WHAT IS A CREATOR?
What is a social media Creator and how on earth have they built a trillion dollar Creator Economy without most of us understanding who they are or what they do?
It’s easy to understand when you go back a few hundred years to when the European merchants discovered that by putting ships on the oceans they could rapidly expand their trading territories and profits.
The oceans such as the Atlantic have been replaced with social media platforms including TikTok/Douyin and Ships are Posts on social media carrying merchants product experiences to the four corners of the earth at lightning fast speeds – cutting through the waves from London to Shanghai in a billionth of a second, whooosh!
Ships have sailors, Post have Creators and there are millions of them.
To be a Creator you need to be human, have a social media account and be keen to share Posts intended to generate some form of commercial value.
Creators can be Big with millions of Followers (a kind of groupies) at which point they are crowned influencers, or they can be Small, but they can’t be Tiny and have less than 500 Followers – hey, not every human and their kitten can instantly become a Creator.
Creators share either Content Posts or Sales Posts.
Content Posts Creators typically share their experiences in using products, such as trying out the latest lipstick from a brand. They use video, text and photos to Post their experience on their social media account, and these Posts are seen by their Followers .
The Creator’s Followers will see the Post and this lifts purchase intention for the featured product.
But this is where only a fraction of the treasure is found. You see shoppers encountering a brand for the first time will search for these Content Posts on social media, and these Posts will sway their purchase decision. If these Content Posts don’t exist shoppers are increasingly unlikely to buy the product.
Remember that these Content Posts can continue to turn up in search results and lift purchase intention for many months, if not years – so you can see this is really where the gold pieces of eight are actually stashed.
Aesops, a brand that just sold to L’Oreal for £5bn knew this and used it apparently to expand globally without the need for single advertisement – although I don’t think they will share this secret with L’Oreal until the money is securely in their bank.
Content Post Creators typically receive a small payment from the brand if the brand reposts the Content Post, which is a little like paying da Vinci to allow you to print his Mona Lisa on some tea towels. The Mona Lisa came before the Tea Towel – trust me on this one.
Sales Posts
Sales Posts Creators are often posting using live video from anywhere and they mostly centre on hard selling the featured product and taking as many orders as possible from shoppers watching the Sales Post.
Products like lipstick fit well, as it is an impulse purchase, and for Followers it can be interesting to watch a Sales Creator use it – especially a male Sales Creators as the Creator economy history books reveal in the Lipstick King chapter.
Sales Creators are reef knotted to their Online Retailers, who automatically receives all orders placed by shoppers with the Sales Creator. They then manage the shipping and other boring online retail processes.
These Online Retailers will have typically already ordered the stock wholesale from the brand, and shipped it to the destination country prior to the Sales Creator posting.
Online Retailers typically pay the Sales Creators a commission of between 20% – 40% of the shopper order value and buy the stock from the brand at 20% – 40% of the retail selling price.
A Secret Drawer
Oh, before we go you should also know about the hidden drawer in this Creator Economy. It contains a simple, powerful secret that the beauty and wellness brands you see inexplicably exploding in popularity all over the world have already found.
The secret is that brands don’t need to actually go to the new global territories they are expanding into or even learn the language. They simply need to find Creators nearby, in their own country who are from the territory into which the brand wishes to expand. Australian brands expanding into China find Chinese Creators living in Australia.
These nearby Creators will Post the experience of using the product and sell it in their native language to their Followers on social media platforms in the expansion territory.
And when the Online Retailers from that territory sees the brand becoming popular on social media they will reach out and place wholesale orders and manage all the logistics.
Another Secret Drawer
Before I forget there is another hidden drawer with a secret that unlocks a priceless puzzle relating to the power of the Creators.
Brands new to using Creators are normally betrayed by their common sense which suggests it would be best to only choose Creators with high numbers of followers. Get more done with less work kind of thinking. This is so wrong and will just lead you to smashing the Himitsu Bako (japanese puzzle box) against the wall in frustration, again.
You see technology platforms like Duelstone and Grin increasingly make it just as easy to choose thousands of Creators with smaller numbers of Followers. The Followers of these smaller Creators really pay attention to the Posts, and the Posts are more authentic and better at lifting purchase intention resulting in a higher return for the brand.
Bon voyage!
Byron Constable, CEO, Duelstone