Digital Trust 2 of 4

Hello and Welcome back to our exploration of the world of influencers!!

Let’s get straight into it, as part of this research I made sure to delegate some time to analyse other audiences’ reactions to with Instagram posts and Youtube videos from Sarah’s Day and Zoella. I decided to split up these two influencers into separate weeks to focus on what they’ve posted and make observations from there.

This week I have observed the content that Sarah’s Day has uploaded to both Instagram and Youtube. Before getting started I’ll give a quick overview of who Sarah’s Day.

Sarah’s Day is an Australian lifestyle and fitness video blogger. She describes herself as “a health and fitness vlogger with a passion for holistic living. Focusing on the importance of listening to our bodies, eating a whole-food based diet and breaking a sweat.”

Also known by her real name Sarah Stevenson, she regularly shares her training, dieting, and lifestyle advice on the internet, showing everyone how she transformed both her body, and mind to live a healthy life. Her fiancée Kurt Tilse and her son Fox Ocean Tilse regularly feature in both her Instagram and YouTube channel.

She has her own Fitness Ebooks, a Podcast with Kurt, a blog, an active wear line with White Fox Boutique, health and wellness products with Tropeaka and a skin and body care range with LaBang Body. With all this she still finds time to be working on new projects and uploading new content.

October 19th – October 25th

This week Sarah started off with a new podcast promotion, having a ‘health code daily’. Which consisted on short podcasts each day with a new topic for each day. They described these episodes to be ‘daily 5-minute bursts motivation and real talk’. I’ve listened to the episodes all week and they have been exactly that! They were perfect to get a buzz of motivation and advice in the morning. This Instagram post also had a lot of positive comments having a similar response.

Her next post was again via instagram where she gave an update on her upcoming ‘Cooking Project’. She has kept the real contents of this projects under wraps but reveals its not just a book which has allowed a lot of her audience to get excited as this digital era longs for more then just a book!

Again positive comments for this post and it was actually here I found a fanpage which then revealed some more unconfirmed information about the cooking project. This fan page was dedicated to sharing positive posts about sarah intending to create a sort of hub for other fans. I personally don’t interact with these sorts of fan pages however it is interesting to see what these influencers mean to people.

Continuing on within this page I then found another Instagram page called @CancelSarahsDay which seemed to do the very opposite of this fan page. Within this page contained a link that led to a forum that have threads with 1000+ people commenting hateful comments. I have never looked into something like this before, but to say it was saddening to see what people would say about someone, they have presumably never met was the very least of my emotions.

I couldn’t read further after scrolling through the first link I clicked. I didn’t understand the idea of Cancel Culture before seeing this. But people putting their efforts to write every day and post through Instagram hateful comments just to ‘cancel’ a person was extremely sad to witness.

Moving on Sarah had a upcoming restock for her reboot collection with White Fox Boutique.

She then posted for the next 3 days, promos on her Instagram getting her audience excited for what could’ve just been a simple restock she create a whole video production.

In between these posts she posted a protein bowl recipe which in my opinion was a good marketing tactic for her upcoming cooking project and also keeping the interest of her other viewers throughout the restock promotion. She keeps these videos short in order to keep her audience’s attention which works well for quick viewers.

At the end of the week she posted a Behind the Scenes YouTube video of the campaign video she created for the Reboot Restock! She promoted this video through her Instagram as a post and on her story.

This was a 26 minute video with a mix of vlogging herself and the lead up to the campaign and then a videographer vlogging the behind the scenes whilst Sarah was involved with the campaign itself. A lot of positive comments were left saying though it wasn’t relatable they loved the content, some loved how long the video was whilst others appreciated the effort made for the campaign.

And this was the week of Sarah’s Day. I have a mix of feelings after being a participate of her audience, scrolling through comments and finding pages dedicated to praising her and others dedicated to spread negativity about her.

I do still believe through her positive day to day stories, podcasts and Instagram shine a light into getting the raw Sarah and its surprising to me that some people aren’t as trusting as I what I thought. Whilst there are a lot of people who appreciate the ‘real’ persona she puts out onto social media, there are a lot of people who don’t believe it’s real to the point where they place their efforts in contributing to a cancel culture.

Stay tuned for next weeks blog where we look into UK influencer Zoella,

Live and Laugh,