Can Older People be Influencers?

Dear Ms. Smartphone: I liked the career advice for the teen who wanted to be a social media influencer, but what about older people?! I am in my late seventies and am tired of those ads on TV where famous people with gray hair pitch drugs for aches and pains or reverse mortgages. Can’t I be an influencer too? I am on Facebook almost every day. Vera, Tiburon

Dear Vera: You are absolutely right that influencer marketing is aimed towards younger people, mostly those under age 30, while TV ads target “pills” and “poopers.”

Posting on Facebook falls in a different category, even though it is media and you said you check it regularly. Chances are your account is private, and you have a circle of friends and family that you post for. You are connecting with them, but not trying to get unknown people and strangers to also interact through messages or photos. Facebook is the most commonly used social media by people over 60. Pew reports that 37% of the Silent Generation and 60 percent of the Baby Boomers had accounts, and that was before the Covid Pandemic. Facebook is good for keeping up social connections. Think of it like the newsy Christmas Card that keeps coming all year!

Influentials vs. Influencers

There’s a modern-day distinction between influencers and influential older people. There are many older people who make headlines and do important things (think Dr. Fauci, the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Oprah Winfrey, Maye Musk). These famous names will show up in a list when you search for seniors who are/have been influencers but they do less “pitch” on social media.

They are not influencers, in the social media sense of the word. A social media maven creates content, and a brand, say ‘Warby Parker’ or ‘Toyota’, then associates with them because it draws in like-minded people they would like to reach. BTW, there is probably a marketing agency in the middle of this transaction, holding the marriage together with contracts and revenue. Just this week, there was an announcement that some brands will try to initiate the content and post it on the influencer’s site, after getting their permission. That could corrupt the influencer process, as it stands today.

Quirky TUrkeys

When I searched for older, senior influencers, I was a struck by two things. There are lists of older people who are ‘top ten’ online. But, many of these are quirky older people who are experienced with attention-getting from their former careers as models or fashion designers. They struck me as odd birds in their psychedelic outfits and feathered costumes. They defied my stereotype of age, but not necessarily in a good way. Second, these leaders did less connecting ‘your brand to their content’– the way that modern kids do through a daily vlog or diary. These influencers seemed more like narcissists trapped parroting a campy narrative to copy youngsters. Many were not displaying that cool “authentic voice.”

My concern is that younger people, and those in charge of the advertising machinery, view these older influencers as a curiosity. They are something to be oogled, not because their content is a shared slice of daily life, but because the jarring images covertly reinforce a young person’s game, a hip image-based culture.

REFOCUS THAT IMAGE, Please!

More specifically, older people are not shown showing their strengths. In the words of MIT author/researcher Joseph Coughlin, they control up to seventy percent of the nation’s consumer spending, and are a trillion-dollar component of the economy. Older people have untapped consumer power. They also have a lot social media savvy, but it’s trapped in static messages on Facebook and captured less on video. Only the outspoken have jumped to younger platforms like Tik-Tok, Snap, and YouTube, perhaps because each site begins with cameras and a steep learning curve.