What is it, exactly?
The truth is, none of us have really gotten over Instagram’s algorithm change of 2016. That was when everyone’s feeds turned from a reverse chronological presentation of all posts to the more Zuckerberg-ian “We’ll tell you what you like” model. As a result, everyone’s reach took a hit. Estimates as to how many of an account’s followers actually see their posts ranged from 10% to 60%, both of which, you may notice, a significant distance from 100%.
While there’s no way to definitively “beat” the system and ensure your posts get seen by all your followers, InfluPush offers a clever workaround. By creating an account on the app, and then inviting their followers to follow them there, influencers and creators can send push notifications directly to their audience. The notifications can have links and media embedded right in them, and can exist in a feed in the InfluPush app.
What’s the Cost?
InfluPush is, according to its website, “100% free,” for both the pushers and the pushees. It’s also an ad-free app so if you’re wondering what the catch is, I can tell you: there isn’t one.
Really. But also, InfluPush does appear to have a long game. Once you’ve created an account and are setting up your profile, you’ll notice there’s a button on the bottom right labeled “Agency.”
Tapping through to that reveals that InfluPush has an Agency Team looming to represent talent and help you “profit out of your influencer power.” If you’re interested in joining, you can indicate that through the app to get the ball rolling. This is a very clever, win-win way to start recruiting talent for an agency, and those who aren’t interested still get to use the app free of charge.
Is It Easy to Setup and Use?
It’s such a simple service that they would have to try extra hard to make it difficult. You connect your Instagram account to InfluPush, create your profile, and off you go. There’s not too much to the profile—links to your social accounts, links to other websites, and that’s it. The more enterprising among you will have noticed that I said you can add links to other websites, and you’ll have already realized that makes this a nice alternative to link-in-bio tools. By driving your followers to follow links, they’ll end up at your InfluPush profile where they can subscribe to you directly.
Sending a push is an intuitive process, too. If you’ve ever created a social post—and you have—you know how to create a push. Here’s what the page looks like if you do it from your desktop:
But don’t use InfluPush on your desktop. The web interface is surprisingly glitchy, and ultimately a little frustrating. But also, none of you reading this are going to use the desktop version. It’s a mobile tool for mobile apps and mobile notifications, and the mobile app interface looks and works a hell of a lot better. When you send a push, it’s a matter of seconds before it ends up directly on your followers’ home screens. When they follow the notification, it brings them to the full post within InfluPush, where they can like or comment on it, or follow a link out to anywhere you’d like to take them.
One feature that’s lacking is the ability to customise, even a tiny bit, the look of the InfluPush profile page. They’re all presented in InfuPush’s own brand colors, dark pink and white. If this page is to be used for influencers and creators to showcase themselves, they ought to have a little more control over what that looks like.
Show Me the Money
It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see how an influencer can use InfluPush as a communications hub for all their digital presences. They’ve typically got presences on multiple social media channels and a professional website with a portfolio and probably a blog. Creators, too, with their private channels on sites like Patreon, and merch stores set up with any number of on-demand print services—it’s a lot of channels to manage. The audiences vary from place to place, so having a centralized tool where the updates for all the other channels can be pushed directly to people should be very compelling. And if that thought alone doesn’t put it in the proper context, maybe this statistic will:
The open rate of push notifications is nearly 5x that of an email when it comes to marketing communications, making InfluPush a much better tool than email marketing to keep an audience up to date.
The Bottom Line
InfluPush isn’t a perfect solution, but it’s still new and has room to grow. The idea behind it is a great one; it gives a great measure of control to influencers and creators in connecting with their audiences. No algorithms to bury your posts, no hashtags needed to get found: just a simple, direct, and effective way to get your thoughts in front of your audience’s eyes.
Sure, you’ll have to convince them to download another app, but you’re an influencer, remember? Besides, it won’t cost either of you a penny, so what’s the risk?
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