How Niharika became a star influencer by Being her True Self Online

Niharika surprised even herself when her Instagram page - @skin.finityy - grew from zero to 20k followers in just a year! She believes this was because she succeeded in gaining the trust of her followers. Trying new products for the skin and hair is surely a risky business and we believe only trusted sources. There are thousands of voices on different social media platforms that offer skincare and haircare product recommendations.

Niharika was reading about the different ingredients that constitute haircare and skincare products and started trying them on her skin. She realized that she trusted certain products only because she could see the results on her skin, so that’s what she had to show her followers as well. Following her intuition, she gained an edge over other pages when she started posting about her true skin and hair, at their best and most importantly, at their worst. Her content became relatable and her followers resonated with her real experience in cracking the correct skincare.

Read to know her journey towards a group of followers who trust her word and reward her efforts with their feedback.

1. How She Started

Niharika, an engineering student, had always been interested in skincare and would regularly try the natural DIYs that most skincare bloggers and YouTubers suggest. During the lockdown, she found free time and started experimenting with skincare products on her own and realized that the chemical formulation worked much better than the natural DIYs. She wanted to break that myth of natural skincare and started an Instagram page.

In the beginning, however, Niharika was too shy to make content with her own face. She only posted product reviews online with textual graphics. This wasn’t working.

2. Giving the Page a Face

Niharika put all her underconfidence behind her and started posting pictures of herself along with her product reviews. Once the page had a face, her followers started forming a better connection with her content, they felt that they were, after all, interacting with a living, breathing, human being.

People usually take skincare very seriously and would never risk following doubtful advice for it. So once Niharika started posting pictures of herself and how the product affected her skin, her content became reliable.

3. The Magic of Reels

When Instagram came up with reels, it turned out to be a true blessing for online content creators. Reels became a way of increasing their reach and engagement and were definitely much more interactive than the posts. For Niharika especially, this proved to be even better because now she could record herself and show her followers how the products were working out for her, without making a full-length video. Her one such reel blew over the internet and increased her followers from 10k to 24k! In this reel, she talked about the shampoos that you should never use on your hair because of the damage they did to hers. By acknowledging the failures of haircare, and putting her not-so-good experience for her followers to see, she had managed to gain the trust of her audience.

4. Maintaining the Honesty

When Niharika's followers increased rapidly, she started getting collaboration offers from several brands. Some of them wanted her to say certain things about their products that weren't necessarily true. She told them that she would review the product honestly and only write things that she believed to be true.

Even now, she asks brands for a time window where she can use the product and then review it based on her experience. Niharika is doing this to maintain the integrity of her page and keep the trust of her followers who believe her word and use skincare and haircare products at her recommendation.

5. Being Honest about Bad Hair and Bad Skin Days

When asked about the anxiety of the days when she didn’t feel very confident in her skin or hair, Niharika had an interesting response.

As mentioned in her Instagram profile bio, Niharika believes in showing real skin and accepting the so-called flaws that are a consequence of being human. She says that she uses her bad hair and skin days as an opportunity to show her followers the problems that everyone in the world suffers from. She records her journey of dealing with pimples, pores, frizzy hair, how she recovers from it, and shares it with her audience. This works brilliantly for her page because her followers can see themselves in her shoes. They relate to her problems, and as a result, trust her solutions and trust her page, recommending it to others.

6. The Reward of Being Your True Self

Niharika tells us that her most memorable moments are the ones where her followers reach out to her and tell her that the products suggested by her worked magically for their skin. She receives her fair share of unnecessarily rude comments that question her credibility and call her fake, but what keeps her going are the followers who trust her, give her their life updates, and actually care for her. These precious followers she has been able to achieve by documenting the ups and downs of her journey as a skincare and haircare enthusiast, by making her followers believe in the accepted "flaws" of real skin.

Niharika's is a story of success but also a story that teaches you what the rewards of being an authentic voice can be. Also, it shows us that what we see on social media is not all glam and glitter. Social media creators are real human beings who also have their own struggles.

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