Authenticity is Old School: Why the Future of Social Media is to be Relatable

To grow on social media think simple, create a niche product and follow the audience’s preferences.

Right after launching her 12th company in Oslo, Isabella Löwengrip came to the Oslo Business Forum to share her unique story with the audience. As a versatile person and successful influencer, Isabella revealed a few key points for succeeding in digital marketing.

“The big goal for me is to become the world’s most powerful businesswoman.” – Isabella Löwengrip

Löwengrip has started creating her own path to success as a 14-year-old when she started writing a blog. A bit more than a decade later, her blog has become one of the biggest Scandinavian blogs with more than 1.5 million readers.

On this journey from a bold teenage girl to a successful young entrepreneur, Löwengrip became a proud mother, owner of eleven different companies, boss to 70 employees and a successful influencer followed by millions. In 2018, she was awarded as the most powerful businesswoman in Sweden. For the future, she has many business ideas, including a vision to become a modern Oprah Winfrey.

Social media as a window to get out and think outside of the box

“If you want to sell in a store, you can pick one country, but if you want to sell through social media or where you have your followers, you can sell everywhere,” says Löwengrip.

She sees social media as marketing windows. The real success actually comes from a niche product that is able to scale up fast all over the world. “I always focus on what can scale up on Instagram,” Isabella explains.

In order to promote her brands in different countries, Isabella came up with an idea of employing a robot influencer - a social media identity on a social platform which is dominantly used in a specific country. For instance, Gabrielle Löwengrip is Isabelle’s clone based in New York. She was born in December 2018, and she is into beauty and aesthetics.

Her followers will be able to take a peek into her everyday life, as she goes on dates, shopping, or anything else that is the life of a girl made of. She represents an alternative life of Isabella if she was born in America. To make it more interesting, Isabella invited all followers to help her out in choosing or creating a face for Gabrielle.

With such activities, she is gathering useful statistics about the preferences and interests of the audience and as per that delivers content that is wanted while introducing a new or already existing brand.

“Each market can have its own content related to the local market. So when I am doing something with Sephora in New York, Gabrielle Löwengrip can push it on her Instagram,” explains Isabella.

Being authentic and real on social media is old school

Strange as it may sound, robots on social media are one of the possible ways of thinking outside of the box and being innovative.

Before people said you have to be transparent, you have to be so honest. That is old. The future of social media is to be relatable and to inspire. People don’t care if the account is real or not,” Löwengrip says. The Swedish influencer explains that it is like watching a movie – it doesn’t have to be necessary real, but people will still watch it and consume if it is interesting and inspiring.

Besides the help of robots in generating content for social media, Isabella pointed out that networking is even more important for success, especially with people who have a similar vision as you – “There is a lot of different women. We are eating lunch, networking, helping each other's companies grow, tagging each other. It is a new way to grow.”

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The future of virtual influencers

As a social media influencer, the line between privacy and publicity is getting blurred. Constantly being online, available and exposed to many curious followers might be the downside of this almost perfect job for millennials. This is what might be changed in the future by using robots as influencers. As this young entrepreneur says, authenticity and exposing of someone’s life became old school. Now is a time when fiction is coming back as a key to original marketing. Inspiration will be again an effective attraction of followers.

As original Isabelle once wrote in one of her blogs: “I see an extremely bright future for influencer robots. I’m guessing that within a year or so won’t really care if you’re following a real person on social media. The important thing is being inspired and that might as well be from an animated person.”

Are you interested in reading more from the conference, Digital Leadership? If so, we recommend you to dig into these three articles: 
  1. Nancy Giordano: The future of leadership – Invest in curiosity and trust
  2. Kate Darling: How robots will provide comfort and make space for better jobs
  3. Hilde Tonne: How doing business right will change the world