Youtube and Instagram influencers are a big deal. A lot of startups I talk to nowadays have influencer marketing as their top channel to reach their audience.

Clearly, these influencers deliver value to brands that pay them to carry their products and post about them. Growingly, a lot more than traditional media ads do.

This brings up the question of why influencers are able to influence purchase decisions in their audiences.

The leading hypothesis is that it is because they are not so perfect.

Traditional media ads aim for perfection. Viewers watching a traditional ad can clearly tell the difference between their own reality and how far the people being portrayed in the ad are from them. Whereas, with influencers, that divide is far lower.

Watching an influencer is like watching one of our cooler friends ask us to try out a new product or a service to be a little more like them. We know they are not so perfect. We know their presentation is not so perfect. Which gives us the sense (often, a false sense) that what we are witnessing is real.

Which brings me to my meta point that there isn't a need to strive for a false perfection which we try to showcase by hiding our flaws.

The most famous authors, bloggers, podcasters and influencers today are the ones who bare their faults out in public and own them.

This doesn't mean we shouldn't correct our flaws and strive for perfection by actually improving. That we should.

But what we don't need to do anymore is to showcase a perfection that doesn't exist by hiding our flaws.

As it is our flaws that make us more real and bring us closer to those who we are sharing them with.