URSP Student Effie Anayiotos Researches the Effectiveness Behind Social Influencers on Instagram

In the last couple of years, I have become interested in how companies are using social influencers to promote their products more than celebrity endorsers on Instagram. When enrolling in an honors research course at Mason, I decided to explore this idea and came up with the research project Effectiveness of Social Influencers on Instagram. As I began my research, I became even more interested on how these social influencers are effecting the lives of Instagram users in between the ages of 18-34. Social media applications have taken over the lives of millennials and I believe that it is very important to study how they affect decision making when purchasing or consuming a product.

This research will not only help me personally understand how social influencers have affected millennial lives, but will benefit me in my career. As a Communication major with a concentration in Public Relations, I will be using social media in the office frequently. By having an understanding on how social influencers affect the Instagram users, I will be able to understand how to successfully reach a target audience when working on advertising campaigns. This will help me throughout my career when brainstorming with colleagues on the best way to reach the audience of a company or brand.

I began my research in Fall 2017. Between the beginning of Fall to mid-winter, I conducted research to learn about the history behind Instagram, social influencers and what has already been studied about the two. Since then, I have been working weekly on my Introduction, Literature Review and Method of my project. In the past month, I have been collecting data via a survey. Once this data is collected, I will begin putting my research paper together with graphs and other visual tools to help come up with a conclusion to how effective social influencers can be on millennials.

One thing that I have learned/discovered throughout this project is time-management. It is very important to stay on top of my research even though I am a full-time student at Mason, graduating in May. I believe that this research has helped me grow individually and has made me become a more organized person.