Digital Trust 3 of 4

Hello and Welcome back to finding out what it means to be part of and lifestyle influencers audience!

Last week I focused on being part of the Sarah’s Day audience, this week I’ll be focusing on Zoella. But first who is she?

To start Zoella is actually the YouTube username of 30-year-old Zoe Sugg. Zoella first started uploading videos to YouTube in 2009, with each video lasting between 10 to 20 minutes. She’s a woman of many talents having a debut novel Girl Online released in November 2014. A sequel, Girl Online: On Tour was released in 2015 and a third entitled Girl Online: Going Solo was released in November 2016. Zoella featured on the chorus of 2014 single Do They Know It’s Christmas as party of the Band Aid 30 supergroup, raising money for the Ebola virus epidemic in West Africa. That same year she launched a range of beauty products under the name Zoella Beauty and has since unveiled a range of lifestyle products for the winter.

Fast forward to now and she’s left behind her Zoella persona and transformed her channels into more mature content. Her content is more staggered however she posts monthly 2-3 times on YouTube and each video are around 30-50 minutes and she is frequently active on Instagram, posting usually once a week and every day through Instagram Stories. She now has another novel that she has co-written debuting in October 2020, she has her own digital Book club, manages her own website/blog, created her own photo editing app and is involved in many collaborations with UK businesses.

Due to her minimal amount of content I decided to combine 2 weeks for Zoella however it is crucial to note that she uploads less frequent content.

18th October – 29th of October

This was an IGTV post to show her involvement with the Halloween spirit! This was a mixture of sponsored items and items she has purchased. She makes sure to put ‘AD’ or ‘brand-ambassador’ on all the items she has affiliates with, I believe this is so important when building a fan-base that is going to trust your content, the transparency is vital which I think Zoe does really well.

Zoe then posted a promotional post for her novel ‘The Magpie Society’. She has been posting videos and photos regarding the process of writing the novel with her co-writer Amy. Having this process documented was crucial with this novel as her past novels were called upon being co-written though it only specified that Zoe had written them. Though nothing was confirmed beside it being proof-read, I believe this was a good comeback to that backlash. Due to the lead up to its debut, her audience has been excited to finally unveil aspects like the cover, pre-order day and the release day itself.

She posted an IGTV once again using her photo/film editing app. She is good friends with Mark Ferris another social media influencer. This connection helps bring other audiences into her content, but that doesn’t take away that they are good friends just having fun. She promotes Tulley’s Pumpkins to which she is an affiliate with, and she promotes her own app as well. I decided to read all the comments for this post, I was curious to see if there was any negative comments and to my delight I only found 2, which I personally wouldn’t call ‘negative’ just constructive criticism. This is great to see especially after seeing the negativity in Sarah’s Day’s content.

She then posted this YouTube video titled Life Updates & Future Plans | New Office, Baby Chat & Getting Honest. It was on the longer end of 50 minutes, but she delved deep into many questions from her audience. She started with a Q and A which she gained off her audience through an Instagram poll. She was very transparent in how she answered these questions keying into the ‘Getting Honest’ portion of the video, she then continued into a vlog style for the remainder of the video.

Many of the comments praised her for being so raw and honest and particularly liked her relatability. Many people referred to her being ‘friend’ and that this video was just like ‘conversation’ words like ‘authentic’, ‘real’, ‘honesty’ and ‘rawness’ circulated the comments section.

She touched on the idea of the internet not being as ‘cosy’ as it was before, that the simpler times have passed there are more un-written rules being an influencer that she needs to follow. And as an audience I can agree that I can even notice that the influencers I interact with have changed.

It’s interesting to see the difference between influencers, one who’s been active on social media for 11 years whilst the other is only 7. Stay tuned for next week’s blog where I’ll be analysing the my findings being part of an active member of their audiences.

Live and Laugh,