In many of her Instagram posts, Anani — a lifestyle blogger with almost 12,000 followers — poses with various sponsored products, like makeup or protein bars. She coordinates the colors of her outfits with the backgrounds of her photos, and she smiles at the camera in filtered, technicolor bliss.
But in a post from June 10, Anani isn’t posing with a product. She’s posing with a COVID-19 vaccination card.
“Hey Besties!” she wrote in the caption. “I’ve partnered with the @GuilfordPublicHealth Department to encourage you all to get educated about the COVID-19 vaccine and to get your shot as soon as you can! ... The sooner we all are vaccinated, the sooner life returns to normal!”
Leaders have relied on health experts and community leaders to educate about the COVID-19 vaccine, and they’ve tried incentives like a lottery and cash rewards.
Now, they’re turning to social media influencers in an effort to encourage people to get the shot. The campaigns are largely targeted toward young people, who have recently been getting infected at higher rates than earlier in the pandemic, and who also may pay more attention to the influencers’ words.
There’s a reason 18-year-old pop star Olivia Rodrigo recently was invited to the White House to meet President Joe Biden and film vaccine education videos with Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s top infectious disease expert.
“I think young people can start to trust sources if it’s something that shows up multiple times on our feed, rather than if it’s presented by one person with a title,” said Ive Jones, a Princeton student from Apex, who has helped spread the message about the importance of the vaccine.
On July 28, she moderated a live stream hosted by Dr. Mandy Cohen, Secretary of the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services, with TikTok stars Josh Cureton, an N.C. native who has 3.5 million TikTok followers on his account @juztjosh, and Harley Powell, who has 211,000 followers.
Anani’s social media posts were part of an initiative by the Guilford County Health Department, who turned to Anani and 40 other people with considerable social media followings to promote the COVID-19 vaccine.
In the Triangle, Wake County is in the process of launching a similar campaign to recruit influencers to promote the vaccine on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and TikTok.
“These personal conversations are really what’s going to get us over the finish line with COVID,” said Dawn Crawford, a member of Wake County Public Health’s communications team. “The more voices out there in our community we have sharing correct information, facts and personal experiences, the better.”
OUTREACH FROM 'LOCAL CITIZENS'
Guilford County hired the digital marketing agency XOMAD to run the influencer campaign. In May, the company began reaching out to influencers in Guilford County to ask if they would help promote the vaccine.
In their outreach, they focused on who they call “nano-influencers” (those with less than 10,000 followers) and “micro-influencers” (those with less than 100,000 followers).
Rob Perry, the CEO of XOMAD, said followers feel they know these users with smaller followings more intimately than wildly famous social media stars.
“The Olivia Rodrigos of the world are wonderful,” Perry told The News & Observer in an interview. “But the real way to increase vaccination rates is through activating these local citizens and creators.”
Guilford County paid XOMAD $100,000 for the campaign with the largest cost component going to pay the local influencers. Influencers received $50 to $1,000 to promote the vaccine, depending on how many followers they have. Most of the influencers posted on their Instagram feeds once and on their Instagram stories several times.
When Anani got the email from XOMAD asking for her help, she knew she would say yes. For her, educating people about the vaccine is personal. Both of her parents died from COVID-19.
“It was really unexpected, and now I’m trying to inspire other people — letting them know it’s really serious and it’s not a joke,” she said.
Anani now lives in High Point, but was born in Nigeria and went to middle school and high school in Raleigh. She said she was initially hesitant to get the vaccine herself. She was concerned because of the history of medical racism against Black Americans and because of rumors and misinformation that were circulating on her social media feeds.
“There’s a lot of negligence and bias in general when it comes to taking the health of Black people seriously,” she said. “And so there are a lot of conspiracy theories out there, and I didn’t really know what to believe.”
But she changed her mind earlier this year after her parents’ deaths.
Many of her followers, Anani said, feel similarly skeptical about the vaccine. On her post where she encourages her followers to get vaccinated, some express this skepticism. One user commented: “I’m still on the fence honestly.” Another: “No vaccine, more data is needed.”
But the point of sharing information about the vaccine is not to change people’s minds immediately, said several of the influencers hired by XOMAD. The idea is to show users more examples of people they trust getting the vaccine and sharing information about it.
“Nobody really changes somebody’s mind over the internet,” said Ashley Virginia, a musician based in Greensboro hired by XOMAD. “By putting factual information out there, the hope is that people, using their own reason and logic, will eventually come to that choice themselves.”
REACHING YOUNG PEOPLE
The effectiveness of these campaigns remains to be seen.
On June 7, the first day of Guilford County’s campaign, 46% of Guilford County residents had received at least one dose of the vaccine, XOMAD reported. By Aug. 2, that number rose to 51.5%, XOMAD said.
In North Carolina, 43.9% of residents had received at least one dose on June 7, as compared to 51.5% on Aug. 2.
Iulia Vann, the public health director of Guilford County, told The News & Observer that the county is still analyzing the data collected from the campaign. But there was a correlation between the number of campaign impressions — or instances when posts were shown to a user — and the number of Guilford County residents receiving the vaccine, Vann said.
“And during these same times in which our vaccination rates increased along with impressions, vaccination rates dropped throughout the rest of North Carolina,” Vann added.
According to XOMAD, over 276,000 Guilford County residents saw content posted by participating influencers multiple times over the course of the campaign. And many people interacted with the posts: Anani’s post received over 400 likes, while Loon K. Do, another participating influencer, received over 800 likes on his.
Jones, the Princeton student, said she believes the live stream she did with NCDHHS and similar efforts are an effective way to reach young people.
She said she’s noticed that young adults often get information on Instagram, on topics as diverse as police brutality to the Israeli-Palestinian crisis from infographics, rather than more conventional information sources like newspapers or cable TV.
“Our cell phones are our primary way of getting all our information,” she said.
Perry, the CEO of XOMAD, noted that small influencers tend to get less negative feedback from followers than official institutions that post information about the vaccine.
The TikTok event hosted by NCDHHS, for example, was streamed from several different outlets. The North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services official Facebook page streamed the video, as did Cureton and Powell’s personal TikTok pages.
On the official Facebook video, which has had over 5,700 views, several users left angry comments about the vaccine being a personal choice.
But when Powell — who is from Raleigh and recently graduated from East Carolina University — live streamed the event from her own account, she received no negative feedback, she said. Instead, followers asked questions in the comments section about concerns like long-term side effects of the vaccine, which Cohen was able to address over the course of the live stream.
Powell, 22, who majored in public health, said about 1,000 people watched the live stream from her TikTok page.
As cases continue to surge in North Carolina and throughout the nation, more state and local governments may turn to influencers to help boost vaccination rates.
Wake County plans to launch its campaign by the end of the month. Guilford County is considering doing a second campaign. And Perry said XOMAD has received an outpouring of interest in influencer campaigns from state and local governments because of the delta variant.
Several influencers hired by XOMAD said that in this point of the pandemic, the possibility of convincing even one or two of their followers to get the vaccine feels significant.
“It’s weird that we’re living in a generation where we listen to who’s on our phone rather than science and news,” said Do, one of the Guilford County influencers. “But if it works, it works.”
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