TRANSCRIPT:
Me: Just to let you know, I’m recording this because obviously I’m going to use this for my research, is that ok?
Sophina: Yeah, yeah of course
Me: Ok, so I’ll just get straight into it. First I’m just going to ask you about your understanding of your audience. How did you build your audience? Did you use any specific techniques?
Sophina: I think I kind of just started posting pics on Instagram, d’you know just sort of outfit related around last October. So, I would follow ‘the outfit scrapbook’, ‘100flavours’ and accounts like that and I saw some of the outfits going on there are the outfits that I’d like so some of them I’d recreate, I’d recreate looks from smaller accounts as well and just tag myself in that page and quite a lot of other big pages where it is outfit inspo. Then I got reposted one of the pages and my account grew quite quickly. It’s quite hard because for some of my pictures I’ll get a huge audience whereas for others I won’t sort of get a viewing. I think it was easier back then if that makes sense? What I’ve done is I’ve planned outfits that I think will potentially get me re-posted around what I normally wear. I know what my audience is, my audience is women. I’ve got 79% women, compared to men which because I’ve got an audience of clothing and comfier everyday inspos, I know what to post. The people that follow my posts come from these other pages so if i post outfits that are similar to these other pages then I know it’s going to do well, it’s going to get seen, it’s going to get reposted and I’m going to grow a lot more in audience. My last picture that I put up with the adidas trousers, I had like 700 follows just from that one picture. I guess going on business on Instagram is helpful because it shows you how many people have seen your picture, the amount of impressions you’ve got, it shows you who’s saved it and that picture had like 3000 people save it which is just incredible so Instagram itself is a bit of a tool. I haven’t paid been paid to be posted on Instagram because I’ve heard that takes you down hill. They sort of want you to keep paying so they don’t show your posts to anybody.
Me: So you’ve said that your audience is 79% women, is this what you expected. Is this what you’ve always perceived your audience to be, more women or is that surprising to you?
Sophina: No, it’s not surprising because I know what the audience on those bigger pages is so if you look at the comments on the pictures, the likes and the follower base on the page, and it is women and some of the pages that I have been posted on only post outfits by women so I would expect that the audience that follow me, follow the reposts and are women. I know quite a lot of other bloggers and we’ve got a couple group chats where we just talk about outfits and what we’re interested in and what events are coming up and a lot of the girls have a lot more males than they do women which is obviously the complete opposite to me but if you were to take a look at their pictures and things, it’s more bikini based and holiday….
Me: I was going to say that, do you have like a target audience in mind, do you think that they’re posting bikini pictures with the male audience in mind as well as the females because I personally love to see bloggers and influencers with great bodies on holiday.
(5:04)
Sophina: Yeah, I think it’s what you’re more comfortable with, I think if I posted more… I’m not going to say provocative because that’s not the right word, but more bikini pictures, tasteful bikini pictures we’ll call it, I don’t think it would fit my audience, I do think I would get likes, I think it would attract a male audience but that’s, I don’t know, I guess it’s just how you’re brought up, I’m comfortable with my body, 100%, when I go away I will be in a bikini completely and I will be the person boogy-boarding in the pool, that doesn’t bother me but erm….
Me: You don’t feel a need to share it with your audience…
Sophina: I think my audience just prefer big teddy coats and just clean, black outfits.
Me: How do you interact with your audience? Do you go through your content and reply to comments from your, it’s weird to say fans, but like your followers. Do you reply to them?
Sophina: Yeah, I know what you mean. It’s hard because sometimes I’ll get loads of comments and I will be asleep and I just won’t reply to them because I’ll forget. But I do try and reply back because if you reply back, a lot of the questions and comments and DMs that I get is people asking me what this item is on this website and things like that. I think before when I messaged bloggers and things before I even got into it, they wouldn’t reply or they wouldn’t reply to just like 20 girls on their picture asking where is this outfit from, I just [inaudible] within the first hour of the post I will always try and respond to people who are there engaging with me quite quickly so I need to, in my opinion, engage back with them and I do get quite a lot of people who just spam the hell out of my instagram and like 70 pictures in a row and it’ll remind me of my trip to thailand like three years ago and I’ll go and have a look at their page and I will comment and say ‘I absolutely love this, I’m going to copy this, this is so much inspo’ and I think that people do genuinely just love that and they tend to sort of just give me a follow. It’s hard for me because I think I follow quite a few people so I always get notifications when they give me comments and I comment back to them if that makes sense.
Me: I was going to say, do you keep your notifications on or do you have them turned off still?
Sophina: I don’t know. Because sometimes I get loads and then sometimes I don’t but like I sleep with my phone turned upside down so that the light doesn’t wake me up.
Me: Yeah, that’s fair enough! How do you choose to create your content? In that I mean, is it a quick and natural photo that your friends have perhaps taken? Or is it more planned, staged and organised?
Sophina: It’s definitely planned and organised. Unless it is out with friends. So, the reason why is because I used to take pictures on instagram and used to go to all the cool little cafes and stuff in London and be like ahh, really wanna get a picture here. I think sometimes it adds the pressure to you actually being at this place, because in the back of your mind you’re like oooh I really want to get a picture here but you’re like I don’t want to get a picture in front of all these people and all those sort of things. For me I go and do all that stuff but I don’t sort of feel the pressure to take photos so, the reason because of that is I will go out and shoot for maybe an hour or two a week and get all of my content for the week done.
Me: Ohhh ok, so you’ll have like posts where you’ve planned them out in your head and you’ll set them up for the week ahead.
Sophina: Yeah, there’s some companies that will message me and say for example Lornaluxe line came out a couple of weeks ago so I was sent some of the Lornaluxe stuff before it was available to everyone else and I was like I’ve gotta go out today and I’ve gotta get this picture because I’m obsessed with the girl personally, so I’ve gotta go and do this. But apart from that everything else is planned and I have everything ready and I’ll go and shoot it all. Sometimes I’ll go down to London, my partner is really good, he takes a lot of mine and it takes him sort of… I know people sort of think oh god you must have so many photos on your phone, it probably takes him about ten.
Me: Oh really?
(10:00)
Sophina: I think he knows deep down that he has to get it quickly. It’s good because he’s so supportive and he’ll always message me ‘oh you’ve gone up by this amount of people today’ and I’m like aw yeah thanks for following me. But yeah, it’s scheduled, it’s planned. And I find that if it’s planned I have all my accessories and things all together. If I just say I’m going to sort of just do it while I go out and things it’s harder because I’ll think oh that would of looked better if it had a jacket over it or different pair of shoes and things like that because when I’m actually doing my day-to-day I’ve just got moisturizer on my face and a pair of trainers on.
Me: So you take different outfits out with you. How many shots will you try and get in one shoot?
Sophina: A week’s worth of content. I’ve got loads I can post but it’s hard because you want to create a theme to your theme because my holiday theme is sort of gone and now I’m going more back to my old theme where it’s a lot of blacks, whites, creams, stuff like that. I have got a lot of colourful clothes, believe it or not….
Me: It’s not just as aesthetically pleasing is it not?
Sophina: Well, yeah for me it is and i’m trying to create a page that I would want to follow, if I didn’t know who the person was and who I would get inspiration from for like outfits, whether it’s dressed up going out or it’s genuinely dossing about. So yeah, it is planned.
Me: You were saying that you get sent things, do you then get to decide what you say about the product or does the brand say you need to mention X, Y and Z?
Sophina: It’s hard because different brands have different rules if that makes sense. Always tag the brand, in my opinion if it’s a collab with Ashley Croft, I’ll always tag her and say this is part of her collection, I don’t overly push that it’s a collaboration because some of them are, some of them aren’t, most of them are. But i’ll always sort of put ad things and I do reuse quite a lot of items so you’ll see it will have had ad at some point but I don’t have any contracts with these companies so I don’t legally have to say “I love this item”, if I don’t like it, I email them back and say I’m sorry I’m not able to shoot this, can I please send this back?”
Me: Yeah, because it’s not your personal preference?
Sophina: Because it’s a lot more stressful to try and shoot something... like when I first started, I had this red dress that I really had to shoot and I really couldn’t do it, it was something that I really wanted to do because I had just started out and I didn’t want to have a bad relationship with this company. So I shot it and uploaded it and it did a lot better than I thought, it honestly took so long and it was giving me so much anxiety so the best thing to do is to just be honest like “I absolutely love your brand, I do want to continue working together but this item isn’t flattering to me, I’d love to send it back and shoot something else instead”
Me: So would you say that you’re selective in the things that you choose to promote?
Sophina: I’ve been sent things that I haven’t asked for and I’ve not shot them, you have to agree and a lot of these clothes companies are really good, it’s tends to be the smaller ones where they’re sort of pushing you to pick something that they want to promote, whereas if it’s big brand like prettylittlething or missguided you know, you pick what you want to style, your outfits and they just let you run with it and if they didn’t, I probably wouldn’t want to work with them.
Me: Yeah, it’s your page at the end of the day isn’t it. So what type of content do you enjoy creating the most, is it sort of clothing, is it travel, is it cosmetics?...
Sophina: I love travel posts. So before I started to do anything clothing related I went away and my instagram was pretty much just an advert for my holiday, I didn’t really put up anything else, it was new years eve and then my friend’s birthdays, apart from that there would be nothing in there. I do think you don’t get a lot about my life apart from sort of stories every now and then but it is really just clothes related because that and travel is what I use instagram for, to look at, so for example I went to Mexico the other week, I looked at all the hotels on Instagram to see what they looked like, to see who was going there and that’s how I decided what hotel to go to.
Me: Oh really?
Sophina: Yeah because… you know Kendall from Love Island, and another guy from Love Island were in a hotel the same week I was there but another one had been the week before. I just looked at their stories for a week each and sort of saw that there were so many facilities, it looked really nice and when I went there it was actually nicer than I thought, which I think is better than, no offence to TripAdvisor but TripAdvisor photos that you see are random people taking photos of holes in walls when they want to complain and I look past holes and things like that because I’m just not paying attention.
Me: So going off of that, what would you say your followers enjoy seeing the most because your content is very clothes related now, do you think they enjoy your fashion posts or your travel posts more?
(15:33)
Sophina: It’s hard because… I’d say clothes because if you look at the engagement in the photos I got quite a lot of engagement in my holiday photos and you get quite a lot of collabs of companies following my holiday but the engagement with my newest photos is where I’ve really grown my account. I’ve had 4000 followers in the last month alone, thats through coming out of my holiday content, coming into this new content with clothing. So i’d definitely say clothing which is why i’d probably stick to it, I wouldn’t just randomly have a picture of me promoting some mascara or something like that or skinny teas or whatever they are, I don’t know.
Me: When you go out to do these shoots, how long would it take you to create a single post? You say it doesn’t take you long to get the shot because you say your boyfriend is really good at his duties, he gets them in 10. But is there a process of editing afterwards and then uploading, do you have to check with the brand before you upload?
Sophina: I think I’m supposed to check with the brand before I upload but I haven’t done it with a single one. That’s just due to my inbox being full of things I’ve bought, little silly things from ebay for the house, random little things so going back into my inbox to say “I’m going to post this later, are you ok with it?” For me that’s just an added step, I don’t really do that and I get why some people do do it because you’re more likely to be reposted and seen for that photo whereas my aim is not to be reposted by prettylittlething and things like that, well prettylittlething yeah but lots of different companies I wouldn’t really want to be reposted by because you don’t get much growth from it whereas you do for these big pages like outfitinspo.
Me: Yeah it’s more worth while?
Sophina: So I would look through the ten, sometimes there is more, I’d just select two and favourite them. Then I go through my favourites because those two will be there so out of the ten and I will look at them and decide which one will look better. I’ve got an app called [inaudible] and it looks like Instagram and you can see which ones would look best and I just decide from there which one I want to do and then I basically just clean up my pictures so just a tiny bit of editing goes into it, say if there’s a cigarette on the floor, I’d just remove that.
Me: Oh wow, that’s amazing
Sophina: Yeah, you can see the difference between taking cigarettes out and keeping them in, it’s just tiny things like that that make for a slightly cleaner picture and then I will add more lighting if it’s a little bit darker, I don’t have filters but I do change blacks and the whites in pictures just so it’s all the same because sometimes some of the pictures, the blacks look grey when it’s actually black it’s just it may be the sun reflecting down a bit weird, then I’ll put it on instagram and I will put a caption so... I’ll put a caption around “Having a great day” I don’t really know what I’ll put, then I’ll tag the brand and put in the hashtag that they have and tag all of the accounts that I hope to be reposted on then I will save that in my drafts. I tend to look around other people’s posts, say if someone posted ten minutes ago on a similar around of engagement as me and I’ll wait a couple minutes to see how their post is doing so if their engagement is really good then I’ll be like yep mine’s ready to go I’m just going to post it and then quickly copy and past my hashtags into a comment straight underneath and then i’ll just comment and keep going with that. The next day I’ll just do the same sort of thing and that’s probably as much that goes into it, the editing of the picture is probably a two minute job as well.
(20:00)
Me: Would you say that this feels like a 24/7 job type of thing, is it everyday, does it feel like a chore or is it sort of like a fun and….
Sophina: For me, it’s more of a hobby. At one point it got to being a chore because I was down about my Instagram, my page wasn’t growing as much over the christmas period. I think when you get… it’s not a reward… when you get people enjoying your pictures and things it’s a boost… this outfit took me… I looked at an instagram picture and then emailed a company saying I’d love to recreate something like this using your bomber or your jacket, that was sent then I went out and shot all my content for an hour and then each day, I’d probably be on instagram for about an hour and a half everyday usage.
Me: That’s like nothing.
Sophina: It’s quite good for me but some other people erm that I know that do the same sort of thing as me… but I try to keep it low within two hours, but it’s hard when I work, you can see the days when I’m in the office or i’m travelling I sort of go on it for an hour in the evening. But when I work from home it’s easy while i’m on a call just to scroll on Instagram for more inspo and just reply to any comments and then a lot of people ask me questions in my DMs, I try to reply to everybody but I have a lot of long conversations around helping girls get into it and they ask me how I do what I’ve done, there’s a lot into it but if you know what you’re doing and how to start then that’s all you really need.
Me: That’s amazing, you said if you see some clothes that you like, do you approach brands or do they approach you? What’s the relationship there?
Sophina: I have a lot of relationships with quite a lot of brands and I know for some brands, so I’ll work with them once a month and they’ll send me ten items a month and I’ll get it out within that month, they don’t sort of check up on it, then there’s other brands where they’ll say to you, within receiving this item, I want it up within a week so it depends on that. If I know there’s a really slow turn around and I’ve got a whole month to get something up then I will probably contact that brand a lot more than the other companies. Some companies will message me but they’re just the ones i’ve not worked with before, whereas the ones I have worked with before, I’ll say, my post went up last night, hope you enjoyed it, I’d love to start working on some more content and getting some more pieces and that’s just how it goes, over and over until you get a relationship or you just sometimes the companies where the clothing online isn’t anything to my taste, I won’t ignore them, I just sort of won’t contact them until I’m ready or happy with something that I might be able to produce with their items.
Me: Do you stay pretty true to your aesthetic then, you’re not just going to post a Boohoo jumper for the sake of it type of thing?
Sophina: Yeah, so I recently worked with a company where they’d messaged me while I was on holiday and I was really excited about working with them because I’d never had… they’d sent me an item out but they hadn’t actually told me what it was going to be and I was a little bit annoyed about that but I was also like I really want to get a good relationship with this company so I shot the item and it did end up doing really well, they also sent it in the wrong size. The thing is I was able to shoot it and was able to get the content and now I’ve got a relationship with them so it’s hard.
Me: Do you get to keep the clothes, are they gifted? Or do they send them out to you and you have to send them back?
Sophina: Definitely gifted and I’m happy they are because once I’ve worn an item of clothing, they can end up with the most bizzare marks on them, my kitten will climb up on them and there’ll be claw marks on them, yeah everything is gifted, some things I post and I’m paid for so, there’s quite a lot of money in it to be fair. I do have a lot of clothes at the moment, I’m hoping to get a lot on depop, if not then I’ll take them to the charity shop but I guess if I’m able to sell the clothes then I’m able to buy more things to produce more content... yeah I know I’m getting them for free and I’m selling them all off but I’m selling them for less than half of the price and producing more and it’s still a benefit to the person who is buying them because it’s still Prettylittlething and pretty much worn once, may have a few claw marks, but nothing you know…
Me: It’s not going to waste then as well.
Sophina: Without a doubt. I take quite a lot of stuff to the charity shop as well because it really frustrates me. I just try to get a lot of that out, like there’s some items that I think no one will buy this because I wouldn’t buy this but in fact a lot of people would. I think that’s the worst bit about it because the thought of putting things on depop, that’s more time consuming than Instagram.
Me: How much on average, do you get paid for a post. Is it just for you to post once or do you have to post a series of things for them to pay you? How does the sponsorship work?
Sophina: It honestly just depends. A lot of the bigger companies, they won’t pay because they can work with bloggers who have millions of followers and they’ll be paid quite a bit. I’ve been paid between £50 and £100 for a post. Which is really good for my audience, but I have a really engaging audience. You might see 30,000, not getting the same amount of likes that I get. That’s partly to do with Instagram, that’s partly to do with the pictures, no offence to them. They probably just haven’t been as smart and they’re just posting the whatever they’re sent because they’re being paid for it whereas I’m posting what is true to me. Which is what I’ve been doing more recently, because I could probably get millions and millions of clothes, probably not millions, but loads of clothes sent to me and get paid for it and I probably wouldn’t like it. It’s hard because there’s quite a lot of bloggers around my area of followers and they will be getting paid for things and I could as well, but I just don’t like the content… the items. If I was to get paid for swipe ups and stories, for my it’s around £30, I know some bloggers, I don’t know if it’s true, they say you should get £10 for every 10,000 followers but that obviously isn’t right in my case. I know girls who are on 100k who get paid £200 for two posts a month from a company so they have quite a lot of contracts out with those companies and they’ll do swipes up included as well. It’s really hit and miss with companies, beauty I’ve heard pays a lot more. There’s a lot of girls who take pictures in clothes, so you’ve got to prove to a company that you’re worth their money and a lot of companies are really happy to gift in opposed to paying. At the moment, I’m more about making the content and I’m happy for that but I used to buy a lot of clothes as well.
Me: Yeah, this is what you were doing anyway. So when posting, you said that you would state ad but then reusing the item the same item you wouldn’t have to. What’s the case with that more recently, has anyone spoken to you about it because obviously the whole ‘Fyre Festival’ thing happened, I don’t know if a law has been put in place or if you have to state it’s an ad or paid partnership?
Sophina: Obviously, it’s hard because there’s a lot of speculation around that piece. I’ve spoken to people who have spoken to lawyers and I don’t have any contracts out with companies where the company says I have to legally say that this is an ad. No companies have said that you have to say this is an ad.
Me: Because it is still your opinion at the end of the day?
Sophina: So therefore… and I’ve not been paid. If i’m being paid then I have to say paid or ad but the ones I’ve been paid for and posted were before the changes if that makes sense. Anything now, sometimes I will put ad, if I remember, but I don’t think I have to because I’m not legally in a contract with any of these companies. If a contract did say that I need to state that it’s an advert for that company then I would have to legally. But at the moment, I’m not in a contract with them so I don’t have to.
Me: Going back to being gifted and working with brands, do you plan to post content three times a week or do you just post when you can remember, how often would you say that you post?
(30:00)
Sophina: I aim to post everyday. I think if I did more would get you more followers, but I think my engagement would go down so I wouldn’t want to see my face or somebody else’s face all the time, whether they are a blogger or not. So I tend to post once a week… once a day, sometimes I’ll post three or four times a week because I’m busy, I don’t put pressure on it, a lot of the companies let me run a bit wild, I think because I’ve worked with them for so long, they know that I’m going to, so if I miss a deadline for a piece, they’ll sort of push me on and say you know are you posting this any time soon, I’ll say I’m waiting back for this or that, as long as you’re up for it and reply to them in good time and you continue to have a good relationship with them then you can post whenever you want. I know a couple of companies when I first started with them, they would say I want you to post at half past eight on this day and you have to tag us and do the hashtag. I think that company still does that, I’ve worked with them since and just posted when I wanted to and they’ve never brought me up on it. I’ve brought it up with them myself, I’ve said I posted this on the monday rather than sunday because my engagement is a lot higher so your image is going to be viewed by a lot more people. They can’t really argue with that, I’m doing them a favour. I think everyone knows, through your insights you can see all of that information, when the best time to post is and when your audience are actually on there and when they’re on their phones in the evening or lunch you get a spike of when people are on. You get quite a bit of information about where they’re from, a lot of my audience are from London so I will shoot a lot in London and put that as the location and it grows my following from London a lot more because people do check the geotags and things like that.