Segment: You Can't Be on Top Forever - The Hard Truth About Influence and Building Beyond Fame

From stumbling into influencing in 2019 without even knowing what content creation was to building two businesses on the back of social media attention, and why the brutal truth about being an influencer is that you can't be popular forever because your time will pass and younger people will be more vibrant and more in tune with the culture than you are which is why you have to find something that works for you when you're sleeping and when people don't see your face, the young woman who got paid 800 cedis in 2019 to post bags for a brand thinking it was the biggest deal of her life before realizing people actually get paid serious money for this and she could step up her pricing and start talking to brands properly, the reality that influencing can be very dicey and you can lose it at any moment which is why she doesn't even know how she's been relevant from 2019 till now because usually some people are just there for some months and then they are gone, the wisdom that the moment you get that people are looking at you, you have to find something and put the influence inside otherwise you can't be an influencer forever because it's not possible to have that hold on people forever, the honest truth that just like footballers can't play for the rest of their lives and will retire, influencers also have to retire because you can't be popular for the rest of your life, the blessing of being lucky enough to be an influencer for 10 years which is a long time for people's attention to be on you and within that 10 years you should be able to build something so when you're telling your children that you were popping you can also tell them what you did within that 10 years, the biggest challenge being that she's an on the spot thinker who never asks what questions will be asked in interviews and can't write scripts because she works better in the moment looking at products and deciding what will work better but sometimes that doesn't work with some brands who want you to script it or have their own storyline which becomes difficult because it's not just bad for the brand it's bad for her brand as well when a post gets 50,000 views instead of her usual 500,000 views, the mixed reality that not every brand takes influencing seriously but some brands do and right now they are starting to take influencers seriously because it's better now than when they started in 2019 as brands are starting to understand the power that social media has as compared to traditional media, the fight that one influencer has to say this one I'm taking 10,000 so the next person doesn't settle for 5,000 which reminds her of the type of work Shatta Wale had to do fighting for musicians in the country to get what they deserve, the lack of unity in the influencing business because nobody wants to start that conversation after she went to an interview three years ago and mentioned she was paid 5,000 cedis for a brand to help other people coming up know what to expect and everybody said she was lying so now who wants to have the conversation when somebody tried and people put them down, the reality that people are afraid of sellouts because if they all agree to something somebody will go for less like it has happened to her before, the country where people don't like to talk about finances or give figures but she feels like it's a realistic conversation to know what to expect in the real world like if you have 500,000 followers how much is a good amount or a range so people know what to expect, the disagreement that influencing is oversaturated because anybody can be an influencer just like the number of lawyers that are competing or doctors so why is influencing oversaturated when brands just need to know who they want to pick.