#BookReview: Influencer by Brittany Hennessy

Influencer by Brittany Hennessy
Published by Citadel on 31/07/2018
Genres: Nonfiction
Pages: 254
Format: ARC, eBook
Source: Netgalley
Goodreads

Brittany Hennessy does a great job on writing a book about that targets Instagram as the platform to promote your work. Appropriately titled, Influencer: Building Your Personal Brand in the Age of Social Media this book makes you understand the strategies behind the Insta-popularity/lifestyle.

As a blogger myself, I started Instagram very late. I do not think it is important to be on every platform personally if you are one man army but I do think Instagram is a great core source of Digital Marketing in the modern day world. After using it for seven months now, I find there are two kinds of people on it, the one with many followers and the one lesser followers. I am not taking spammers and shameless promoting agencies into account.

I find Instagram works differently from social media platforms such as Twitter which in my opinion is more diverse and flexible. On Instagram, people are there to spread the word out of their book, blog, product, service, etc. by using hashtags and lots of them. It is easy to engage the audience but to build one is, of course, a game of patience, some smart decisions and working hard to promote your content. Once you have gained enough audience or number of followers as what they call on it, you can start monetizing. There is no hard and fast rule monetization. I have seen people with a lesser number of followers (that means, only in few thousands) monetizing greatly. Thus, this is what the book is about.

Hennessy guides you from how to start at the lowest level that is having zero influencers. From creating content worth double tapping and using hashtags to get discovered, not getting banned and delivering is what makes an impact on your audience. With things live Instagram TV, I have seen people who used live streaming services like Twitch or YouTube are now using it. Why? The answer is simple. It works on mobile which is easy to use in terms of setup (all you need is the app) both for the influencer and audience member.

The book is well organized and offers man practical methods that if put in practice, Hennessy assures that it will bring results. I cannot say that if I agree or not with her, because not everything is for everyone but I do think some of the methods she has described are not long term. The book offers insights from a few beauty, fashion, lifestyle and photographers who are digital influencers. This is the most valuable part of this book I find since many of the stuff they say did not sound biased towards using one social media platform such as Instagram.

The writing style is good but since it is more of a how-to book, there is no proper paradigm to value it thoroughly. Even though this book is 250 pages long, I think it could have been shorter. Some of the content I find is irrelevant to the core idea of the book.

3 out of 5! For two reasons. One it concentrates on only one Social Media Platform, which is great, but I am not interested in it more than I am using it right now. Secondly, some of the content does sound like dragging elements just to fill in the pages, as I have mentioned this book could have been shorter. If you are getting started on Instagram or want to to know how it works, this book is for you.

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If you are book blogger read this post on how to promote your Bookish Instagram Posts: 10 Bookish Hashtags to Follow on Instagram