local companies.
A year after moving to Spain, I was offered a job at an advertising agency iKarma - the central office is located in Moscow, but there are employees even in the United States and Israel. They were looking for a Russian-speaking person living in Europe who speaks local languages, can communicate with local bloggers and connect with them international clients - large companies with large budgets, including pharmaceutical ones.
At the same time, the popularity of bloggers began. People began to realize that those with a lot of subscribers are opinion leaders, and it works even in medicine. Bloggers are a relatively inexpensive way to make the maximum number of buyers know about your brand. It is a blogger who can motivate people to end actions - order, download, subscribe, and often this effect persists, for example, a person comes for a second purchase or recommends something to others. This is psychology: it seems to subscribers that they know a person personally, that they are friends, many bloggers receive messages from subscribers following personal stories and requests to suggest something. Users perceive the recommendations of popular people in social networks as the advice of the best friend, which means that if you want to sell something, you establish relations with the right blogger, then your recommendation will be sold as a friend.
Users perceive the recommendations of popular people in social networks as tips from their best friend.
I got into the right wave, and I wanted to grow with this market. There were no manuals on how to work with bloggers; My boss taught me a lot. Gradually, contacts appeared, and at some point I was allocated a project where I had to analyze more than five hundred bloggers (from ten thousand to a million subscribers), place advertisements in one hundred and fifty of them, work out every detail and regularly report on the results. It was a project that I worked on for a whole year. For each blogger, we separately collected numbers, analyzed the audience, predicted how many people would download the application that they needed to advertise.
Gradually, I realized that of all SMM and of all social networks, my topic was bloggers, here my interests coincided with skills, and for the first time, I really liked what I was doing. There was excitement, a feeling that I was in my place. Now for any project I can name a pool of specific people who will help to advance, tell you what the results will be and how much money it will take.
When working with bloggers, all communication skills are pumped through - you learn to communicate with people who are complex or, on the contrary, very confident. You understand how to negotiate with anyone, and in writing, with text — you cannot influence the reaction with a smile or a gift, or reflect gestures, as was the work of the medical representative. For communication to be effective, you need to like it humanly. The blogger should trust you and love you - but at the same time the client also has to give tangible results, so sometimes you have to insist on your own, to defend the goals of the customer.
It is very important organization and habit to confirm the same agreement on many times, with different words and in different channels. Bloggers are busy people, often creative, they need to be reminded and pronounced many times - do not forget to take a photo, not to advertise competitors the day before us and so on. Tasks have to paint to the smallest details, otherwise advertising will be ineffective, and the budget is spent. Until recently, I kept all this in my head, but now in the Google calendar I’m writing a list to remind me that I need to send a photo, to take a screenshot of statistics at a certain time, and so on. It unloads the brain.
Tunnel syndrome, burnout and conflicts
Most bloggers are interesting, smart and nice people. I want to be friends with them - that's why they like so much. Sometimes the borders are blurred, the blogger starts asking for reduced requirements “out of friendship”, for example, to take a photo not somewhere in a place with a beautiful view (as agreed), but at home on the couch. It is important to seek compromises, you need flexibility to quickly solve such situations, and no one will do it for you. Force majeure can happen at weekends, at night, or when your parents come to visit you - and many SMM specialists because of this have a professional burnout. You need to be constantly online, you can not turn off the computer and phone, go for a week to where there is no connection. Negotiations with the blogger can be in the morning, so I sleep with the phone. There were moments when I jumped in the middle of the night and looked for any messages. Over the past year there has not been a single day without correspondence at work. It is hard, but it helped me to simply accept the fact that this work is such, it cannot be changed, and since it brings me joy, you need to adjust. Buy comfortable headphones, a good computer, a large phone, on which it will be convenient to correspond.
A separate problem is that those around this aspect of work do not understand: it annoys my friends that I am sitting on the phone when we went out to dinner on Friday evening. Or, for example, my mother flew in, we are going to go for a walk, and the blogger writes that everything went wrong and the advertising could not be done - of course, I have to urgently resolve the situation. If relatives do not understand what is happening, then in the end you have stress both at work and outside. It helps to tell family and friends in detail what kind of work it is, what exactly you are doing, even to show some kind of correspondence - after all, problems arise because of understatement. The same with older people who do not understand what kind of work this is - they can explain them in an accessible way, give some examples, and now they are discussing the statistics of subscribers with you.
There are also occupational diseases in SMM - I constantly have tunnel syndrome on both hands, my eyes get tired, my neck gets tired. In order to take the load off my eyes and hands, I try to go over to audio messages with all those who find it convenient — besides, it saves time. Since any message could potentially be a force majeure, high anxiety develops. To overcome it, I set up different messages for everyone - friends, family, customers, bloggers, in order to understand when it is not necessary to react sharply. And, of course, experience helps - you just get used to the fact that force majeure sometimes happens, but somehow problems can be solved.
Lack of binding to the office is a plus and a minus of work. Yes, I can work from the treadmill, from the park, from the beach. On the other hand, there is a risk of sticking at home, so I try to raise awareness, go somewhere where there is sun and people. Meditation helps to develop awareness (and just to relax) - I use the HeadSpace application, there are even very short meditations, for one minute. I also drink melatonin and hydroxytryptophan (this is a precursor of serotonin), they help you sleep and recover better.
On the other side
I don’t want to give people what I wouldn’t use myself - in this regard, I was lucky with the agency, we refuse to promote any pieces that could be harmful. Bloggers are opinion leaders, they put new ideas in their heads, and I don’t want these ideas to be bad. Bloggers feel this attitude on my part, they like it, we made friends with many, and at some point some of them offered me to become their manager.
So I was on the other hand - now I’m not sending out releases, but I’m receiving bids from advertising agencies. I process these requests, and the most disliked moment is when they start asking for a discount. Now I understand what a devaluation of labor is: bloggers have a huge amount of work, and the same problems as everyone, like a migraine or ill children. Advertising on instagram costs that kind of money not only because it pays off, but also because it is a lot of work. Usually bloggers have an IP registered, that is, there are no hospital certificates, any guarantees of the state or the employer. You can go on vacation, but you can not rest - you need to continue to work constantly.
Bloggers also have a burnout due to the constant presence of online, pressure from customers, haters in social networks. It is hard for me to see comments from my bloggers, but as a manager, I don’t just read them, but even go to special haiter forums and see what happens there. Haters are capable of massive complaints to block an account, and it is important for me to monitor these processes. I take insults as a personal insult, I get upset. Subscribers too often worry and react sharply.
Advertising on instagram costs that kind of money, not only because it pays off, but also because it is a lot of work.
Bloggers earn advertising from 200 thousand to a million, and sometimes two million rubles a month. True, it also takes a lot to invest in work: a good camera, trips to where there are beautiful backgrounds, clothing that should be different, rental of photo studios. A blogger can specifically go to a salon for a hair treatment or a manicure specifically for the sake of one advertising photo. In the net balance of income is lower (although still decent). Also, of course, there is no guarantee that you will not cease to be interesting and advertising will remain regular. It is known that mothers sell best of all, and among mothers - mothers with newborns, and this is a very short period.
On "mummies" subscribe other women on maternity leave or pregnant. They have a desire to buy, there is time to sit on instagram, and they need communication. Now, even for information, mothers go to Instagram, literally to find out what to take to the maternity hospital or how to teach the child to the pot. A blogger is an invisible friend with whom you can share your problems or, on the contrary, be inspired. And this is a very effective sales system. In Russia, decisions about purchases are most often made by women, even if they do not work - and these are purchases not only for themselves. This food, and all sorts of applications for everyday use, and different things for the house, and courses or activities.
Working as a blogger manager with hundreds of thousands of subscribers helps me in my first job — I can put myself in one place on either side of this chain. When you see how much work is being done, you stop considering people to be lazy or weak-willed. I want to get more psychological education, it will help to understand many things. And, of course, the more I plunge, the more I see difficulties: the farther, the less I myself want to be a professional blogger. I do not want to do anything with my own instagram, because for its development we need both material and moral investments. Let him remain a small blog about my life.
