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Javier E

For Lee Tilghman, There Is Life After Influencing - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...lee-tilghman-influencer.html

influencer social media lifestyle

shared by Javier E on 12 Apr 23 - No Cached
  • At her first full-time job since leaving influencing, the erstwhile smoothie-bowl virtuoso Lee Tilghman stunned a new co-worker with her enthusiasm for the 9-to-5 grind.
  • The co-worker pulled her aside that first morning, wanting to impress upon her the stakes of that decision. “This is terrible,” he told her. “Like, I’m at a desk.”“You don’t get it,” Ms. Tilghman remembered saying. “You think you’re a slave, but you’re not.” He had it backward, she added. “When you’re an influencer, then you have chains on.’”
  • In the late 2010s, for a certain subset of millennial women, Ms. Tilghman was wellness culture, a warm-blooded mood board of Outdoor Voices workout sets, coconut oil and headstands. She had earned north of $300,000 a year — and then dropped more than 150,000 followers, her entire management team, and most of her savings to become an I.R.L. person.
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  • The corporate gig, as a social media director for a tech platform, was a revelation. “I could just show up to work and do work,” Ms. Tilghman said. After she was done, she could leave. She didn’t have to be a brand. There’s no comments section at an office job.
  • In 2019, a Morning Consult report found that 54 percent of Gen Z and millennial Americans were interested in becoming influencers. (Eighty-six percent said they would be willing to post sponsored content for money.)
  • If social media has made audiences anxious, it’s driving creators to the brink. In 2021, the TikTok breakout star Charli D’Amelio said she had “lost the passion” for posting videos. A few months later, Erin Kern announced to her 600,000 Instagram followers that she would be deactivating her account @cottonstem; she had been losing her hair, and her doctors blamed work-induced stress
  • Other influencers faded without fanfare — teens whose mental health had taken too much of a hit and amateur influencers who stopped posting after an algorithm tweak tanked their metrics. Some had been at this for a decade or more, starting at 12 or 14 or 19.
  • She posted less, testing out new identities that she hoped wouldn’t touch off the same spiral that wellness had. There were dancing videos, dog photos, interior design. None of it stuck. (“You can change the niche, but you’re still going to be performing your life for content,” she explained over lunch.)
  • Ms. Tilghman’s problem — as the interest in the workshop, which she decided to cap at 15, demonstrated — is that she has an undeniable knack for this. In 2022, she started a Substack to continue writing, thinking of it as a calling card while she applied to editorial jobs; it soon amassed 20,000 subscribers. It once had a different name, but now it’s called “Offline Time.” The paid tier costs $5 a month.
  • Casey Lewis, who helms the After School newsletter about Gen Z consumer trends, predicts more pivots and exits. TikTok has elevated creators faster than other platforms and burned them out quicker, she said.
  • Ms. Lewis expects a swell of former influencers taking jobs with P.R. agencies, marketing firms and product development conglomerates. She pointed out that creators have experience not just in video and photo editing, but in image management, crisis communication and rapid response. “Those skills do transfer,” she said.
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