Since Instagram and TikTok have exploded, a new avenue for making a living has been opened to those with hundreds of thousands of followers. It seems like an easy gig; posting pictures and videos of your favorite brands as an Instagram influencer has taken off as a marketing tactic, and as a result, the demand for influencers is growing. But how much do influencers make exactly? Our team decided to investigate to see how quickly your favorite Instagram influencer could earn your rent.
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Using government data and recent articles outlining the earning potential of social media influencers, our team was able to compare and contrast how long the average people in every state need to work to earn rent or mortgage payments, and then compared that to how often influencers need to post to earn the same amount of money. We included three different levels of influencers in this study, microinfluencers, medium influencers, and megainfluencers. A full breakdown of how we defined these influencer levels as well as our data sources and cost calculations can be found in the ‘Methodology’ section at the end of this post.
Naturally, mega-influencers have to post far fewer times than micro-influencers to earn their monthly mortgage payment. In fact, the most a major Instagram influencer will ever have to post to earn their monthly mortgage is 2.68 times in Washington D.C. There are only 8 total states where a mega-influencer has to post on average more than twice to make their mortgage payment.
Meanwhile, a single post in West Virginia will go a long way. A mega-influencer only needs 1.05 posts to cover a mortgage payment in West Virginia and Arkansas comes in right behind that with 1.09 posts needed to pay an average mortgage. An Instagram influencer salary sounds pretty good in those areas!
If you’re wondering how an Instagram influencer salary would work in your state, check out the map below! You can see how each type of influencer would do in every state in terms of earning their mortgage each month.
This data is a major tribute to not discounting the little guy! Even a micro-influencer can make rent in Hawaii with fewer than 17 monthly posts… and let’s be honest, it’s easy to get great pictures anywhere in Hawaii! You can rent anywhere in America if you’re a micro-influencer who posts 20 times per month. Of course, if you’re looking for somewhere more affordable, West Virginia, Arkansas, South Dakota, Kentucky, and Mississippi all have average rents that can be covered with under 10 social media posts by micro-influencers.
If you’re wondering how an Instagram influencer salary would work in your state, check out the map below! You can see how each type of influencer would do in every state in terms of earning their rent each month.
To get a better idea of how long non-influencers need to work to make rent, we compiled a list of states where people have to work the most number of hours per month to make both their rent and their mortgage payments. Hawaii requires the highest number of hours for the average person to make both rent and mortgage payments. Meanwhile, North Dakota required the fewest number of hours worked in a month to make rent, and Indiana required the fewest number of hours to make mortgage payments every month.
To find out how long you have to work to earn your monthly rent or mortgage payment in your state, check out the map below! You can select which measurement you want to see on the dropdown and see the results for your state by hovering over it.
While your dream to make an Instagram influencer’s salary might seem easy, becoming an influencer is all about understanding marketing! Your brand and your platform become your business and you have to be able to adjust your strategy and effectively compete with hundreds of thousands of influencers who want the same thing as you do: to earn a living through social media posts! To learn more about how you can leverage your social media to build your brand, start your own free trial today!
Methodology
To perform this analysis, our team also had to find out how much social media influencers earn. Thankfully, this topic has been investigated in the recent past, providing us with a solid baseline to use when performing our calculations. The site PetalCard found that influencers with less than 10,000 followers make around $88 per post, while those with more than that but less than 100,000 can expect to earn $200 per post. When it comes to major social media influencers with follower counts of seven digits or more, we used a report from Redfin indicating that influencers with over one million followers earn $10,000 per post. These are the monetary values used to calculate post numbers throughout this piece.
Using average rent and mortgage costs in every state pulled from the United States Census, our team then calculated how long it would take popular influencers based on average pricing for their follower count-to earn enough to pay their monthly rent or mortgage. We broke down influencer types into 3 categories based on their number of followers: micro influencers (under 10,000 followers), medium influencers (under 100,000 followers), and mega influencers (1,000,000+ followers). This way, we were able to show how different levels of influencers can earn a living, and how realistic that is depending on what level of influencer they might be. For additional comparison, we also calculated how quickly the average employee earns enough to pay their rent or mortgage in every state.