55% Of Creators Prefer Social Media Marketplaces For Brand Deals, While 39% Use Influencer Marketing Platforms

According to a a new survey, about 50% of the influencers find brand partnerships from different marketplaces. There are also other ways of securing brand deals like going to DMs of brands, using Slack or through talent managers or agents. Even despite all of this, social media platform marketplaces like TikTok are the most common ones for influencers to secure brand deals and gigs.

American Influencer Council (AIC) founder and executive director Qianna Smith Bruneteau says that these marketplaces are easily discovered by small or middle level creators. For AIC’s report, they surveyed 567 different content creators. The definition of a content creator by AIC is a person who primarily earns from social media. Content creators can be full-time or part-time, however, 54% of the content creators in the survey identified themselves as part-timers.

55% of the respondents in the survey said social media marketplaces are their top choices for securing brand deals while 39% said they go to influencer marketing platforms if they want a brand deal. Emails pitching (25.9%) and social DMs (23.8%) are also used for getting brand deals by the influencers. Smith also said that they are now encouraging content creators to go to brand leaders on LinkedIn for deals but we see newer creators hesitating more as compared to old creators.

The survey also found out that 28% of the content creators need five to nine brand deals monthly to make a livable wage while 16% of the content creators need at least ten brand deals monthly. 46% of them said that they can have a sustainable income from two to four brand deals a month. The data doesn’t talk about the income different types of brand deals make. Some deals are multi-channel sponsorships while some are affiliate links so their pay can vary. 31% of the creators in the survey said that most of their brand deals last a month, 21% said their deals last a week while 22% said their brand deals last at least three months.

Partnerships of more than three months are not very common with only 12.5% saying that their deals last six months while 11.9% said that their deals last a year. If a brand deal is longer, there is more chance that the more influencer’s content will be distributed across different channels of the brand. When asked about how quick their payments are, 32% of the content creators said that they are very instant while 29% have to wait at least a month after the deal has ended to get their payment. 10% of the content creators wait 60 to 90 days to get paid after the brand deal has been done.