Male influencers account for just 22% of all influencers and create only about 15% of the sponsored content on Instagram. If you’re keen on recruiting male influencers for your next campaign, we have a 3 key insights you’re gonna want to know.
#1 Men Hashtag Differently (if they use them at all)
One of the big challenges with finding male influencers to fit specific campaigns is that men are less likely to punctuate their posts with hashtags. I talked about this in a bit of detail in our roundup of bloggers over 50. This means the men who could be or would-be influencers are virtually unfindable beyond their sphere of friends.
If you’ve never noticed before, I’ll go ahead and tell ya – men and women use hashtags differently. If and when men use hashtags, they hashtag to connect their captions to other ongoing conversations (like #socialmedia #fightisland #entrepreneurship).
Women, on the other hand, are more likely to use hashtags as an extension of the sentiments expressed in their posts (like #byefelicia #basicaf #whydidntIthinkofthat).
#2 Men communicate differently on social media
Keep that in mind as you craft your messaging and map out those campaigns. 70% of men use social media, but it’s pretty different from how your typical influencer (likely female) uses it.
Here are a few of those differences between how men and women do the social media thing:
- By and large, most selfies are posted by women. Men usually post full-body shots with their friends or pics of them outdoors.
- Women tend to use social media to socialize privately and communicate professionally, while men use social media as a resource for sharing insights and pulling them.
- Men are visual creatures, but when it comes to social media, women rely more heavily on visual content to communicate while men lean more toward textual content (think Pinterest vs Reddit).
- Women use emoticons to contextualize text while men are more likely to rely strictly on textual communication.
- Women use social media to create communities for sharing their feelings and experiences while men tend to use social media to talk about abstract topics like politics, values, the government, and sports.
Not an exhaustive list, but I’m sure you’re picking up a theme here.
All of these little nuances are important for the visuals your campaign produces, the audience you’ll reach, and the type of content you’ll have to reuse across your various branded channels. It’s really pretty fascinating stuff.
#3 You May Pay More Since Scarcity Drives Up The Price
That said, money becomes a pretty important carrot for recruiting men to your campaign. Technically, there are probably around 100,000 male influencers out there (Ste Davies). The thing is, you need to find the ones whose audiences overlap your target audience. And there are only so many of those.
IF you manage to carve out the time to find the right male influencers for your campaign, they will be in short supply. And there’s a good chance they’ll be charging more than a female influencer would for the same campaign.
Not to be the naysayer here, but the going narrative is that men are paid more for influencer campaigns than women because they’re men… but again, men are also a little harder to woo, so… you’re going to pay more for male influencers. Maybe it’s not sexism this time. Maybe it’s just supply and demand.
The average male influencer charges $108 more per sponsored image post than female influencers.) Even after that, you’re gonna need to put together a dazzling pitch to woo them.
Are you exhausted yet?
For many brands, incorporating male influencers into a campaign is a way to add a level of depth and diversity you just don’t get when your entire influencer pool looks exactly the same. But in verticals like hunting, outdoors, construction, agriculture, and outerwear, and sports apparel you NEED male influencers. You miss a significant portion of your target audience without them.
We’ve incorporated men, couples, dads into campaigns from all walks of life – from blue-collar heroes to male models to the cool and aloof and it’s a job. But it’s not impossible. Just trust – you have your work cut out for you.
