If you're frequently on social media and always looking for new, emerging trends, you've likely started to notice the rebellion against perfectly curated social feeds. There's this real battle people are facing between perfection and self esteem and how we feel when we're looking at only the best parts of our lives versus the reality of what we all really go through.
We first saw this trend emerge with Gen Z and who Gen Z follows from an influencer marketing perspective. This younger generation is looking at people who have less perfect feeds and more realistic feeds.
We also see this in the use of Pinterest. Pinterest just a couple years ago was something you scrolled through looking for inspiration. But instead, users were more so being depressed thinking that everyone posting this content must have their lives better organized than. Flash forward to today, and now Pinterest has really evolved into a search engine designed to help with a particular concept when you need to know how to do it.
Another example we found for a restaurant client. They provided us with the "perfect" food shots they used on their menus and we went into the restaurants and we shot our own content much more similar to what a diner would actually see and experience. It was a great test and control because we were able to share both kinds of content and every time the realistic, authentic content we took outperformed the perfect food shots. Why - because that's what people are used to seeing on social media. That's what people are used to seeing when they walk into the restaurants. And that's what people are reacting to.
In your next influencer marketing program don't try so hard to create perfect content. Try hard to create authentic content. That's what's really going strike a tone with the influencer's followers. And it's going to get you better engagement and better performance on your campaign overall.