There’s a certain type of personality that wants a career on social media.
Back in the olden days, before there were such phenomena as the internet and Taylor Swift, if anyone had told their school careers adviser that they aspired to become an “influencer”, the councillor would assume the advisee was likely under the influence.
Skip forward a few decades and not only is being an influencer an actual thing, it’s the career option du jour of a staggering 33% of children surveyed in the US, UK and China. By comparison, a mere 11% had the more admirable, although less achievable, ambition of becoming an astronaut.
Now it’s entirely possible that this sizeable cohort of today’s youth simply consider the idea of using their amazing selves to influence potential buyers of a product or service by promoting the items on social media as a dead-shit easy way to make loads of money using minimal effort.
But is there more to it than that?
Indeed there is, according to a team of researchers who decided to take a deep dive into the personality types of young folks who are keen to pursue this thoroughly modern career path.
In a study published in the journal, Telematics and Informatics, our boffins from Poland’s University of Wrocław and the UK’s Oxford University, discovered that young people who were “extraverted, self-involved and dramatic” were more likely to aspire to being an influencer than their more introverted and calmer counterparts.
This somewhat less than earth-shattering finding was arrived at by recruiting nearly 800 Polish and British 16 and 17-year-olds and peppering them with questions about their career goals and their dream jobs.
The teens were also given questionnaires measuring how strongly they exhibited the “Big Five” personality traits of openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism, as well as how histrionic, or dramatic, they were.
Unsurprisingly, those with heightened extraversion, narcissism and histrionics were also those more likely to be interested in a career as an influencer, with those traits correlating with a desire to be seen and validated by others – kind of like the kids of yesteryear who dreamed of a career on Broadway or in Hollywood.
And also like in the olden days, actually making it big as an influencer isn’t the easy road to riches that our youthful dreamers imagine it to be.
According to Ryan Hilliard of influencer analystics company, HypeAuditor, an aspiring influencer would need to have 1 million followers on social media to make that a full-time career, something less than 1% of wannabes ever achieve.
“It’s just too hard. There’s too many other people doing similar stuff,” he said.
So just as your humble scribe never managed to fulfill his childhood desire to become a lumberjack, we are comforted in the knowledge that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Be genuinely influential by sending story tips to holly@medicalrepubic.com.au.
