Instagram creators are selling trust

Why non-expert influencers on IG are more trustworthy for providing self-improvement services than certified specialists

To begin our story, Let’s meet Hoda first:

Hoda, is a working mom and has a full-time job as a research manager at Amazon. Although her job is a demanding one, she is blogging about other parts of her life, like parenting and building a healthy lifestyle.
Hoda talks about her journey to weight loss and how she has accomplished to involve exercise in her daily routine (something most people fail at but still want to apply it to their life). She fearlessly mentions her failures and talks about the broken relationship she had with her body and how tough it is to be a mom in the early days of having a baby.

Her story is so compelling that her followers reach out to her to get advice, ask for help, and clarification of her hacks and methods and she tries so hard to answer all the inquiries.

Hoda is not an official expert in neither parenting nor exercising. But, she has become a trustworthy source to learn and practice a better lifestyle.

We can learn two things from this story:

1) It seems that people prefer to learn from her rather than hiring an official expert on parenting or a consultant to help them build a healthy routine.

2) Most of the followers have never thought about hiring an expert to help them with these challenges. Her followers like to see how an amateur deals with mentioned daily lifestyle challenges and learn from her rather than hiring an expert. Because Hoda’s life context resonates with them in a way that an expert can never does.

So we see a trend here.

Instagram has enabled a new generation of creators in self-development: Ordinary people who are curious to find life hacks and test new strategies to build a better lifestyle. They share the whole journey of learning, failing, and accomplishments with their audience daily. Their curiosity and dedication to learn, research, test and refine has turned them to online influencers who are building a meaningful, trustworthy and engaging relationship with their follower base.

These influencers are becoming one of the main sources of learning for their followers.

Let’s articulate this trend in the following:

People need to learn about the subjects no standard curriculum covers

Our modern life is getting complicated every day. We need to learn and know about many different topics like parenting, staying healthy, time management, self-improvement, changing habits, how to sustain the quality of our relationships, and so on.

It’s not affordable to pay for traditional experts to gain this knowledge and also these are not topics to take one course or two to master them. These subjects have same attributes in common:

• They are continuous: We need to continually learn and practice them. There is no endpoint. This is why daily engagement and content consumption (offered by social media) would be a better option rather than taking a time course.
• They do not have a one-fits-all solution: These topics are complicated and non-linear to learn. Also, the context of the life coach (her job, where she lives, and her mindset) can have a huge role in adoption and make the learning path meaningful. Suppose you are a working mom in a developing country and need to learn how to cope with parenting and also developing your career. if you can learn it from someone who could accomplish this goal before or is several steps ahead of you which matches with your life context, then it would be practical and understandable for you to learn from her rather than learning this from a working mom in silicon valley or even a consultant who is not in your situation and gives you general information and techniques.
• You learn it best from someone who has been there recently:
  Let’s read an example from writing skill. Traditionally people who wanted to write a book or teach something needed to be a real master or professional in the field. but for learning soft skills that are necessary for our daily lives, people prefer to learn it from someone who is not an expert or professional. because it makes it hard to relate. for example, if I am a working mom who needs to increase her work out time, it’s easier and more practical to learn how to improve from someone who is not a professional sports trainer but from someone like her whom she can see is progressing and encounter same ups and downs as her.

Julie Zhuo, tells a story in her book that has stuck with me for a long time. She is a product manager at Facebook.
After some years of working there, people ask her many times to write a book and tell her experiences of becoming a manager in the early days of her career. She first thought that only a person with decades of experience in management can write a book about management. But then she realized that people actually are passionate to hear the daily challenges of a first-time manager not a senior one. These day-to-day experiences often are forgotten by experienced managers and only can be told by someone living it on a day-to-day basis.

Creators need more tools to help them provide actual service

These types of creators now mostly work for free on Instagram. They are not the official experts to have the confidence of selling online courses, and also they do not want to accept affiliation or advertising which will hurt the honest relationship with their audience.

But, still, they are devoting a lot of time to teach what they have learned. Help them act, change and learn new things. On the other hand, their audience demands more and more of their time and accountability to answer questions, discuss controversial topics, and so on.

These types of creators need a better platform to enable them to monetize their time and experiences which cannot exactly be defined as a course, nor a pure community. They need a tool to let them share their experiences easily and to be able to create on-the-go content. They also need a tool to let them be the moderator and maintain the strong relationship they have with their audience.