 What's up everybody once again it's your boy Brandon Shawn and I gotta talk about something that's been bothering me for a good minute man and that is influencers, this liar, this incorrect or lack of information about influencers. Let me break it down and start back historically. Most of the time people say a good influencer is not just someone who has a lot of followers. That's right. It's somebody who also has this engagement. Don't just look and see if they have a lot of followers. Do they have engagement? Now you know they don't have fake followers. Now you know that their followers actually cares about them and those are the people that you want to follow up with. That's pretty much become the agreed upon thing but there's one step further people I swear it's one step further than a lot of folks are missing straight up. Engagement does not equal influence. That's pretty much it. Engagement does not equal influence. Do I mean by that? Well you know what? First let's rewind back for a little bit of story time. Now I had this home girl. This home girl was throwing an event and she was so excited. She had this host that was an IG influencer. When I say IG influencer I'm talking about this person had 150 something thousand followers. Real talk. Real followers because these people were engaged. In fact she was super excited because the person was so cool that they started posting her event pretty early and then she said Shawn I really want you to come to this event like for real for real come to this event check it out and I said okay okay I come out to the event and I get there late mind you and this is what I see. I see about 15 people in the whole venue including myself including the probably about five artists that were performing and their friends and the host. Why? Because I'm not that interested in coming to see this person because that person was not an influencer at least not in that way. Being an influencer means being able to actually influence people and their decision making having a certain level of trust. This person I believe if I remember correctly was basically like a little comedian and they had got them skits going and people were going there to their page to laugh but they weren't going to really see what this person was about. There was no buy in as much as people hate them Kardashian a lot of people hate on her there's a lot of people that look to her for influence right they look at what she's wearing they look at the lips the butt and all them things so keep this in mind when you pick your influencers for your campaigns who you're trying to pay because you can end up wasting a lot of money paying somebody who has views and engagement but zero influence. There's a lot of people that I know that I'm cool with or I might even pick up the phone if they call but I'm not really checking it in for what shoes they're wearing right. Jay-Z has a lot of influence right but nobody's really looking at his sneakers at least not on the level that they might be looking at Kanye's sneakers right. This is just one specific category and this is very important for you guys to consider for your music as well Jay-Z is obviously an influential person but they're not looking at him for fashion as much as they're looking at Kanye for fashion as a matter of fact people are now looking at some pretty ugly sneakers just because this Kanye like the latest I know some people might disagree but the latest easy collection type stuff but people are buying so a great example is a homeboys rapper I'm not gonna mention his name or anything like that he went to the page of a very popular dancer named Kitta the Great now Kitta is that Nick like Kitta can dance his butt off he's dope however I told him bro don't pay buddy to put your music on his page and dance to your music and I tried to explain it beforehand why it would not work this is why I said yo people go to his page to see him dance I know there's a lot of views on his videos but they're going to his page to see him dance they're not really listening or caring too much about the music that's in the background they're just watching his dance to the beat so his influence is more so dance based there's probably a lot of dancers that love him and can be influenced by him watch his moves but because he's dancing all the time and that's what's on his page no one's really going to hear the music they just want to see him dance again and the same thing for a lot of these pages where they're twerking all the time I'm sure people throw money at him all the time however people are not really checking the twerk pages the twerk they're going for the booty we know what people are going for whether also people who actually like twerking study and they want to dance you know twerk themselves and they're looking for twerk moves whatever but point is people are not going to those pages for the music just being listened to you might have some people who drizzle over and actually want to listen to your song and they really get caught by it but it's nowhere near as impactful as going to a different page when someone actually has influence and they're not diluting their brain in a sense of the music that they might listen to now the same artists that I told to not use kid of the great also saw amazing results in this other campaign that I mentioned right and there's these girls he got posted on the girls page had nothing to do with them actually dancing to the song or anything like that they were just kind of listening to it in the background more so however these girls do not post music all the time so now the people who are following them and have some influence by him when that song gets played by them they think they actually like that song so now these people that I like like this song I want to know more about that song what makes them think that's so great but if I'm just dancing the songs all the time it has nothing to do with whether I like the song or not you don't really think that I love this song just because I'm dancing to it but if I did a song on one of my pages and I was just like yo this is the best song ever and people never see me talk about music y'all are gonna probably listen to the song because I'm usually talking about artists campaigns I'm not really talking about this is my favorite song on this channel it's the same way you should look at everything there's context so not only is it followers engagement but then you want to look at influence and influence has multiple categories right influence has first through people actually look to this person and actually make decisions or see value in this person's opinion and then the other layer is when you analyze these people in their pages what likely is their influence faced towards like are they influencing other people to dance or are they influencing other people to dance to specific songs are they just making people laugh and if they are making people laugh and they can they do a video in a unique way where the song seems so enjoyable they want to check that song too like there's so many ways and it's a little bit more nuanced than just saying this person has followers and engagement I had to put that out there maybe one day I might go deeper with very specific examples or some things like that I don't know I think that's specific enough because there's a wide range of you guys who have different scenarios so you got to use it for your own situation but I would like to know what you guys think I hope that was helpful but other than that if you liked this video go ahead hit that like button if you like it you might as well share it and if you're not subscribed you know what to do hit that subscribe