Recently I’ve been getting the question “how did you grow your followers so quickly?” The first answer that always come out of my mouth is “I don’t worry about how many followers I have, I just simply share what I love to do with the rest of the world.”

Nowadays, it is very easy for people to gain followers on Instagram simply through a video or picture that goes viral. People with a following can often call themselves “influencers,” but the question is, what are you influencing?

As a social media influencer myself, it’s concerning that people with no passion or purpose are gaining attention from others, often times in which are negative attention.

To be a social media influencer is to be passionate enough about a particular subject that you are willing to share with the world. You can have 500,000 followers on Instagram, but if you don’t have a purpose beyond getting the likes and comments then you are not an influencer.

Over the last year of growing on Instagram, I’ve come across a number of people on social media whom I don’t even know that were willing to pay me to “shout them out” so they can gain followers. It disgusted me because these people only cared about gaining followers and do not realize the hard work it actually takes to get noticed.

Behind every piece of content that is posted by an influencer, there is a number of precautions that must be taken. We have to let our followers know if our post is sponsored, we make sure to voice our own opinions through the captions, and most importantly, we make sure that our posts are of professional quality.

“Influencers” who only look to gain likes and comments often make themselves vulnerable to the public and do not think of the pros and cons when it comes to posting content.

Influencers are always looking for ways to be creative and support those that encourage them. Dedicated influencers actually care about what their followers have to say and connect with them as much as possible.

My point is, if you’re going to call yourself a social media influencer, have purpose behind your content. Your amount of followers don’t amount to the people that you’re actually influencing.